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] ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]