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Author Topic: "Enhanced" Cue Mark Rant Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 04-05-2019 02:24 PM                     Yesterday I was doing a couple of press screenings of 35mm films that will be part of an upcoming film festival later this month. One was a fairly recent archival print of an older title, which was in excellent shape- - Except for the fact that some Bozo had decided to "enhance" the perfectly visible (and large) lab cues by hand-scribing ugly blotches into them. This kind of crap always pisses me off! These cues annoyed me so much, I had almost considered closing my eyes so I wouldn't have to look at them, but then I realized that was probably not going to work out too well during the screening. So, I managed to get through the screening OK, but a friend who was visiting the booth said I ground my teeth & grunted ( & I'm sure my blood pressure went up a few points) at every change-over. "Actual Photo" (And this pic shows one of the less offensive examples)  |  IP: Logged Victor Liorentas Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 800 From: london ontario canada Registered: May 2009 posted 04-05-2019 02:47 PM                     Yeah it's maddening!!!  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 04-05-2019 03:19 PM                        That is restrained compared to some examples I've seen. The office paper folder hole punch method sticks in my mind as being particularly egregious. That looks like a 1.66 hard matte to me. What's the movie?  |  IP: Logged Michael Cornish Film Handler Posts: 26 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Registered: Sep 2011 posted 04-05-2019 03:32 PM                     Back in the 80's I was a projectionist at our local Art house. I had to put up with with a lot of that kind of garbage.Even worse when the lab ques were fine but there were still as many as 4 or sometimes 5 sets of hand made ques.  |  IP: Logged Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 04-05-2019 04:26 PM                     quote: Leo Enticknap That is restrained compared to some examples I've seen. I agree, and as I said in my post, the picture I used was one of the least objectionable examples on that print. I think the reasons this incident bugged me so much were: 1> the print itself was fairly recently struck, and looked like it had gotten very little use. So except for those cues, it was 'almost practically new'. 2> The lab-cues were all in well lit scenes and VERY easy to see; so the extra scribing was was just unnecessary damage. 3> As is procedure with many "serious" archives, I had to provide the client who booked the event with technical details about the facility and documentation and references about my film handling qualifications before the owning archives would ship the print out for use. I assume they did this with everyone, and yet somehow, someone managed to handle this print who should have known better. ....and in the end, I think that gives all of us a bad name. quote: Leo Enticknap That looks like a 1.66 hard matte to me. What's the movie? The movie title (in English) is "Tragedy Of A Ridiclous Man" . It's a Bertolucci flick from 1981. Your Aspect Ratio observation is correct. It's 1:66 ( & mono sound.) It's a recent copy (possibly a restoration) from some archives in Italy that will be shown at an Italian Film Festival later this month here in SF.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 04-05-2019 04:53 PM                     So, did you get back to the archive about this? - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 04-05-2019 09:54 PM                        Dealing with the big nonprofit, FIAF archives can be very problematic. The core of the problem is that very few of their technicians and access officers have any projection experience, and therefore dispatch their prints to theaters in a form that makes them difficult to handle and prepare for presentation efficiently; and also impose sometimes unrealistic and unnecessary rules on projectionists. I once witnessed a screaming row between an A-list movie maker and the director of one of the world's most prestigious archives in my booth. The cause of the disagreement was that the filmmaker was insisting that the print of his restored movie be built up and run from a platter, because in his experience, the color temperature of the light from two projectors in a changeover pair was never identical, and he found the shift at each changeover highly distracting. The archivist was taking the predictable "You cut the heads and tails off my precious print and I'll personally see to it that you are escorted to a cellar and introduced to The Gimp" line. The filmmaker clearly had significant knowledge of projection. In comments to me before the archivist arrived, he identified various pieces of equipment in the booth and commented on them intelligently. The archivist clearly (from his remarks and comments) had next to none. Prints arriving from these institutions with evidence of mishandling by incompetents is frequent. I suspect the reason to be that these archives simply don't have the staff resources to do a detailed bench examination of every print that comes back from a booking, and probably just look at a random sample. The problem happens when damage caused by venue A is not caught, the print goes to venue B, venue B's projectionist thinks that the damage is typical wear and tear for a print of that age and provenance, does not report or make a fuss about it, the print is examined on return from venue B, and venue B gets whacked with a bill for a new print. I've seen this happen many times. So the moral of the story is, document and report up the wazoo. I always had a rule with prints from the big studio and non-profit archives, which was to grade the print overall one classification lower than I would any other. So for a regular print that I would grade as excellent, if it was an archival one I would check good; average rather than good, poor rather than average, and bad rather than poor. I would also make detailed, copious notes of defects that I wouldn't bother to document in any other print. If there was any damage that I thought would be picked up by the archive on return, I would have a co-worker look at the print with me, so that I had a witness that the print arrived with the defect. For example, here's a typical archive print report of the sort I used to do: The slight scuffs between the perfs (very likely from having been run on a badly tensioned continuous motion telecine or scanner, with dirty rollers) is not something that I'd have bothered to note if this were a commercial rep print. But in this case, the need exists to protect oneself against a "You broke it, you own it" accusation.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 04-05-2019 11:22 PM                     Leo, you forgot to check SRD/DTS/SDDS for that 1980 print. I learned that from Deluxe.  |  IP: Logged Donald Brown Expert Film Handler Posts: 131 From: Lincoln, DE Registered: Sep 2009 posted 04-06-2019 06:28 PM                     I've encountered a wide range of enhanced cue markings, but the most dramatic that I've seen were made with a hole punch! Prints that frequently screened at drive-ins were often the worst! There were often duplicate sets of cues that extended over a surprising length of footage!  |  IP: Logged Kenneth Wuepper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1026 From: Saginaw, MI, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 04-06-2019 08:10 PM                     The drive-in thing started when CinemaScope prints were shown on under width screens. Not just the q marks were in the trees but even some of the characters that were at the extreme sides of the frame ended up there. The destructive way out was to run a china marker down the center of the image during the q marked frames. Often this happened on the emulsion side of the print. Never did it myself as I preferred the thick tape noise through the gate instead of seeing the q marks, a trick taught me by a projectionist in 1949.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 04-06-2019 11:06 PM                        +1 to click strips as an alternative to visible cue marks if an archival print arrives without any cues on the print whatsoever. When film was in mainstream use, the French labs tended not to put cue marks on their prints at all (presumably in the expectation that most of them would be plattered), and so if I got an Eclair or an LTC print that was new and I was running it in a changeover house, I'd put click strips on it. More recently, some European archives seem to have carried on this tradition (the Nederlands Filmmuseum especially, which seemed to have a policy both of not putting cue dots on their prints, and banning projectionists from plattering them!): I got a few when I was at the Egyptian. Some booths make using click strips easier than others, the model of projector and the ambient noise level in the booth being the main factors. For a projectionist trying them for the first time, I'd suggest making up quite a long loop of scrap film and running it for a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the sound of the splicing tape going through. In many booths you only need a strip on the base side, but if it's too quiet you can tape both sides. You'll also need a footage and frame counter, and I'd suggest putting a cheat sheet on the bench, so that the correct positioning of the strips is always to hand. By gently removing the tape using gloves and pushing one corner of the strip with a Dolby screwdriver to get it started, the click strips can be removed without anyone ever knowing that they were there.  |  IP: Logged

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