This is why I love analog, and not just in the sense of "I'm an old fart and old things are better" (though I'm sure there's a good dose of that), but because there's a whole spectrum between "working" and "not working".
(Environmental issues aside, that is -- I recognize that the chemicals needed to manufacture and develop traditional film are pretty nasty.)
With digital, if it works, it's 100%, which is great, but if it doesn't work, it's 0%, and that can make it hard to even get a grip on what the problem is or which direction to go to find a solution. (DRM just makes this worse.) I've got some weird routing to my TV because the obvious HDMI connection doesn't work, and how do you troubleshoot that?
I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise!
That's a situation that could never happen with a new digital projection system. The odd thing is that even though we groaned at how poorly-timed the changeovers were, in my mind the whole event is an overwhelmingly positive memory. I learned something about how projection systems work, and we got to interact with the projectionist, and it was a unique movie night we got to talk about, and I even enjoyed the movie still. We sometimes act as though the only goal of cinema is to reproduce every pixel and soundwave perfectly, but my most enjoyable movie experiences don't correlate to that, and in this case is almost the polar opposite.
I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise!
I might be misunderstanding something about cinema projection, but how does a broken lens lead to 20-minute segmentation? The only things I can think of are perhaps it has some sort of cooling mechanism (I know the bulbs do emit massive quantities of heat) that needed a chance to cool off, or they were somehow playing it on a different projector which couldn't handle a full film-reel?
Certainly a more interesting experience than the few glitches I've encountered including "Yes, we know you've been complaining since the 3rd minute of playback that we had the aspect ratio wrong, but we're only going to fix it now, 70% of the way through the film"
> but how does a broken lens lead to 20-minute segmentation?
I think a "proper" analogue theatre has two projectors. With the films split into reels, one reel is played through one projector, and then when it's time to switch to the next reel, the projectionist cues it up on the second projector, and then switches between the two. Like a DJ mixing records, I suppose.
So if one lens is broken, they need to stop the film, feed in the second reel, then carry on playing. Hence the 20 minute break.
I may be wrong about this. Other commenters seem to be former projectionists; I'm just some guy who's seen Fight Club ;)
This is exactly right; although not all "proper" theaters have two projectors. Where I work we have one and a "long play" tower which allows us to play the whole film with one projector.
Many still do run changeover systems, though.
(In case you're interested, I work in an indie cinema in the UK, and we're really scared about the costs of changing to digital, which we will need to do in the next 12 months)
On Youtube, if you search for words like "theatre projector changeover" there are some great videos of projectionists showing how it's done.
Apparently there are "platter" systems that let you splice all the reels together and project the entire film through one lens with no changeovers, but my story took place at least 15 years ago, and it was not a very big or modern theatre.
(Environmental issues aside, that is -- I recognize that the chemicals needed to manufacture and develop traditional film are pretty nasty.)
With digital, if it works, it's 100%, which is great, but if it doesn't work, it's 0%, and that can make it hard to even get a grip on what the problem is or which direction to go to find a solution. (DRM just makes this worse.) I've got some weird routing to my TV because the obvious HDMI connection doesn't work, and how do you troubleshoot that?
I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise!
That's a situation that could never happen with a new digital projection system. The odd thing is that even though we groaned at how poorly-timed the changeovers were, in my mind the whole event is an overwhelmingly positive memory. I learned something about how projection systems work, and we got to interact with the projectionist, and it was a unique movie night we got to talk about, and I even enjoyed the movie still. We sometimes act as though the only goal of cinema is to reproduce every pixel and soundwave perfectly, but my most enjoyable movie experiences don't correlate to that, and in this case is almost the polar opposite.
I suppose I'm a bit weird like that.