Digital Rocks: How Hollywood Killed Celluloid

[Jon Dent]

The soft image could be nothing more than too many flat/scope changes with nobody checking how far the focus has drifted.

[Leo Enticknap]

It does, and "touching up" the lens position macros is an important part of planned maintenance. I do this by hooking a wifi access point up in the booth and then make those adjustments with a laptop standing close to the screen. The lens shift can also drift a bit, too (more on NECs than Barcos, I find), though for some reason the zoom almost never does.

Occasionally I encounter a projector in which the focus uniformity (Scheimpflug) on a Barco was never set properly during the initial installation, and someone appears to have slightly defocused it deliberately later on, possibly because an image that is pin sharp on some parts but not others is a visibly obvious flaw that customers are likely to complain about.

[Jon Dent]

Problem is some people confuse projector issues with filmmaking choices. We had someone complain that the sides of Batman were out of focus. They were, thanks to the anamorphic lenses they used to film it! I checked our projector focus right before that movie started and it was edge to edge sharp on our end.

Back to the topic, we're facing a situation where our owner picked up a few NEC projectors for 'a good deal' a while back. Now we're looking at getting one of them (NC2000C) running. Problem is it's been in storage for years, so it's a guarantee that anything needing a battery in there is shot. We were told we can pirate most of the boards out of the NC1200C that we're currently running, but it's still going to cost us a few grand. And this is on top of having to shell out $15k for new servers last fall.

All I know is it's a good thing our crew isn't trying to earn a living from running a theater.

[Leo Enticknap]

If the SIB has an Enigma link decrypter on it, I can almost guarantee that it will be pooped. I recently refurbished a bunch of older Series 2 NECs that my boss bought at auction from a Pacific Theatres 'plex that closed during the pandemic, and had been unpowered since around March 2020. The Enigma's certificate had gone on four out of the five. However, if you're planning to put an existing IMB into it, that won't worry you. Apart from that, the ICP battery is the only other risk there, if the projector is heading towards a decade old.

[Steve Guttag]

The biggest failure point from the storage will be the Engima module. That will be toast. If you are using an IMB, the Enigma is not needed, can be removed and merely tell the projector via DCC that the board is just a DVI board and not the full Legacy board.

The ICP clock battery can be changed though I would ensure that one of the modules that has a clock is right because the projector is smart enough to reset its own clock when that battery gets changed.

The NC1200 and NC2000 are identical in all respects except for the LPSU (Lamp Power Supply Unit).

[Jon Dent]

We have IMS3000 servers so no, we don't need an Enigma, and to his credit our installer had already mentioned that this wouldn't be an issue. I think his quote was more labor and travel than parts.