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This topic comprises 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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Author
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Topic: Film era fades to black
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Tom Petrov
Five Guys Lover
Posts: 1121
From: El Paso, TX
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted 09-24-2011 12:01 PM
Next week, Odeon becomes Victoria's first older theatre to go 100 per cent digital
Christine Aust laughs as she unwittingly quotes the title of a 1974 horror flick to describe how temperamental film can be.
"It's alive!" she says. "Anyone who's worked with film will know how crazy it can be. If you drop film, it spirals and it flips."
As head projectionist at the Odeon, Aust, 24, has had plenty of adventures with celluloid, but not for much longer. By next Friday, film will be a thing of the past at Cineplex Entertainment's venerable downtown cinema.
It will be the end of an era as the Odeon, which opened in 1949, becomes Victoria's first long-running movie theatre to go 100 per cent digital.
Many filmgoers have long taken the romance of moviegoing for granted - flickering images illuminating a darkened theatre, the sounds of celluloid rolling over sprockets audible from the projection booth, dwarfed by soundtracks that seem to grow louder each year. While those memories will fade, they'll never be forgotten.
The upside is what the sleek digital cinema projectors from Canadian-owned Christie Digital Systems and Doremi Cinema's playback servers - being uncrated next week by Kevin Eagle and his technical crew from Cinematronix - promise to provide a stable presentation with sharper high-definition images that don't fade or scratch over time.
"The 1,000th time we run the show, the quality's the same as the first time - perfect," says Odeon manager Pierre Gauthier, a 50year film-exhibition veteran who isn't as sentimental about film's passing as you'd expect.
"It's been nothing but a source of aggravation."
Gauthier says he won't miss having to delay shows because of 35mm film projector malfunctions, lugging heavy film canisters around, sending staff to the bus station or airport to pick up prints, or having to "build" films by splicing several reels together and loading them onto patiotable-sized platters.
"With wear and tear, bad things can happen," he said. "Some prints would flake, someone would put the leader on wrong so the feature presentation [intro] would show upside-down, or you'd get prints that came in backwards or weren't rewound properly. Sometimes you'd get two cans with reels 1 and 2 twice, instead of 3 and 4."
As for those clunky, heavyweight old film projectors, they've effectively been rendered useless and will likely gather dust in booths nationwide - at least for now, he said.
"All those reels, splicers and rewind tables? Null and void."
The digital changeover sparked memories for Pentte Lamberg, a retired projectionist for Odeon and Famous Players.
He recalled running two projectors side-by-side, manually changing reels when visual cues appeared on screen.
"If one machine was broken you could fix it fast while the other one was running and nobody would know," laughed Lamberg, recalling the days when a spare film would be stored in case of an unresolvable breakdown.
The solitary life of the movie projectionist "stays with you," he said.
"I still have nightmares about films breaking and something gone wrong with the lamphouse," he added.
"Films would come late and you can't get it ready, [or] there were missed splices you can see on screen. You'd worry about a lot."
While automated equipment replaced many functions traditionally handled by veterans like Lamberg, digital simplifies the process further. Releases now come via satellite and in high-capacity digital drives, with the projectionist downloading data onto computer server-like projectors programmed to beam movies into the theatre.
Security, not surprisingly, is a top priority.
"There are more encryption codes than there are stars in the known universe," quips Eagle.
As beloved as 35mm film is, digital conversion is a sign of the times, Cineplex communications director Kyle Moffatt said.
"By the end of 2012, our entire circuit will be digital," he said, referring to the chain's formation of the Canadian Digital Cinema Partnership with competitor Empire Theatres Ltd.
"The studios are moving away from film prints as well for similar reasons like cost savings and storage."
As evidenced by crowdpleasers like The Met Live in HD, digital also allows for programming flexibility and gives theatre managers the option of switching a popular movie "on the fly" to a larger house.
"Years from now, kids won't even realize films used to come on giant platforms that look like kitchen tables," he laughed.
Aust, who began working as a projectionist at the Lux in Banff in 2005, has mixed feelings.
"It makes me sad because I like splicing and putting together movies," she said.
"The good thing is there will be a lot less waste. There's a lot of film that really needs to be recycled."
She also notes that while mechanical film breakdowns could once be fixed by projectionists, digital's a different beast. If the new system breaks down, it requires a call to technical support, or a new device.
Aust, who comes in each Thursday to ensure new movies are built-up, says she's often reminded why this changeover was inevitable - like when she had a print issue building up the Ryan Gosling film Drive.
