Lab decides that Dolby Digital is too much work for the last minute?

[Jim Cassedy]

WoW! I've never seen that before! Usually, when there's a 'lab error' during the last minute
or so on a print it's been because it has somehow gotten light-struck, or gotten stuck in the
processor 'soup' causing over-development and/or color shifts. I've noticed there seems to
be an increase in 35mm film-stuff done on a Cinevator. I've had at least 3 in the past month.

[Brad Miller]

There was likely some major problem at the end of the reel that failed QC, so rather than junk the entire reel they slugged in replacement footage and in the process simply didn't catch that there was no SRD track. I've received a random entire reel in a print with no SRD where they forgot to turn the light on during printing. I'm sure it was nothing more than an accident, but since the theater that played it in 2014 didn't say anything...here it is now.

Remember also most theaters still running film in 2014 were small independent theaters scraping by. They probably didn't have digital sound anyway so it didn't even affect them.

[David Ferguson]

I was playing through a film I just got, and all was well, until suddenly the DA20 reverted back to analog unexpectedly. The track had been reading healthy so I wound it back to inspect where it reverted, and found the following shown in the image. Yep, that would cause a reversion all right!

IMG_3203.jpg

You'll see that there is a lab ultrasonic splice, and then suddenly, no more Dolby Digital track! If this was a tape splice I'd assume it was another theatre/collector who had spliced together two prints, but given its a lab splice, this is much more unlikely. Also, this is a 2014 print, so all prints would have had Dolby Digital anyway.

Even more unusually, this print was created on a Cinevator (the digital file direct to positive print film machine), which prints the SRD directly on the film, rather than a separate audio negative.

Any guesses how this could have happened? This splice is agonizingly close to the end of the reel - only 26 seconds away - so there's only 26 seconds of footage that is missing Dolby Digital. Which is a bit annoying, but I'll get over it. Perhaps re-syncing up the Dolby CA-10 (the Dolby device used in labs to print the Dolby Digital track) for the last few seconds was "too much effort"?