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Topic: Miramax Moving To ETS?
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-10-2004 06:03 PM
Of course, trashed prints are the responsibility of the previous theatre. However, the depot isn't blameless, either. They shouldn't be sending out prints at random for second-run and repertory engagements. Instead, they should spot-check prints as they are returned from first-run houses and prints from theatres which have a history of print damage should be the first to be shredded. The prints from houses which have a history of returning prints in good condition should be the ones that are saved for future engagements. In this way, intelligent film depots can reduce the chances that second-run houses will receive inferior prints. I don't know if this actually happens, however.
Obviously, full inspection of every print (along with bills sent to theatres which cause damage) would be ideal, but that appears to be unlikely to happen for mainstream titles. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
For what it's worth, I have received prints from ETS depots in Landover, MD. and Salem, MA. and both seem to be about equal to Technicolor as far as print quality, so I'm assuming that all three are simply sending out prints at random. Other than ETS having better reels and TES having reel bands for all prints (not just 10-year-old ones), I haven't noticed much difference between depots. I've never gotten a totally unplayable print and I've replaced three reels in six years (two ETS, one TES).
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John Hawkinson
Film God
Posts: 2273
From: Cambridge, MA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 01-10-2004 06:28 PM
I've talked to TES about their integrity check process recently, so I have some hard information.
It turns out that TES's "integrity check" (IC) in fact involves having a human being look at the first twenty feet of each reel, counting after the splice (so twenty feet of actual projected film, not counting leader). Prints that have damage are supposed to be rejected. They only look at the end of the reel that is out, so it is not consistently heads or tails that are inspected.
As I understand it, they are pretty religious about doing these checks (i.e. they always happen when a print leaves the depot, except if a the print iscircuitted directly from another theatre) but the criteria applied during the checks is less tightly controlled. And, if there are no more prints available, well, there's not much they can do without the studio making more.
Anyhow, so to recap, Bill's statement "neither ETS or Technicolor does more than warehouse & ship prints, the condition of your used print is the luck of the draw" is incorrect. I don't know what ETS's inspection policies are, but TES always does the IC inspection, regardless of studio (they have a "full inspection" option that studios can pay for). Obviously ETS can get replacements to many theatres faster than TES (i.e. less than one day) because of their distributed vs. centralized model.
As for Scott's comments on frequency of replacement, I guess it depends on where you are in the food chain. Down here at the bottom (non-theatrical), I'll give you our stats for this fall, from August through December. We had 4 replacements out of 11 prints for TES (36%), and also 4 replacements out of 16 prints ETS (25%). That only counts prints we actually replaced, as opposed to those perhaps we should have but were too busy to deal with the hassle or logistics/timing made it infeasable.
--jhawk
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Vernon Cramer
Film Handler
Posts: 16
From: Virginia Beach, VA, USA
Registered: Mar 2002
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posted 01-11-2004 06:27 PM
Sorry to hear another studio is shifting to ETS. We are non-theatrical and the shipping costs for us are higher for prints from ETS than TES. Overall, the print quality control through TES has been better than with ETS. We've had prints arrive from the Landover, MD ETS depot with film ends not secured (on more than one print we've had to pull all the reels out at once because the film was so badly tangled up you couldn't get just one reel out), leaders missing or heads & tails switched, one print that was missing a reel, plus a fair number of broken reels. In spite of these annoyances, the condition of the prints has been very good to excellent.
In contrast, we've had far fewer problems with prints that shipped from TES, although we've had a couple of prints (both Universal titles) that were more worn than we typically get (got to see film-guard really do an incredible job cleaning up a heavily scratched print of Bourne Identity). In over 2 years we've actually only had one significant problem with a print from TES. They shipped a mag-only SP print of Fantasia (labelled "archive print" with heads and tails still attached) when we had requested the 1990 reissue. Between Swank and TES we had the correct print in hand (and a good one) in a couple of days, still way ahead of the showdate.
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