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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Steven Colbert says he watched AVENGERS with no soundtrack.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 04-30-2019 10:30 AM
Although we are lucky enough to have access to our "own" screening room and we can essentially watch whatever we want there in a pretty much perfectly calibrated environment, I and my wife still enjoy going to the movies. We visit a lot of theaters, wherever we go, we usually visit one or more theaters. It's not only for the love of movies, but also simply for the love of the experience of going out to the movies. For me, it's also partly because I'm still inspired and intrigued by the whole exhibition thing, even though there aren't that many secrets for me, it doesn't seem to lose its magic.
I've ranted on it in other topics before: The industry needs a big wake-up: Your baseline quality starts to suck more than ever before. Outages, half working equipment and other snafus are so common, it's no longer a one-in-a-hundred chance of hitting a botched show, across the board, for me, it's more like in one out of five or even worse... (I'm not keeping hard statistics here.)
Now it hit some high-profile individual like Stephen Colbert. But what he mentions is exactly what I see happening all the time around. It boils down to total incompetence and total lack of leadership.
I've also had tons of shows starting without sound, with missing channels, with no picture at all, with sound way to silent, with lights on and even with people being SOLD the wrong 3D glasses for a show that included 3D glasses.
While some may have you believe, the average multiplex runs like a well-oiled machine, where everything is meticulously controlled and monitored from a distance, the practice nowadays looks more like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where the whole show is on a self-destructive autopilot. Trying to get somebody's attention in the average multiplex is about the same experience as calling Central Services.
Folks, the situation is probably more dire than due the worst days of the "35mm heydays". Back in those days, there were at least a bunch of booth-monkeys that halfway knew what buttons to press when stuff went haywire.
My recent experiences were all pretty bad. I'm almost glad if I go to a show where everything works out smoothly. Knowing this industry, I know that stuff can and will break. There are a lot of things that need to work in unison for everything to go smoothly, but then again, we're not launching rockets into space here. My biggest gripe is that, when stuff goes wrong, there is simply nobody with any clue around of how to handle the situation. Heck, there have been situations, that out of pure frustration, I offered myself to have a look at it and go into the booth and try to fix the damn problem... for free.
It almost feels like flying without a pilot, where the stewardess comes out and asks if there's a pilot among the passengers, because the auto-pilot just crapped out...
PS: AFAIK the guy is called Stephen Colbert, at the very least if we're talking about the guy that's delivering your daily Trump rant almost every night for the last years. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-30-2019 01:56 PM
I can't believe Colbert stopped talking about politics long enough to discuss a movie theater problem!
I wonder what the percentage of "imperfect" shows is. My wife and I usually wind up going to at least one, or maybe two, movies whenever we go somewhere. So far this year we've seen "Green Book" in Seattle, "Shazam" in Orlando, and "The Upside" in Vero Beach, FL, and some other movie I can't remember in Billings, MT. All were perfect presentations and I don't remember any sticky floors or major audience annoyances either. (To be fair, most of our moviegoing is on weeknights and never on opening weekends.)
We probably see at least four to six movies a year when we're on various excursions, and I can't remember the last "substandard" presentation I've seen in a theater. Quite frankly, the worst presentation in my recent memory has been the trailer reels at Cinemacon, which are always presented at least twice as loud as they should be.
Some of us here are probably more picky than the general public... a set of too-bright floor aisle lights might ruin a show for some people, where most wouldn't even notice it.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 04-30-2019 04:09 PM
I guess that most of the people hanging out here are more picky than the average moviegoers, that will also include me, but I hope we all remain picky, because once we lose it, it's nothing holding it back.
Your personal mileage may vary, also, it might vary from location to location, but I'm really witnessing a general "lacklusterness" (if there is such a thing) in the industry as a whole, when it comes down to quality.
In the last year or so, I really went into a lot of really botched shows, to a level I've not experienced before. Not just simple annoyances, but stuff that really botched the whole experience. I may be the unlucky one and a statistical sampling of "one" isn't really a statistic at all, but I could write quite a journal of what kind of stuff went wrong during my visits in the last year.
In most cases, it's nothing really shocking, but there is always one consistency in this story: Almost never was the flaw detected by the cinema staff itself, it required someone of the audience alerting them. And in many cases, it took way longer to fix than you would expect, if there were competent people involved.
A short recount of issues I encountered the last 12 months or so:
- Water from the ceiling forced us to give up our reserved seats (for which we paid extra). We had to find new seats, that weren't taken ourselves, by repeatedly moving around...
- Show started with the house lights on during high-profile Saturday evening show in Dolby Cinema, it took manual intervention to fix it. The movie was already running for at least 10 minutes. No restart of the show, no sorry, no nothing.
- Show started with no picture at all, manual intervention was necessary. This happened about 3 times now on three different shows in different cinemas. It's clearly the lamp failing to start and nobody getting notified in time about that problem.
- 3D show started as a 2D show. Nobody mentioned the problem to the cinema staff. The situation wasn't fixed. I actually didn't mind seeing it in 2D, but in the end we paid extra for something we didn't get. Also, all those poor suckers that saw this "faux 3D" show must really have though... this 3D used to be better?
