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I got these aluminium stickers from a place where they used to have Bauer automation from around the 1970's. There is no way you could have hidden these; they are 1 cm wide and up to 7 cm long.
If, you're working in a film archive and this is the first time you've encountered this, you should consider yourself a lucky man!
Archives tend not to preserve significant numbers of release prints, and if they do, not relatively recent ones (that would be most likely to have automation tape on them). If there is a curatorial reason for doing so (e.g. original IB print from 1938 in good condition) they will, but a release print is at least three generations removed from the camera original, and so not ideal preservation material. I'm not surprised that even an experienced archivist is encountering this for the first time. Hopefully it'll be possible to get them off non-destructively, possibly by careful peeling and then ultrasonically cleaning the reel to get rid of any adhesive residue.
The polite way to apply foil cue tapes (or the UA barcode cues) was to put down clear splicing tape first, than apply the cue on top of the tape. When you broke down the print you would remove it, leaving no indication that a cue had been applied. And if you used the Kelmar dot cues, place it on the frame line so it was not visible in matted formats.
Most of the systems I encountered used a single proximity detector lined up with the centreline of the film, in combination with an automation controller. The strip of cue tape was usually placed in the frame line across the film. Apart from its other vices, the adhesive on the cue foil was so tough it was almost impossible to remove the foil from the film afterwards. I would leave the backing paper on the foil and hold it in place on the film with a strip of clear splicing tape, which worked fine and made it very easy to remove the cue after the run.
With the cue tape placed along the frame line it was invariably visible on screen to some extent - usually appearing as a black flash top and bottom of succesive frames. Around one of the local circuits the opertors had a kind of competition among themselves as to where the foils could be hidden within a particular scene to make them less distracting - which impressed me as a creative effort to try to make the best of a sadly flawed system. These were not old-timers, they were young men who had come up through the system well after the management regime of de-skilling of the projection room took hold.
It was pretty trivial to change the positioning of those single cue detectors that read down the centerline of the film to read the inboard edge. Then if you used Neumade cue tape (not the total garbage sold under every other brand), it would look like this when you finished. No wrap-around to make the image shift in the gate, no double-thickness kicking up dust and dirt as it passed by and touched the pad rollers, no interference with the image or sound (not even SDDS), and even after over a thousand plays, it would still pull off without any residue at all.
The only problem is, most theaters couldn't be bothered to spend the extra dollar to get the quality Neumade cue tape. Then again most theaters couldn't be bothered to get the quality Neumade splicing tape either. They used all of those other awful brands that always left nasty residue over time. (Neumade tape will still pull off cleanly 30+ years later and is stronger than all other tapes as well.)
Isn't it amazing how your talk a bit about some cue foil on a FILM print and the posts get animated and folks have a barrel full of "I remember when" stories that bring back great memories or scary memories, but memories that just want to bubble up out to tell. I wonder what will animate anyone in future generations about what kind of hard drives they encountered or problems with DCPs or some really interesting issues with a KDMs...probably NOT.
Isn't it amazing how your talk a bit about some cue foil on a FILM print and the posts get animated and folks have a barrel full of "I remember when" stories that bring back great memories or scary memories, but memories that just want to bubble up out to tell. I wonder what will animate anyone in future generations about what kind of hard drives they encountered or problems with DCPs or some really interesting issues with a KDMs...probably NOT.
I'm sure my projectionists will be recounting how my key troubleshooting guide helped them determine that the public key hash listed in the KDM didn't match the media block for generations!
As long as this topic has been jump-started again, There were a few of these cue-stickers
on a 35mm print I ran last week. There were a couple on the leader of the 1st reel, and
there were several more on the last reel. This one was at the very end, if I recall.
The bar-code & ID number were different on each sticker. (of course they were!) I was
running change-overs and they didn't really bother me much so I just left them in place.
I don't know which system these were for, but I'm sure somebody can identify them.
There were several cue stickers on the last reel.
Whoever placed them at least managed to put them
over "dark space" between credits so as not to be too
visually obvious on screen. I think this was the very
last cue-sticker at the end of the last reel. CueSticker.jpg
(Applied to BASE side of film)
I remember seeing these on reels from the early nineties or so, I think it was either AMC or United Artists that fooled around with it, and I remember reading about it in Boxoffice. As I recall It was a laser scan system much like a supermarket bar code scanner, and you assigned different show events to different number stickers. Can't remember who made it though. I always peeled them off and cleaned the residual gunk off as well.
The old Cruzett proximity switches required about a 3" long piece of 1/2" tape to operate properly
I can't remember who, but one of the automation companies, possibly Kelmar fixed that issue by adding a electronic cue stretcher circuit in all their automation. Then you only needed a tiny dot of cue tape.
That is the United Artists barcode automation system. Kelmar built them. The initial scanners weren't too great, but the later "B" version with the visible red light scanner absolutely never missed. That being said it always infuriated me when some UA guy would put the stickers directly onto the film because as you will find, they DO NOT COME OFF. By the time you pick at it and use lighter fluid or the solvent of your choice, you have in all likelihood created all sorts of little scratches in that foot of film you fought to remove the sticker from. All that had to be done was to lay a piece of splicing tape down and then put the barcode on top, but most lazy UA projectionists just couldn't be bothered.
I always flipped the scanner's mounting around and set it up so it scanned the analog track on the emulsion side. I would then place the edge of the sticker in alignment with where the dts timecode would be and punch it with the splicer (with half of the barcode being discarded off the edge of the film. If the sticker is placed on the emulsion side, it stays put just fine, but can be removed with relative ease (unlike when it is on the base side). With digital sound it also meant those cues passed without anyone having the slightest hint that they were there since they were not visible on screen in any way. The only time it made any difference was if for some oddball reason we ran an analog-only print, there would be a brief blip in the analog audio at the lights up cue for the end credits, but that happened maybe once or twice in several years.
At least whoever put that sticker on did it correctly with the code OPPOSITE the soundtrack. As you can see when it is centered on the picture, the actual barcode itself becomes centered on the 35mm width of the film. Idiot UA projectionists would often reverse that orientation so the "19" number you see in the photo above was next to the optical soundtrack, and that meant if the scanner was slightly off alignment it would miss reading the cue. I never figured out why they didn't just make the stickers wider to cover the entire width of the picture area though, as that would increase the chance of a cue never missing if the reader got knocked out of exact alignment.
If you hook up 555 timer in monostable mode and use a 1,000 µF capacitor with a 100 KΩ potentiometer you'll get an adjustable debouncer that can stretch an input pulse from 0 to 10 seconds.
We used to be able to go to Radio Shack and buy that stuff then have it built and working in the span of a Saturday afternoon.
Dolby also toyed with a barcode type of automation at one point. I think the idea was the release prints would carry a barcode that would be read for the proper sound format.
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