On Syncing
So it’s occured to me that I talk about this (syncing prints) a lot but I don’t ever actually say how we do it… Gobo Fraggle finally called me on it at MYSTcommunity, but since it was in a somewhat off-topic conversation, I decided to post the answer in a more public venue for easy reference at a later date.
Anyway, this requires a little bit of pre-explaination with regards to modern 35mm projector technology. Unlike old-fashioned projectors, ours are not reel-to-reel (think of the home-theatre 8mm and 16mm projectors if you don’t know what reel-to-reel is). With modern-day movies averaging 6 reels in length, and movie multiplexes housing anywhere between 6 and 30 projectors, it becomes largely impractical and annoying to employ enough people to monitor the movies as they play and change the reel over roughly every 15 to 20 minutes. So, what we do is we take all of the reels, and we tape them together. We then take this massive disc of film and lay it on a “platter”, which feeds out from the center like an 8-track tape. This then runs through the projector and feeds back onto a different platter. Our “trees” have 3 platters each, so we can have one running (taking up 2 platters) and one sitting on the third for a later show.
When we sync a print, we’re basically running the same print through multiple projectors at the same time. This requires a number of extra rollers to move the film from one projector to the next, and as I can personally attest, setting up these rollers can at times be a real pain. To get into a bit more detail, we thread the film off of the platter in the theatre where we want to start the sync, run it to the intake on the projector back through the “tree”, and then, since we want to keep going, we skip threading the platter and projector for the moment and move to the sync rollers. We follow the rollers to the next projector we want to add, thread through its intake rollers, out through its “tree”, and on to the next set of rollers. We repeat this process until we’ve threaded all of our sync rollers and end on the platter beside the projector we want to end at. Then, starting at the last projector, we thread each projector, pulling out any slack as we go so we don’t loose tension (tension is important to keeping the film off the ground and running properly… if we loose it, alarms go off and the movie stops to prevent causing damage to the film).
We’re fortunate in that our theatre’s projectors can be automated, so that starting them all simultaneously is handled by the computer; all we do is hit “start” on one of them and they all start. Assuming everything was threaded properly, we don’t snap the film or loose tension. Trust me, when you’ve got that many people waiting to see a movie (and especially one like Star Wars), having film trouble is a bad thing ;).