But there's a bright side to this story!

Just take a broken plastic reel and break off the center protrusions, so it's a flat disc. Then take two and place them against each other, and then tape them together at the edge in 4 places. Slide the DTS disc jewel cases inbetween and presto!

These kinds of problems were discussed at the Inter-Society meeting held at ShoWest. If you "band-aid" the problems and don't report them, they won't be fixed. Take some photos of the way the print and discs were shipped and report them to the exchange and to the distributor (who actually "owns" the print). Provide details including theatre, play dates, title, and print number, and whether the poor shipping caused any film/disc damage.

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Though as a non-theatrical venue (aka bottom of the food chain), this is a lot more difficult since the system is engineered to prevent us from having any direct contact with the studios (instead we have to funnel all of our interactions through Swank, which is at best a lossy communications path). As such, I prefer to hold out the direct contact cards for real emergencies, because I can only take so much being yelled at.

Those of you who have real contact with your studio buyer/bookers should cherish it, and certainly report this sort of thing.

Still, I will go and report it to TES (as the exchange in question), since that's easy to do, though I don't have high-hopes that such a report will produce anything useful.

For what it's worth, this sort of thing happens all too often at the end of the first run; on our print of Harry Potter this month, our ETS delivery folks reported that they had to go through twenty prints of the movie in order to find one set of DTS discs. (Now, perhaps they really only went through 20 cans, i.e. 20/3==7 prints, but either way it's an alarming statistic.)

--jhawk

Suddenly it's cdrom burning time with the theater in the next town!

I've stacked up many, many of them at just one site here and I'm sure there's going to be a matching stack at the other site.

I'm told that part of the problem is that the disks ship out in separate boxes and the frisbees won't fit in the cans, so they have to send the disks back "naked" (i.e. without putting them in the frisbee).

Anyway...I sent an email to Karen asking her if there's a special place to send them. I've already ordered boxes so they can be packed for shipping.

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And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

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• The previous folks who had the print tossed them in.
  
• The previous folks who had the print lost the discs and they
  have to scrounge to find some, and the ones they find aren't in a wheel.
  

The key element here is "the previous folks who had the print screwed up."

If you're always handling new prints, I suspect you'll never see an issue. I'm sure Brad has a different story to tell though...

Then the other extreme of this is what I saw with STAR WARS EP1 discs -- the cans were of the correct size to hold all seven reels. Somehow it seemed that the DTS caddy as simply crammed into a 3 reel can ALONG WITH 3 REELS! How do they do this?....bang out the sides of the can in hopes they can make enough room for the extra caddy? Needless-to-say, the caddy was cracked. And I am sure it couldn't have been a can that was actually DESIGNED for 3 reels plus the width of a DTS caddy....nope, it was an old, beat up piece of junk, probably as old as the first SW release. So, as I said, this shipping method, unlike putting it in a can with extra room, was to just force-fit it. Extra room?....we don't need no stinkin' extra room! Luckily the discs themselves were not damaged, but give it time....sooner or later some kid is going to try to ram that caddy in the can with a hammer.

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Please, **ALWAYS** feel free to send me an email (I love the photo idea) anytime you get damaged discs. It will help me to correct the situation. I count on you all to alert me as to what you experience and I appreciate all the input.

Posting the audio files is not that simple. The files don't belong to us, they belong to the studio and they hold the copyrights. It also violates our contract with them, that we are the sole providers of those files and that the files only be available on discs that we provide. Any site caught posting DTS audio files would be contacted by our lawyer.

Yes, that does sound like it would be a local ETS issue. I'm kind of curious, do you first-run folks have a good relationship with your ETS depot? It seems that we (and I don't know if this is an ETS/Boston thing, or a non-theatrical thing, or what) always get told "call the studio" if we ever call ETS and ask for anything.

Frank, I don't think things are quite as bad as you seem to indicate. In my experience, metal cans are pretty flexible, and I've never seen a DTS wheel break, unless it was on one of the extreme edges of the can (i.e. not between two reels). Yeah, the cans get dented in both directions. I just take a hammer and dent them (the cans) back in the opposite direction and seems to work just fine...The other variable in can size is when trailers get shoved in them...