Ever wonder how movies are played?

nice read, but you left out a word in your conclusion.

“Thats why I recommend getting yourself a good” … I know what you were shooting for based on your next sentence but I thought i’d let you know anyway

National Anthem at the movies? Hrm…never heard that one before.
Pretty cool explination though! I knew that old movies were on many reels, did not think modern ones (with digital and all that) still used a reel switch system.

Sucks to think soon digital theatres (look i brought it back for ya) are going to put your job out. Good to know focus wont e a problem

I projected too! I mostly worked the digital projectors but we have these huge film projectors with wide, wide plates with the whole movie put onto one HEAVY reel.

A great Columbo episode revolved around switching reels during a film. It threw the timeline of the murder off and Columbo latched onto the dude like a remora.

I worked at both a reel feed and platter feed theatre in college. Couple tidbits: flat is equivalent to 1.85 resolution and scope is 2.35. There also exists 1.66 still, which tends to be foreign always, typically french, and 1.33, which is used on old prints with what’s called break tape. Film nowadays doesn’t break when you pull on it, so if it gets caught in the brain, the device which feeds film from the one big reel platter to the projector, it doesnt break and snags giving the audience a picture of the filmm melting (since the explosive xenon bulb is very hot). THis is called a wrap since it wraps the brain when it snags inside it. We used to through old xenon bulbs off the roof of our theatre, or put them on the ground and throw rocks at them. When they explode the glass flies up to the 3rd florr where we are, and it is LOUD. Reel based is much more fun, but isn’t used as much now since the most 1 person can run are 2 reel projectors, whilst 1 projectionist can run 7 or so platter feed projectors. Also, when you get a wide screen movie, it’s actually 1.85. HDTV’s are in 1.85 resolution, mostly. so it isn’t actually widescreen, just wider.
cheers

One thing to add to Patrick’s book, if you want to tell scope from flat all yall need to do is look at the dots, and if they are circular then the movie is flat, if theyre ovular then the film is scope.

i worked in the theatre at clemson for 3 semesters, if i understood correctly, those bulbs were expensive. you just threw them off of a building? sure.

You didn’t understand correctly. He threw the bulbs over when they were old, aka, burnt out, used, a worn out bulb isn’t worth a dime anymore, only when they are new and useable…. Kool story!

I do believe he said “old xenon bulbs,” most probably meaning ones which were burnt out. Still, throwing them off the building sounds quite dangerous, especially if anyone was walking by down below unnoticed. Not to mention all the glass fragments layout around everywhere.

LINUX RULES

How movies are played

This is pretty interesting; It shows how a theater prepares a movie for viewing. Its a lot more involved then I could have imagined.read more | digg story…

There’s a cool website for info on this stuff. It’s over at:
http://www.filmtech.com/
When I was a projectionist in college (35mm, 5 platter system) I use to frequent the site on a regular basis to check out pics of other projection booths. Seeing someone chain The Matrix over 7 theaters was pretty cool.

Erm, sorry, the site is:
http://www.film-tech.com/
My bad.

I work at a college campus theater. I’m not usually a projectionist, but I’ve picked up a few things… first, that there’s enormous variation in print types and sound types. At the low end you’ve got 16mm. Normally, that really is just load the reels, push the button. But even that can go wrong sometimes; if the top reel’s motor gets out of tune, it can result in the film stretching and snapping, repeatedly. The only in-movie solution is to have someone there to manually turn the reel at the right speed for the rest of the movie. The sound is almost always mono. The picture could be in any one of several formats, which are usually dependent on the age of the film, and which require their own lenses.

Then there’s 35 mm. Nitrate prints break very easily. More modern ones don’t, but when something goes wrong, it can really clog up the works. Lost 20 feet of a movie that way recently. There are too many sound modes to list, but pretty much all of them are stereo, either analog or digital. Analog doesn’t sound as good, but digital isn’t as tolerant of aberrations in setup or errors in the film. Both have to be calibrated using an oscilloscope occasionally. There’s scope and flat prints, which require different lenses, lenses which can become “out of tune”; they won’t focus properly. It takes something involving a screwdriver to fix it, which I haven’t seen.

