These signs were placed all over the town to advertise the festival, which is popular among residents and tourists alike.

Rental equipment (mostly video decks and projectors) for the festival, at the rental house in Phoenix.

Harkins' Sedona 6 Luxury Cinemas, the primary festival venue. This building was originally a grocery store before being converted into a cinema. This is the only commercial cinema in Sedona. We occupied four screens for the duration of the festival, and used the other two screens occasionally (we had to split them with the Harkins' regular programming).

The lobby at Harkins.

Another venue for the festival was the auditorium for the local high school, which was built in the last year or two and is known as the Sedona Performing Arts Center. It is an interesting venue, although the screen is too small for the room (700+ seats). This venue only showed video.

How many high school theaters have crystal chandeliers in their lobbies?

The Sedona Rouge hotel, across the street from the Harkins, served as a third festival venue. This one was also video-only and used a rear- projection setup. This venue seated about fifty.

These signs were all over town. The festival is a popular event in Sedona, and parking is at a premium.

Sedona is a beautiful area. This is the view from the roof of the Harkins.

Another shot from the roof.

This is the typical projection setup at the Harkins. Cinemecannica V5, Strong Super Highlight lamphouse, and Christie AW3 platter. This is cinema #2, which is the largest house at the theatre (seats about 250) and which is built to THX specifications. At the left of the frame is some of the festival's video equipment and two shelves full of tapes. Sound is Dolby Digital with a CP65 and DA20.

A close-up shot of the V5, with its motorized lens turret. The thing above the Dolby reader with three rollers is a "film chopper." It is designed to cut the film in the event of high feed tension (as would happen if a brain wrap were to occur). The theory is that one clean cut through one frame of film is preferably to several feet of mangled polyester. I tested it. It works. I have never seen these in any other theatre.

A similar projection setup in a smaller house. This one uses Ultra-Stereo instead of Dolby.

Some of the prints shown at the festival. The theatre's own staff took care of most of the film work.

Apparently someone hates film. (Not to worry ... we ran the print, not the DVD.)

Built-up prints on boards designed to make print movements easier. This festival shows everything twice, often in different auditoria.

As with most festivals now, much of the programming was on various video formats instead of film. This festival accepted Beta SP, Digi-Beta, and HDCAM tapes, as well as a few Blu-Rays.

All of the video decks were set up in one central area, so that four screens' worth of video could be run with only two operators. This is half of the video control area.

And this is the other half.

We removed the theatre's LCD video projectors (normally used for advertising) and replaced them with Panasonic 7700 3-chip DLP units for the video screenings. This shelf needed some extra support to hold the heavier unit.

We had snow for several days of the festival -- supposedly, this is an unusual occurrence in Sedona in late February. The natural beauty in this town is amazing and cannot be captured adequately in photographs.