The Future is Now

I work for a theatre chain in the Wisconsin area (which will remain nameless). I've been working in the movie theatre business 14 years and have been exclusively in the Booth Projection Services for the last year. I've worked almost every aspect of the business starting from an usher, vendor, projectionist, assistant manager, IT and all around answer guy for odds and ends.

The last year we, as a company, have put fort a push to install Digital cinema in many of our theatres to feed the growing popularity of Digital 3D. With the outstanding success of Avatar we have rolled out another dozen and have even begun work on installing on our very large auditorium screens (70 plus feet wide) to compete with the branded Imax name.

I've worked with Digital cinema for almost 5 years now and have done most of the testing. I've worked with NEC, Sony, Barco projectors and Doremi, Kodak and Dolby servers. They all have their pluses and they all have their minuses. The only thing in common, is that they are all computers.

In the last year installing I've come across several incidents, oops, "you got to be kidding me's" and others of the likes. You can ask my wife how many weekend days I had to leave to go fix a projector and didn't call until almost dinner to say it will be a little more. During this time I've noticed a few things.

1. The errors usually have almost nothing to do with the aliment.
   
2. The diagnosis usually is out of left field. Ranging from hardware replacement to just turning a little pot to turn up the voltage, to even just installing a "secret" firmware upgrade. Which brings me to my 3rd..
   
3. NO one is really sharing information. It seems you have to ask extra special nicely about a certain fix to get the answer. Not very good sharing or communication. I've seen alot in less then a year.

Now that brings us to this blog. Many of my coworkers and associates have talked on how there is no common place for us to exchange information. Outside of us forwarding e-mails to each other or passing along a tidbit over the phone or handing off a USB stick with programs we got from someone else. There really wasn't a forum to document our wacky adventures.

So I want to have this blog to type in my journal of incidents and fixes. I'm hoping that some of my associates also contribute to this as well.

If you have any questions or comments. Please feel free to e-mail me at gothamx.majewski@gmail.com.