Then there’s 70mm. Huge film there, but it uses the same projectors as 35, just goes around different mechanisms. Also, the sound is magnetically encoded onto the film, rather than optically. Our projectors don’t handle 70 anymore though after the upgrade for digital sound in 35; nowhere for the film to escape to the takeup reel. Fantastic picture though.

IMAX (which we’ve never projected of course) is actually similar to 70, except it’s projected horizontally instead of vertically, which gives you a larger area per frame, since the height of the picture is now the width of the film, instead of the width being the width (which means more frames per given area).

nice read, but you left out a word in your conclusion.

“Thats why I recommend getting yourself a good” … I know what you were shooting for based on your next sentence but I thought i’d let you know anywaylol

nice first comment.

test codeend test

Interesting read, thanks!

If you’re going to be a college student soon, you should probably brush up on your proofreading skills…I hope you don’t plan on turning any assignments in with writing quality like I’ve just had to wade through.

yea yea yea…cut me some slack it was written at 3 AM okay…I just got off work and decided to blog!

You guys rock it old school; reel 2 reel. I’ve always worked with platters, and I love them dearly. I can run 12 houses all by me lonesome with platters, plus get an hour after every rush of film starts to relax.

I salute you for having the skill to do change overs. I can barely do it right between the prefeature and the trailers.

I think there’s a big difference between platter and reel set ups. The biggest part of reel to reel is being there for the changeovers and then doing them correctly. That just isn’t a concern for platter since all the reels are spliced together.

The biggest part of running platter is threading the projector and the feed tree. You can just hand crank the film through, but I have to thread down the tree, over a projector roller, back up the tree, onto a collection platter, then go back to the projector, thread the sound head, the sprockets, the intermittent (I can never spell that right), the slides, the digital sound heads, and then run back to the tree and ensure tension. All of that has to be done without the film hitting the floor (which isn’t a huge problem because we put about 60ft. of blank film before the start of a movie. All the same, dirt on the film puts dirt on the rollers.) and ensuring proper loop sizes to avoid friction scratches on rollers and cleaners and coming off of sprockets.

Bottom line, your moment of precision comes during the movie, ours comes before.

And to the guy that says digital will quickly replace film (steve?), know that theatre managers aren’t willing to drop the tens of thousands for these projectors when there is no infastucture for digital films release in place and few films are doing it anyways. Besides, even if it does replace mainstream theatre projectors, art house flicks won’t be able to get the capital needed to comply with the proposed standard, so they’ll stick to film and there will always be a place for a skilled projectionist.

IronDan, Sounds pretty cool, I’ve heard about the platter system but never seen it for myself. When I got back to the states this summer I plan on telling a theatre a worked at a military movie theatre and wanna see their set up. One of our projectionist did that last summer, so I plan on hookin’ it up. Anyway, if you could take a picture of the platter system, I have a mental picture in my mind, but its probably all wrong…lol…

Thanks for the comment!

Tyler Durden anyone?

A few of thoughts.

18 inches of 35mm film equals 1 second on screen.

Digital Theaters in the mainstream are probably 10 years away. The technology is here and the picture quality is fantastic, however a theater is not going to “chuck” $20-$40 thousand dollars worth of equipment (Projector, Lamphouse, Lenses, Sound equipment) and buy $40 to $60 thousand to just go “Digital”. And that is per theater. When someone steps up: i.e. Kodak, Technicolor, Buena Vista and finances the changeover so that the expense is buried in the “Box Office Royalty” or something along those lines, you will see the change.

Digital is already a boon for “Art House Theaters”. Most independent film is already shot digital. An independent filmmaker can shoot a film on digital for the cost of the Camera. It is an extra expense to convert it to a 35mm film. As much as $5000.00 per print, a prohibitive cost for a small independent filmmaker. In fact the percentage of current digital Art House theaters is much higher than First Run theaters as they can actually screen a print with a cheap LCD projector because they are not restricted by the prohibitive costs of equipment that the mainstream industry requires.

I knew most of this stuff, but Loved the Pics.
Thanx for the refresher…
You may want to consider ZuD for your iPod.

cat

Just to make the distinction with your commenter who noted incorrectly that “widescreen tvs are 1.85″. In fact, widescreen televisions are referred to as 16×9 and are actually 1.77.

