At 10:21 22/07/99 -0500, you wrote:

>Believe it or not, I think this is a reel-change problem.

The way you could probably tell for sure is by looking for the changeover
cues.  The SMPTE standards dictate that these are positioned at the top of
the frame on the right-hand side (e.g. opposite the soundtrack).  They
appear as circular marks (or oval-shaped if projected through an anamorph)
printed on four consecutive frames 24 and 168 frames before the tail
section.  The first mark tells the projectionist to start the motor of the
incoming machine, and the second tells him/her to press a switch which
instantaneously closes a solenoid-operated shutter on the outgoing mech and
open one on the incoming mech.  If only one mark can be seen during the end
of a reel, it usually means that the 'over' has been done early.

One of the problems with running film on a long play system (a device which
enables all the reels of a feature to be joined into a single roll) is that
it is usually necessary to remove at least one frame from the start and end
of each reel in order to make a decent join.  In this way, a foot or two
can gradually get lost from each start and end, but I can't see how 10
seconds (15 feet of 35mm) could have gone unless there was an incident of
some sort during projection which damaged a section so badly it had to be
cut out.

Incidentally, negative cutters are now instructed to avoid putting fades to
black at the end of a reel at all costs.  This is to minimise the risk of a
print being cut 'out of rack' (i.e. not on the frameline, but between one
of the three intermediate perforations (4 for 70mm) within a frame).
Before the advent of long-play systems, the opposite applied: neg cutters
tried to put fades at the end of reels wherever possible, to minimise the
impact of a missed changeover.  Very few cinemas show films using two
projectors and changeovers any more.

L
Leo Enticknap
email: [log in to unmask]

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