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

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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.

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/

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.