Ok, here I go trying to defend theaters a bit (I'm a projectionist, so I feel its my duty).



First of all, if the theater you're going to has a bad blurry image, a shaking picture, or other problems, go tell the management that the projectionists need to start doing their job and maintaining the projectors. I work at a 16 screen theater, and we take very good care of our projectors. The only issues at my theater are issues that we are not qualified to handle, like fixing masking motors or calibrating the sound systems. But, for the most part, if the presentation is out of focus, it just means that the projectionists there are doing a crappy job.



Second of all, the average projectionist gets paid between $8 and $10 an hour. That is complete crap for the amount of responsibility that is placed on them. Our theater, on a busy day will bring in between $20000 to $30000 in ticket sales. For a projectionist to be taking care of 16 projectors all running at the same time, making sure things are running smoothly and correctly, we are really under-paid. So in some regards, I can't really blame projectionists for doing such a lousy job when they get such lousy pay.



Lastly, as a personal request, if you ever happen to be in the position that you see a bad presentation of a movie and have the chance to talk to the projectionist about it, try to get past your rage of anger and listen to the explanation if it cannot be fixed by them. I recently had a run in with a customer who would not let me explain what so ever about a masking problem that we cannot fix ourselves (we have to have techs come out, and as in any business, the corporate office is always very very slow). This customer just went off on this long rant about how he has been watching movies longer that I've been alive and this should have been fixed during the movie (not possible without stopping the movie). He would not except any explantation what so ever, even though I've been a projectionist for several years and sure as heck knew a lot more about movie projection than he did. Even though he got complimentary passes for his inconveniance (which consisted of about 3 inches of the top of the picture being projected onto a curtain, causing the very occasional tops of heads being chopped off), he would still not give me the light of day to explain the problem to him and continued to blame us, where it is actually a problem with corporate being slow to send out techs to fix long recurring problems.



Anyhow, I'm going to stop ranting now, but please be a little nicer to the management if you speak to them. Theaters get some of the worst customers and the staff quite often gets treated badly, which doesn't exactly contribute to us trying to do a better job to please the anal retentive customers, which I'm sure none of you are.



-Jonathan



Jason: I agree, SDDS does really blow. We have one projector that uses it, and it frequently has problems. It also will interfere with the standard dolbly digital backup, so the movie will drop all the way down to analog, which is what you were watching the movie in. Sony has essentially abandoned SDDS and theaters are slowly getting away from it, hopefully.