Hey,

Nice story. I noticed that some of your pictures on Flickr are taken at Aukam military housing in Wiesbaden, Germany. I used to live just up the street in Sonnenberg on Bayernstrasse (not as military) and have also played a few times at the same baseball pitch.

It’s a small world.

Nice article!

I, too worked as a projectionist to pick-up some extra $$$. The theatre where I was employed was a 1930’s era house that still used the original Simpson E-7 projectors up until about 1997. These beautiful machines used copper-clad carbon rods as their light source…a steadily burning electric arc which I had to maintain by regulating the distance between the posive and negative rods inside the chamber in back of the film gate. The elcetrical current came from a huge D.C. generator adjacent to the projection booth. Not only did I have to hit the cues, but I also had to keep the arc steady and bright.

For an photo of these projectors, look here; scroll down.

There was little time to watch the movie or read with all that had to be done, what with running the film, making up the next week’s features and previews, and maintaining and oiling the equipment. The house is still in existance today, but having been coverted to a multiplex, it no longer uses the E-7s but more modern platter projectors instead.

Out of the 8 movie theaters that are close to my house, only one isn’t digital and they are looking to phase out their projection system shortly.

Kenneth,
Thats insane that you used to live in Wiesbaden…it is a small world. Who would’ve thought you find my site through this article and digg?

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dude zach you are getting comments like crazy

yep yep…front page of digg will do that to you.

[...] Ever wonder how movies are played? at zamwi.com Tags [...]

Nifty! I always had ideas about what went on behind the scenes… but it’s nice hearin’ it from someone who actually does it combined with pictures. Thanks for sharin’!

Nice article, plus the insights from the comments. I toured an Imax projection room a while back, I recall they had the film on horizonal plates, probably what IronDan called platters. I would be interested to hear what the speed of the film is on an Imax projector. I am guesing from the size of the “platter” and the amount of film it must run the film amazingly fast. Managing film at high speed must be a science.

Does anyone have Imax specific knowledge? Speed, how it differs from 35 or 70 mm?

Very nice, though I work with platters as people have pointed out. It’s awesome. Most customers think we run like DVDs I think. If they only knew….

[...] Zamwi has a nice article on how movies are played. I wonder how I never thought of doing this article. Perhaps I will when I resume this summer. For now, enjoy. [...]

not to diss a contribution, but most movie houses have the platter system. it’s simply too prohibitive to actually switch the reels.

The 6 reels are loaded onto one horizontal platter and plays from the inside out. Then winds onto another platter and can be played after that, from the inside out.

They arnt called bulbs!

THEY ARE CALLED LAMPS!

Thank you
-Mike

Ok, well little bit I do remember, but will forward this link on to a friend of mine..

I used to be a manager at an IMAX house, and I did try and learn bits and pieces of what goes on. I also used to be a projectionist at my local theatre. So with that bit of statement…

Brain Wraps. I once had over 15 mins of movie in a brain wrap once. It was insane!!! Brain wraps tend to only happen for two big reasons. Lack of tension, or forgetting to re-engage the motors. I Do have a friend thats I think still runs a booth, I will see if I can get some pics for ya all. (yes, I know I babble all over the place)

IMAX info. Its a 15 perf 70mm film frame. So its 15 perfs (holes) wide and 70mm up and down. Speeds I am not aware of, however sound was not synced like in 35mm.

In 35, you have the soundcode, for both Digital, and Analog, with IMAX… you have to sync the start of the CD based soundtrack to the start of the movie, manually. Its basically alot of trial and error, until it syncs up to an acceptable level. *note* this might have changed since my experiences over 3 years ago.

Imax boothes are forced to maintain a certain humidity and temperature level, for the purposes of preventing the print from sticking. It also uses its own oversized platter/tree/brain system. Saving, self-enclosed ride based IMAX systems…

I do know that the 3d projectors support two prints running at the same time, one above the other, and it uses a vaccum system, to suck that large frame flat for projection, then it releases to allow the next frame to come along.

Ok, well thats about all I remember, I will forward this along to my old IMAX buddy, see what other info he might be able to give ya.

