• It's been said before, but masking tape should not be used at all with film.

• I don't really find it necessary to use tape (any kind) to attach the reel band to the head or tail, you can just tuck it under the film a few inches then wrap it around and it should stay snug as long as the string is holding it tight. (I hope that made sense)

• This is in response to the two used prints of American Beauty I built up today: please, please, please do not mark frame lines with magic marker!!! Especially when the frame lines are so easy to see If you have trouble finding them (which we all do occasionally), you can use a film counter, or hold your place with your fingernail on the edge of the film until you can cut it. Marking them with a pen can cover up the digital and sometimes bleed into the
  picture. Not to mention the fact that it's just plain tacky!

• I know I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but I really find that more than one reference frame is unnecessary. (Hopefully, at least one person will back me up on that).
  

I'm backing you up on those, Erika! Here's some additional thoughts...

• Do not use shoe polish. EVER! Really, how blind must someone be to not be able to break a print down without that shoe polish bleeding all over the digital tracks and frequently the analog tracks and picture area of the film? Also, it flakes off after a few runs and causes an incredible amount of dirt buildup around the reel changes!

• Wrap your reels in 24"x24" plastic trash liners upon packing them back into the shipping cans. This keeps all the nasty dirt inside those pre-WW2 film cans from getting the print dirty. Think of it this way, you put all that care into handling your films, then you just drop them back into a dirty shipping case??? A box of a thousand is cheap and can be ordered with the regular trash liners at each theater.

• Wind the prints emulsion out onto the reels. Assuming the reel of film is head out and the soundtrack is facing you, the lead edge of the film should come off of the reel to the left side to accomplish this. Next print everyone breaks down, check for it. It causes many projectors undue headaches and many changeover houses cannot feed the film wound emulsion in either.

• Enough with using an old piece of splicing tape from the trash to reattach the leaders!!! Need I say more?

• Please put the leaders back on the proper reels. Also, when I take a reel band off of a reel, I shouldn't be greeted with the identification frame...but the beginning of the countdown! How about matching up soundtracks too?

• Please don't try to save money by not splicing the tail leader back on. When the next theater is building in a frenzy because Technicolor delivered the print 10 minutes before showtime, not having it spliced back on will result in an incredible amount of slapping and destruction of the last few feet of the reel. For people loading the film directly onto a platter, reel by reel (a practice I frown upon heavily) the end of each reel will be scratched if not spliced back on. Really, are these theaters hurting THAT MUCH that they can't afford to single sided splice the tail leader back on?

• While we're on that subject, I highly recommend a single sided splice for all reattachments. I think we've pretty much all come to that agreement in another thread.

• If your theater does not have dousers, please save that tail leader! Many theaters like this cut it off intentionally so the end won't run through. Also, please add a stretch of black leader or something. I hate getting a print where the tail end of the credits and the blue rating band are torn up. Simply adding 25-50 feet to the end of each print will keep the end of the movie in pristine condition as well as providing you with some extra "junk" leader should the tail end pull together and wrap.

• If there is no paper reel band (or if one of them was missing a string, which necessitates tossing the entire set away), please use at least a 2 inch strip of tape. This can be masking tape, but please make sure it is something "unused" and with "good adhesive qualities" and there is enough of it to securely hold the film together. How many of you have received a used print that was taped down with that Post-It type tape? Or with a 1/4" x 1/4" piece of masking tape? Such nonsense always arrives at my door step completely mangled up with substantial film damage.
  

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->If, after a special screening, you are breaking down a print to be used for another screening elsewhere with the understanding the print will be returned to your theatre for its regular run...

++please break the print down properly, in its entirety, as if it was the end of the run!++

The incident involved a sneak preview I ran at a local university, in a changeover-equipped facility (Century "H"s with 1 kw ORC integrated lamphouses) capable of handling twenty-minute reels only. A student government representative had picked up the film from an AMC crapoplex an hour's round-trip drive away from the university. When she arrived with the film, I was astonished at what I found in the trunk: the print, sent on two 6000-foot reels, plus one full shipping reel. I immediately called that AMC house and managed to contact a booth usher and--while struggling to hold back the epithets--told him what they provided was unacceptable and that I was sending the rep back with the film to have it *properly* broken down, with leaders and tails and on shipping reels (I had to make it plain as day!). Almost an hour after the scheduled start I received the print in the correct configuration, inspected the first reel, got it on screen, and inspected the rest of the film on the fly. Urgh! Thank goodness for changeover equipment!

The recommendations in this list are wonderful, especially for those visiting this list just to gather ideas for improving their craft. The thing I worry about, though, is the impossibility of getting this kind of word out to the vast majority of platter jockeys out there. Sigh.

--Jon

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Way back when, reel bands were pretty heavy-duty, not paper-thin. And the strings on them were just that--STRINGS, not thread! Forget it today, the bands are too cheap and flimsy to do the job.

You can't put a reel band on properly today because the thread (I won't dignify it by calling it string) comes unwound anyway, and if you wrap it around the catch as tight as it needs to be, it breaks (either the thread or the catch)!

What happened to the good ol' reel bands, that used to be supplied by that bank? (their name was stamped on all of them) Or the MPE bands?

What was the purpose of the reel band to begin with? Two things, both of which have become lost today: Identification, and, to HOLD THE FILM END DOWN... there was no place for masking tape of any kind on a film print or reel band.

And the band's are not necessarily id'ing the reels or picture anymore; I've seen several prints with blank bands! (And what about the ones that are taped on upside down? HA!)

Today, I don't think you have any choice; the stinkin' reel bands are just strips of paper with a thread stapled to them!

They were pretty serious about it too! If a theatre inspector found that you were running film without these bands, he had the power to lift your license on the spot. It actually happened a few times (not to me though).

I hate it when I have to build/break a print that has 9,000,000 spliced frames at the heads/tails. The film we got last week only had 8 frames between the second (change) cue and the end of the reel AND six of them were spliced and taped!

I have been trying to peel off my splices and splice the reel back together one-sided, lately. But when I get one of those spliced up tails, I often wonder what to do.

Should I take out those 9,000,000 splices and throw them out, or just attach the tail back on to the end of the row? Usually, if it's only one or two frames, I'll chuck 'em but if there are a lot, I worry about tossing out too much of the end of the reels. In the course of a 6-reel print, it can easily add up to more than 24 frames of wastage.

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