She said it's ironic she didn't make "any real mistakes" until then - two weeks before film becomes obsolete at the Odeon.
"The film jumped off the roller and that stretched the film a bit, but I was there and lucky enough to be able to catch it."
It's the physical process of "throwing film around" she'll miss most.
"It will be a lot quieter at the station where I do all my downloading," she said.
"The job's going from standing up and moving cans and reels around to sitting down. I'm not going to get as much of a workout."
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/move-guide/Film+fades+black/5447388/story.html
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Tony Bandiera Jr
Film God
Posts: 3067
From: Moreland Idaho
Registered: Apr 2004
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posted 09-24-2011 01:25 PM
quote:
"The 1,000th time we run the show, the quality's the same as the first time - perfect," says Odeon manager Pierre Gauthier, a 50year film-exhibition veteran who isn't as sentimental about film's passing as you'd expect.
"It's been nothing but a source of aggravation."
Gauthier says he won't miss having to delay shows because of 35mm film projector malfunctions, lugging heavy film canisters around, sending staff to the bus station or airport to pick up prints, or having to "build" films by splicing several reels together and loading them onto patiotable-sized platters.
"With wear and tear, bad things can happen," he said. "Some prints would flake, someone would put the leader on wrong so the feature presentation [intro] would show upside-down, or you'd get prints that came in backwards or weren't rewound properly. Sometimes you'd get two cans with reels 1 and 2 twice, instead of 3 and 4."
Yeah just wait until this joker sees that digital isn't perfect either......
Server freezes/crashes...
Bad hard drives.....
KDM's not arriving on time....
Potential long restart times from power glitches(mitigated by proper application of UPS installation of course)
And the kicker...
The incredible increase in relamping costs, since I would imagine this is not some tiny-screened multi we're talking about here.
Digital can be very good, in some aspects better than film, but the mindset of management will never change and they still say and do the stupidest things. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
As for his complaints about film in that last paragraph I quoted, most of them would never happen with COMPETENT projectionists in the booth. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 09-24-2011 03:03 PM
This is what I HATE about these big mouth, small brain fools who piss on film with the same lame, laughable, nonsensical crap that they have been spouting from the Book of Digital for 10 years:
(Film) provides a stable presentation with sharper high-definition images that don't fade or scratch over time....The 1,000th time we run the show, the quality's the same as the first time - perfect" (I guess "stable" is the new, it-doesn't-shake-and-jitter-like-film mantra) Like this guy ever ran a film print 1,000 times. With distribution patterns they way they have been for the last two decades, he is lucky if he has had to run film prints for more than a month. If he couldn't keep his film prints dirt and scratch free, even his longest engagements, then he doesn't deserve to be running a theatre.
Gauthier says he won't miss having to delay shows because of 35mm film projector malfunctions, So how many shows does this guy loose shows because his projectors are not maintained? And he thinks with digital there will never be lost shows? He's an idiot. And not only can't he keep his prints from getting dirty and scratched, but he's too lazy and/or incompetent to maintain a fairly simple mechanical projector compared to the complexity of a digital projector that's replacing it. Again, why is he in the business if he won't maintain the equipment (film OR digital) to keep from loosing shows?
And he hates "...lugging heavy film canisters around, like he ever lugs film cans around. No doubt he makes his underlings do that as well as every other menial job in the house.
....sending staff to the bus station or airport to pick up prints,....and he doesn't think the same shipping issues that can cause him to have to go to the airport to get an errant print shipment will somehow magically disappear because it is a Dprint and not a 35mm print? He's dumber than he sounds.
or having to "build" films by splicing several reels together and loading them onto patiotable-sized platters. Ah, THAT'S the horror of running film, eh? And only if he didn't have to go through the hassle of making popcorn! What a pleasure if he could run his theatre without needing to do ANY work.
Some think digital will solve all their problems; I think they might be wearing some rose-colored 3D glasses when they think a technology will solve all their everyday problems, but fine; I get it. I have no problem with anyone who sees the advantages of digital, real or imagined, but why oh so they insist on pissing on the medium that for a century has made people love the movies? Do they think that somehow trashing film will make digital sound better? THAT I don't get.
The millions upon millions that loved all those AFT Top 100 Films who were edified and entertained and moved by them -- they saw them and experienced them ON FILM. And no one ever said, "Nah, I couldn't enjoy GONE WITH THE WIND because I saw dirt and scratches on it and it was FADED and it had jitter.
RESPECT the history and the heritage that is film....not to mention the fact that it is how you make your effin living, dude. Denigrating it only makes you sound like a fool.