Yeah i work at the same theatre that IronDan does. The only real annoyance I have with the projection system we use is setting the correct loop sizing for the intermittent which is quite annoying when you have 5min or so between movie start times and you have to thread everything he mentioned. On a sidenote though, the system seems to show problems rather quickly allowing time for corrections ina timely manner. I have alwyas wanted to do the whole reel switch thing though, seems like it would be interesting.

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Google Mars - cool!
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Man I thought that was awesome. I kinda always wondered, because of the bad projectionists out there, or their mistakes at least. I def. have more respect now, and it was nice knowing how it all works.
I also really liked the part where you said about spelling. Hilarious! I didn’t think anybody else did that…
Peace.

Here is a photo of the platter system for you all to see (not from me, as taking a photo in my projections booth is a fireable offense):

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/movie-projector-platterfull.jpg

This one is missing the bottom platter and will only hold one print. These are nice because with a three or more platter system you can hold multiple prints for one projector.
I too have much fun throwing the old lamps off high structures, although I usually keep it in it’s case so that I don’t have to clean up afterwards. The shotgun-like sound is good enough for me.

Wow. Just like Fight Club.

In American English,
theater = place where drama is shown, building
theatre = drama, plays, scripts, concept of theatre arts
At least that’s what I learned. Just wanted to put in my two cents where they weren’t needed. ha.

actually, theatre and theater are exactly the same. If you look in any dictionary, you will see that.

Wow Zach… your website just got punched in the nuts! By that I mean alot of people visited… wonder if anyone checked out Video Class…

Cool pictures… I always wondered what they were doing up there behind me in the moovies when it went out of focus, or stopped, or sound or… heh

Funny thing about Fight Club…
One day a fellow projectionist and I decided that we weren’t paid enough (we aren’t) and decided to splice the frozen guy from a “The Fog” trailer into the beginning of another movie (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about just watch “The Fog” trailer and you’ll know what I’m talking about.)
Needless to say it was the funniest thing I have ever seen. I was literally laughing nonstop for several minutes!

Funny, but insanely illegal…the MPAA is probably looking for you as I type this. Are you still working at a theatre?

Not anymore, I’ve moved onto bigger and better things. It was only on for one showing and no one even bought tickets for it.

I work at a movie theatre now, and while I do everything time to time, I’m normally “USH Booth” (usher, and projectionist). Our theatre is a six screen, all platter-based. We have a make table like you have in the pictures, but we build the movie quite differently. First off, we don’t use the make table that you use, we use smaller ones. Most of our movies come with six or seven reels and usually alternate between head and tail (ie, reel 1 is head, reel 2 is tail, reel 3 is head, reel 4 is tail) and we have to rewind them before we put them on. We cut off the heads and tails, and splice the reels together into one long reel, and it sits on a platter. We have three platters per tower, one for payout, one for rewind, and a spare one (for building or tearing down, or for doubling up on a projector). We don’t really have to DO anything, other than thread the movie through and push start. Plenty can go wrong, but usually nothing does, so once it’s started we’re free to wander around, which is how I manage to do usher and booth at the same time.

Very bad things can happen. Someone mentioned “wrapping,” which is pretty much the worst thing that can happen while a movie is playing. The film gets wrapped around the control plate, which is the part of the platter that feeds the film through and speeds up/slows down the platter to prevent wraps. When something goes wrong, the film wraps around the platter, and gets so tight that it won’t feed through anymore. If you catch it quick, you can prevent it from melting the film, but usually it happens. We usually have to cut out five or six frames and splice it back together. Fixing the actual wrap is harder, depending on how it’s wrapped. Sometimes it just wraps cleanly around the plate for no reason, in which case you just stand there and spin the platter in the opposite way for a while. If the film jumped into the control plate, it’s usually all twisted and bunched up, and if there’s no way to slide it back to the outside, it gets nasty. I’ve had to result to taking sissors to film before, and pulling out a huge piece of the movie just to get the thing to run again (splicing it back on before running it through, of course).

