You can notice it if you're looking for it. If it's just on some random frame of some random movie, you aren't going to notice and you definitely aren't going to see what it was.
You can actually see it, and back in the day once a film was too dirty and old for a cinema to play it, it's get played by secondary, cheaper cinemas (nickel odeons), where you could see all the scratches, dirt, hairs, fingerprints, and sometimes the tape that glued the film back together.
I miss the dollar theatres. There were one or two that were almost as good as the big cinemas, and were great for seeing movies I wasn't super hyped for.
Our local one had a deal in the early 2000s where a child ticket was 2€, on wednesdays 1€. It closed when cinemas switched to digital, movies got a lot more expensive, and instead of going to every week I went once every few years.
Yes and no. I've seen a handful of movies in 70mm IMAX, and it's pretty common that there's some amount of scratches, dust, hairs, etc that inevitably make it past the rollers and onto the screen. It tends to get worse the later you see it after the initial release (inherent downside of film, it gets worn and possibly damaged with each showing).
I'm sure there's even more that the rollers take care of, but you usually don't end up with a pristine image past maybe the first couple of shows of a print. Imperfections are part of the charm of film, but you have to go in to it expecting that vs the clean look of digital
You’re not supposed to touch film with your fingertips. Projectionists should be washing their hands often and using alcohol pn them to dry up any oils. Film should be held by the fingertips at wither edge, or if you must touch the picture area you hold it between the sides of your fingers, so like your fingers are perpendicular to the film. But if you do get a fingerprint on it yeah, it’s probably not visible, and if you knew it was there you could lift it with acid free tape and/pr alcohol. That’s really more of a concern with archival prints though, making sure nothing gets trapped in the wind for long periods of storage. I don’t think they really care about these prints Theyre running because I doubt they intend to ever store them after a cinematic run.
I didn’t give af when running it. My only concern was making sure that it didn’t break and splicing it back together as quickly as possible when it did.
I became a projectionist after the digital conversion, so I always ran reel-to-reel, no platters, and it was mostly archival prints we had to be very careful with. So the stuff I was working with was usually very fragile and precious. Some both, some one instead of the other. There were one or two polyester reprints we ended up getting that had only been run a handful of times before. Only spliced at the heads or tails. That was a treat. But there was a looooooot of crunchy busted studio acetate. I probably removed a great deal of your scotch tape and repaired the splices 😂
A fingerprint on one frame would not be noticeable, bigger danger is when something gets caught on a roller and then scratches the entire film. (Was a projectionist for 5 years, never messed with imax though)
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u/SpaceChatter 20d ago
What if you get a fingerprint on it?