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Jasper Sharp writes: > Just as an aside, it seems that the 70 mm print of The Master currently playing in the Odeon Leicester Square has a dirty great scratch running through the frame in its first real. According to reports here [1], the projector was laced up incorrectly - simple as that. Speculating completely and utterly, this was reportedly a DTS 70 print, and it therefore seems possible that the film was also threaded through the projector's magnetic sound head assembly as well as the DTS reader. As you'll see from the attached pic of the model of projector involved (this one does not have a DTS reader on it - if it did, it would be mounted on top of the magnetic penthouse at the top right), that would put enough extra footage between the DTS timecode pickup and the gate to throw the sync out, assuming that the offset had been configured with the film bypassing the mag head, threaded directly from the DTS to the continuous motion sprocket that forms the Latham loop above the gate. Because there is no magnetic oxide on a DTS 70 print, the film base will have been making contact with the head drum, hence the scratching. > ...there are a large number of projectionists out there who don't know how to use the equipment any more. Agreed, and 70mm is an advance straw in the wind, probably. That format was essentially rendered obsolete by the advent of digital optical sound in the early '90s: even during the format's heyday, most 70mm prints were blowups from 35 made to take advantage of its superior audio capabilities, not to show off what contact printing from 65mm originals can do (because so few films were shot on large format negative). The last film to be distributed on anything close to the number of 70mm prints that have been made of _The Master_ was _Titanic_ back in 1997. There have been a few venues that have maintained the infrastructure and skills base to carry on showing the few dozen prints of rep titles still circulating in this country, notably Bradford, the NFT, Warwick's students' union and one or two City Screen sites. But before Paul Thomas Anderson decided to revive 70 as a release medium, it has beeen 15 years since the last significant distribution of a new film in 70mm__. So venues that are theoretically equipped for 70 but haven't actually been called upon to show a print for ages are now finding themselves faced with one, and a lot of them probably don't have a projectionist who has ever handled the medium before. In that context, this accident is hardly surprising. But it's worrying, because operating a film projector does not allow _any_ margin for error - you've got to get it 100% right, every time, because if you don't, you can destroy a reel. And if the film is running from a platter, you will destroy the entire print, as happened with one of the 70mm 2001 reissue prints of _2001_ at a venue that shall remain diplomatically nameless. A £25,000 print was written off in one screening. My fear is that as digital takes hold and film recedes into the distance, we'll be in the same position with 35, and that screening venues either wanting to show film for film's sake, or that want to show a title for which no DCP exists, will find themselves up against archives unwilling to let their prints out of their sight out of fears that a venue that hasn't run film for a few years, has equipment in an uncertain state of maintenance and a projectionist who is at best out of practice and at worst insufficiently trained and experienced are likely to damage them. Heritage railways and other organisations that maintain obsolete equipment and the skills base that goes with it in operational condition have found ways around this, and I'm sure that we can, too. It will take some joined-up thinking, though. Links: ------ [1] http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f8/t006760.html [2] http://www.enticknap.net [3] http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/leo [4] http://leeds.academia.edu/enticknap -------------------------------------------------------- BAFTSS mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the BAFTSS list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=baftss ------------------------------------------------------- This mailing list is a free service and is not restricted to members of BAFTSS. --------------------------------------------------------