The best thing to do if there is a storm in the area and you are expecting the power to go out, wait a minute or two before scrambling to turn everything back on after the first outage happens. It will likely go out again very soon and you'll save yourself a lot of running around. IMHO, it's better to interrupt and re-start the show once with a few minutes delay, then to have them repeatedly start and stop. We used to use the theater's emergency public address system to let everyone know what happened, and that an usher would be in the auditorium to assist anyone who needed to leave.

All of our theatres have generators that kick in 11 seconds after the power fails. The reason for the delay is that if it kicks in too soon, it makes the projectors act wierd. They try to keep going as though nothing has happened, but they make a bad noise in the transition. We kept spacing out the delay to find the minimum amount of time necessary to force the equipment to simply shut completely off.

When the power kicks in after the 11-sec delay, the projectionist has to restart the shows and cue the automation down to where it ought to be in the program sequence.

It's a 6-plex and I think we can continue running HVAC with it.

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Paul
Gimpy Mercenary Projectionist/Engineer
"When the money runs out, so does I."

Do you rewind the movie a bit when you are goint to restart the projector? I can do it very quickly (I have the rewind version of Vic 5) but with platter it is not so simple like push a button.

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Last summer, during the PG&E crisis where they didn't have enough production, There were doing rolling blackouts every week. It would hit the news and people would panic and call our theatre "Are you open today? I hear you may lose your power." Yea right! We'll just shut down and cower under our desks, waiting for the power to go out. The joke is, we were never hit with a ligitimate rolling blackout. The only time we were hit, the power went out at 11:00 AM and came back on at 12:30 PM 1/2 hour before our first show.

But in March 1991, some areas of Rochester were without power for over two weeks in the "Great Ice Storm":
http://www.asylumnation.com/cgi-bin/columns3.pl?num=6

Just another winter in Western New York:
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/buf/winter-pns5.htm
------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
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A heavy thunderstorm rolled through Central New Jersey in the middle of the 4:30 matinee on a Saturday afternoon. The surge was enough to stop the show about 2/3 of the way through. After a couple of minutes with the emergency lights the power came back on. We got the ad slides and non-sync for about 3 minutes while the booth staff reset all the gear. Then . . . the movie came back right on where it left off. Kind of like a "commercial break".

From these posts I find all the outages are in areas with corporate-owned power companies (FPL, PG&E, PSE&G).

By the way, for people who works with platter systems in multiscreens theatres. Do you contemplate the chance of rewind the film or just say to the manager "...forget about it".