- A bright LED strip failing to dim after the start of the show, causing so much distraction, all the people in and around our row eventually left.
- A projector clearly going into emergency mode, dimming the picture so much, it was just shadows on screen. Manual intervention could not solve the problem, which was obviously lamp related.
- Movie started with missing center channel, manual intervention was necessary and took more than 30 minutes to fix.
- IMAX show broke down during the show, in this case the staff was sufficiently forthcoming to restart the show in a non-IMAX theater that was available, for the people that wanted to continue to watch the movie. Refunds were given anyway. A fine example of how you can even try to recover a botched-up situation.
- Projector zoomed to scope, while the movie was in flat, causing it to overshoot the screen. Staff was willing, but entirely clueless, had never heard about "aspect ratios"... Eventually, I had to fix this myself...
- Reserved seat ended up missing elementary parts that make it a seat... In this case, staff ended up being unhelpful by telling us to just find new seats, which obviously ended up being booked by others.
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William Kucharski
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 244
From: Louisville, Colorado, United States of America
Registered: Oct 2012
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posted 05-28-2019 04:05 PM
One of the more unusual issues I’ve encountered (at least unusual to me) was at an AMC where all the channels were off by one. The left channel was silent, the left channel audio was playing in the center channel, the center channel was playing in the right channel, the right channel audio was playing in one of the surrounds and so on. Literally no one else in the theater noticed an issue.
The manager rebooted the CP650 and sound gear and that seemed to set things right, though the balance of the audience was more upset with the interruption than with having all the dialog come out of the right side of the screen.
More recently, at a Fathom screening of Ben-Hur at an AMC, the house lights came up at the start of intermission, but never went back down. I had to run out to the lobby, hunt for an employee and let them know. (Here I also walked into a silent theater and they only started the 30 minute Fathom preshow when notified it wasn’t running. To their credit, they did start the preshow in a way that the feature started on time.)
The major issue is everything at most AMCs is fully automated. The employees don’t even know a show has failed to start until an irate audience member comes out to tell them. The fiasco last Saturday I posted about elsewhere with the Fandango sneak preview of The Secret Lives of Pets 2 had the audience chatting away a good ten minutes past showtime and the employees had no idea the feature hadn’t started.
I feel more sorry for the people I have seen walking out ten minutes into a movie because the closed captioning system wasn’t working.
quote: Mike Blakesley
Quite frankly, the worst presentation in my recent memory has been the trailer reels at Cinemacon, which are always presented at least twice as loud as they should be.
Ironically that’s likely because the processor was actually set at 7 as it should be.
Yes, trailers are loud but that’s also the intended level created by the mixers.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 05-29-2019 06:55 AM
I agree with Mike on this. It's not a new discussion.
I'm also not sure if William has ever heard how many of those trailers sound at 7.0, in a properly calibrated house where 7.0 is close to the intended levels.
I know, for example, that in Belgium, there even is a memorandum for self-regulation between cinemas, where they all agreed to lower the volume of the trailers and pre-show, in order to avoid the authorities stepping in, after there were numerous complaints from the movie-going public, about trailers being unbearably loud.
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-29-2019 09:25 AM
What you don't "get" with trailers (and ads) is that, unlike features, where you could make the argument that the person mixing the movie carefully derived their levels to achieve the sound portion of the picture...with the preshows, it is all about attention getting. They are loud to ensure that they are not quiet and for no other reason than that. In most features, there are quiet as well as loud passages. In preshows, there aren't.
Their "intent" is to scream at you. Whether they believe it or not, it is off-putting to the industry. I, for one, would welcome regulation on preshow levels that sets the maximum for EVERYBODY so nobody has to worry about being lost in the crowd. We have a system with LEQm to determine loudness over a span of time. Trailers are only 2-4 minutes long, on average...if you want to be loud you are going to have to carefully chose when to.
With most features, it isn't an issue because again, they have loud and quiet parts. Trailers forget the quiet parts (except the rating tag and possibly the credits).
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 05-29-2019 10:31 AM
quote: William Kucharski
The industry has had to react to customer demand before, so somehow that feedback needs to make it back to the people producing trailers.
Do you really think they care about the cinema-goers opinion? They're trying to sell you a product.
In Europe, most broadcasters implemented EBU's R128. That mostly solved the problem with over-compressed commercials, where the one tried to be even louder than the other, resulting in almost everybody reaching for their remotes to put the volume down once the commercials started.
Cinema trailers are seldomly mixed by the same team, responsible for the sound mix of the movie. Often, even the soundtrack used in the trailers differs from the soundtrack in the movie.
Most studios know that most theaters put the brake on the fader for pre-shows, that only gave them a motivation to push the loudness even further.
Like Steve mentioned, this really has nothing to do with "how the filmmaker intended the mix to sound", it's simply obnoxious behavior, trying to get your attention and it really should stop.
LEQ(m) is a very objective way to determine loudness over time. The industry should come to a common, safe value and studios should simply stick to it. Although you'll even see that someone still tries to squeeze the maximum out of it, but it's a good baseline. The rest is just common sense...
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