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Dave Macaulay
Film God
Posts: 2321
From: Toronto, Canada
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 09-24-2011 03:48 PM
Personally I couldn't enjoy Gone With The Wind because it's just plain horrible... ass-numbingly long with wooden acting, gaudy technicolor costumes, and winceworthy historical inaccuracies. There is a good fire but that only lasts a few minutes of the 3 hours.
I'm sure there are horse dung collectors, pretzel twisters, telephone operators, icecutters... former workers at any number of other obsoleted jobs who look to the past with rose colored glasses.
Everything this article says is true: your fantasy world where intelligent skilled craftspeople toil lovingly at perfectly maintained machines in a cleanroom booth, whistling as they don white gloves to build up a platter for the ten thousandth time is just that, FANTASY. I've worked with very intelligent projectionists; as a rule they were doing it while working on a degree: the solitude and free time up in the booth was perfect for doing their studying.
Today's film projectionist has a deadening grind of boring rote work. Modern film projectors don't need enough maintenance to justify having a skilled operator, and there's not enough interesting work to keep such a person satisfied. The popcorn machine is probably more complicated to operate than the film projector, yet people here denigrate the modern booth usher as a "popcorn popper".
Get over yourself. It sucks to have your profession relegated to the dustbin of history, but you're hardly the first. In ten years or less film will be forgotten but theatres will probably still be busy selling popcorn.
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Justin Hamaker
Film God
Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004
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posted 09-24-2011 04:17 PM
Frank, I have three points of contention with you.
The first is that I have never had a projector go down due to a maintenance issue. Yes, I have lost shows due to projectionist error - meaning brain wraps, thrown prints, and similar issues. But when I've had projectors go down it's always been the result of a failing part such as a diode or projector motor - and in one instance an intermittent which seized up (and no the oil was never neglected).
I believe the point here is that when a projector does go go down, for whatever reason, it is very easy to move the movie to a different auditorium to avoid losing a show. Of course he probably doesn't understand the reality of a bad hard drive or other issue which can take a digital projector off-line - especially if there is no one on staff qualified to fix the issue.
The second point - at least for the average movie goer - is they are not concerned about the "charm" of a 35mm presentation. They are concerned about the content of the movie far more than the quality of the presentation.
The third point involves the delivery of content and KDM issues. In most cases drives will be received much earlier than with film - especially when you open a movie off the break. While it's possible to have a bad drive (I had one for The Help), there should be plenty of time to get a new drive as long as you're ingesting your movie early. And if they can't ship you a new drive in time, they will usually arrange for you to pick one up at a nearby theatre.
When keys don't work, it usually only takes a phone call and a couple minutes to get replacement keys. Yeah, it's a pain when the key isn't valid until just before the midnight premiere, but that is still less of a worry than when a film can is locked until 12 hours before a premiere.
It's fine to "respect" the history of film projection, but that doesn't mean you have to be sorry to see it go.
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Justin Hamaker
Film God
Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004
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posted 09-25-2011 05:45 AM
Monte, can I flip it around on you: why shouldn't someone be excited to see film go away - even if it's what they started with?
To a certain extent it's the same question that has come up in every industry when they had to change from the way things have always been to the way things will be in the future. Why should the secretary have been happy for the computer when the typewriter is what she had always known. Why should the grocery clerk be happy for a scanner when the manual register is what he's always used.
Maybe my opinion on the subject doesn't matter much because my experience on the technician side of film is limited. But I can tell you digital simplifies my life.
Yes, I am a general manager and it makes it easier on me not having to deal with film. I don't have to deal with the late nights breaking down a hot pick-up or early mornings building up a late delivery. I don't have to deal with the increasingly difficult task of finding competent people to train and trust to handle film in my theatre. I don't have to deal the frustration of one mistake marring my presentation for the entire run. Those are the easy and obvious issues with going digital.
For me, the bigger picture is I understand digital systems better than film. Replacing a bad hard drive or circuit board is something I understand better than fine tuning all the moving parts of the projector and platters. Furthermore, being able to tweak my presentation with my laptop is much simpler.
I have been working with digital for a little over a year now and I have personally installed 8 NEC/GDC systems, including set-up, configuration, and screen presentation (but not the electrical or sound). I am far from an expert, but I am learning more everyday.
I always felt a sense of pride when I fixed a problem on any of the 35mm machines or when I my build-ups looked good on screen. I always strived for 100% right 100% of the time. But I feel the same sense of pride when it's right with the digital systems. For me it's more about the picture on the screen than how it got there, and digital just makes it easier.
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