I’ve never personally seen a reel-fed projector, just platter-fed. We have another theatre close to here, which is a 12 screen, and I had to go there to help build and run things when big movies come out like Star Wars. There’s usually only one booth person running 12 screens, compared to a reel-fed projectionist. I’d imagine a reel-fed could only handle two or three at once. Of course, you get to stay on the clock and do nothing the whole time, and we’re forced to go on break while the movies play through. So, I guess you win.

Not many places still doing change overs. I’ve only worked on platters & towers. More recently been using a digital projector. It’s nice not having to make up a film, some bloke just turns up with it on a hard drive.

This might interest you, happend to me awhile back. This is what it looks like when the platter doesn’t take up & no alarms go off. http://theferalone.com/2005/12/16/when-things-go-wrong/

The Spring Theater in 1981 in Springhill, La., was in its dying throes, but I managed to get a job there working on some older equipment that required a lot of attention during the presentation of the film. I thought it was a cool job. The projector looked like one of the Century CC models but I don’t know for sure, I wasn’t such a geek about it. But it was fun. Two projectors running one reel each with the carbon rods for light. Kept you on your toes for sure.

Found that out the hard way one night while doing my homework and I let the carbon rod get too far off and it went out during the show. Not good.

Anyway, Zach, the post brings back memories. Thanks.

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First off, photos: http://flickr.com/photos/54321887@N00/sets/72057594072111252/

I’m a projectionist/usher at a small town Finnish theatre. We have two rooms, the other one holds 250 people and the other 115. We run an average of two shows a night per room, more on the weekends. We have both a reel and platter based system. The ironic thing is, the platter is for the smaller room We use two Ernemann X projectors for the bigger room and an Ernemann 12S for the smaller one. We only have two platters, there’s a three platter tower sitting in the other room, but it’s not in use, sad I know. We use a vertical motorstand to rewind the reels from the bigger room, sadly I had not taken a picture of that, idiot me But it takes about 5mins to rewind one hour of film.

It takes 30mins to reel in one reel of film on to the platter, but it only takes about 10mins to rewind it off the platter because we take off the bolts that hold the motor against the platter, releasing it and allowing it spin much faster than it would with the motor in place. To rewind off the platter we insert a motorized reel holder onto the fixtures embedded in the wall and plug in the power cord, splice the film at the marks we’ve placed (little white stickies put on the side of the film when spilicing it together for the platter and punctured with the spilicing device).

Our films usually arrive from the central warehouse already spliced together into two bigger reels, each one holding about 45-60min of footage (that’s a bit under 2000m of film per reel). The reason why they’re spliced together is mostly because they have already gone thru the text lab which burns the subtitles on the film with laser. In the four years I’ve worked here, I’ve had to splice together two films, this usually only happens when we get a premiere and they haven’t had time to print the films early enough.

Our bigger room has Dolby Digital and the smaller is still stuck in Dolby 4-way stereo times. Are we old or what? We use 1600W Xenon bulbs in all the machines btw. Very hot stuff I think Finland has like two totally digital theaters. And I assume my place will be going digital about the same time the Sun stops shining… Naah, sometime in 2010 maybe. The whole equipment is owned by the leaser of the property, so it’s their shebang to upgrade it, and they’re tight with money…

I actually submitted a story not unlike this to Cinematical a while back, but their “Tip us” page was broken at the time Glad to see fellow projectionists coming out of the booth too

I am an actress and i am also in to the tech part. I am a ninth grader but this is really cool. I admirer that you like this kind of stuff. Now I know i am not the only one. Good luck with college. My brother is also a senior and is also into theater tech with me.

hah…thanks airhead for the response, glad you enjoyed the article. If you liked this then you should check out my show “Video Class” on zamtv, I think you would like it.

I think they should say the Pledge of Allegience at movies. Except pledge allegience to the MPAA.

If you want to see any of this in action, I own/operate a chain of movie theatres in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Drop me a line.

Brad, that would be awesome, how would you show us this in action, like with video?

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[...] Zamwi has a nice article on how movies are played. I wonder how I never thought of doing this article. Perhaps I will when I resume this summer. For now, enjoy. [...]

[...] If you are into tech, like me, you are cursed [or blessed, depending on how you look at it] with wondering how everything works… Well today I plan on answering one of your questions [if you didn â??t already know] how movies are played in the movie theatre.read more | digg story [...]

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