Some friends and I saw Pirates in one of the big theaters on Wednesday afternoon - the 1:00pm showing; 8 people in a theater for 400 people; it was great.
We observed a number of problems with the screening, most of which were fairly obvious the source of the difficulties. However, there was one issue that, with one screening of one print, we are unable to diagnose with any certainty, so I am soliciting some eye-witness testimony from other viewers of other prints who can provide some additional clues toward tracking down the problem we saw.
Now, as you may note, I'm tacking around the issue; I'm not trying to give away the problem so as to pollute the response pool just yet. I'll embed a brief description of the problem I'm looking for later in the spoiler block below. For those who have not yet seen this film, do take a good look at the request, but perhaps not the spoiler block.
The Request:
Think carefully about the end credit scroll. Apart from being rather long with a lot of names (a rather tremendous number of names, actually,) in fairly small print, think about the credits themselves.
Typically, during a long sequence such as this, projection gate "bob and weave" -- the image shifting between frames within the gate left, right, up, or down, is most obvious - the only place more obvious is on a high-contrast still image, where any motion is a discrepancy.
Apart from the normal bob-and-weave, were there any other... anomalies about the end credits?
Spoiler:
In the print we saw, the scrolling credits actually appeared as a "double image," where each bit of moving text had an equal-brightness second line of text, vertically offset by ~6%, but perfectly in-line horizontally. (For example, in a word-processor, plant a line of 10 point type. Copy it, and paste it on the next line, but reduce the leading between lines until the base-line of the second line is 0.6 points below the base-line of the first line.)
Most telling, we thought, was that the final 'credit' line - "distributed by buena-vista pictures" had the artifact until it slowed to a stop at center-screen.
Please respond to this plea in-thread, and, I would recommend embedding responses in the spoiler tag so as to protect other viewers from accidental contamination. For those who do not know how, this is done by the command code: (spoiler) and (/spoiler) to turn it off, except actually using square brackets - [ and ] instead of parentheses.
I've seen the film twice and sat through the credits, but I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. I was able to read the names just fine, but I can't say with any confidence that there's nothing wrong with them. Just nothing that jumped out. The only issue I really had was that during my first screening on Sunday, the Jack dream sequence was unusually dirty with tons of black specs everywhere - so much so that I figured it may have been applied by the filmmakers intentionally. I saw it again today and this scene was pretty clean.
I never saw anything like that - they looked normal, anfd I certainly would have noticed something like that.
I'm trying to imagine it, and (while I have no idea about projection in cinema, or whether this would even be possible) it almost sounds like the cinema were showing two frames simultaneously - that would explain why it vanished as soon as the "Distributed by.." credit came to a stop.
AFI Top 100 lists: 100 Movies, 100 Thrills - Completed 100 Laughs - 24 to go - last seen: The Freshman 100 Passions - 39 to go - last seen: Breakfast At Tiffany's 100 Heroes & Villains - 10 to go - last seen: Tom Powers in The Public Enemy 100 Songs - 45 to go - last seen: "Moon River" from Breakfast At Tiffany's 100 Quotes - 19 to go - last seen: "Toga! Toga!" in Animal House 100 Years of Film Scores - 3 to go - last seen: How the West Was Won 100 Cheers - 43 to go - last seen: Philadelphia
TOTAL (458 movies) - 145 to go - My AFI movie list here.
That's the thing; most of the gang I was with, while not projectionists ourselves, have a fair amount of the technical/engineering background in theater operations, and are having a hard time coming up with a plausible explanation for what was happening.
The best we could come up with was that the "exit loop" - the one down-stream from the projection gate - had failed or got just a little too short, and the film in the gate was getting jerked just a little bit, but given our experience, that specific failure mode seemed unlikely. Plus, if it was doing that, when the "distributed by" credit came to a stop, it should have been a double-image there, too.
I was speculating that whoever had rendered the credit roll had done something mind-bogglingly stupid and had checked the "Motion Blur" check-box in whatever render package they used for the credits.
(Actually, on a side note, I was pleasently surprised at how readable the credits were, in spite of the double-imaging; the font, spacing, et cetera were a quite nice design for the most part.)
Anyway, since others (so far) are not seeing it, I'm having to go back to something idiosyncratic about the projector I watched it on.
Sounds like travel ghosting- the shutter isn't timed perfectly, or in some cases may be too small for the projector it's installed in. This will cause this effect usually noticeable on any white-on-black material.
Actually, I noticed that the credits were shimmering a bit, almost like a dvd with noise reduction. I even commented to the person I went with if they saw it and they did. The credits would be bright and then alternate dark. Weird.
