Jack Toye, marketing manager at the Cambridge Picturehouse, made his way to the projection room at the Edinburgh Filmhouse to speak to the resident head of tech David Boyd, who’s worked with Filmhouse and the Edinburgh Film Festival for eight years. David shares a cultural heritage with the Picturehouse crew, having previously worked with the NFT in London and the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton!

Jack Toye: What do we have here in this projection room that cinema goers in Cambridge might recognise, and what’s different?

David Boyd: Well, the first thing they’ll recognise is the digital projector in the corner, but over here, we have a pair of 70mm and 35mm projectors. They’re capable of both formats.

JT: We’ve only got one 70mm projector in the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge. These look slightly different to our model?

DB: Your one is made by Cinemeccanica, but ours are the original deal. When 70mm was invented, it was called Todd-AO, so it was Mike Todd and American Opticals. Philips got together with them and invented the projector. This projector in fact is the only projector that ever got an Oscar.

JT: Wow!

DB: Yes really, so it’s called the Philips DP70. Everybody else then got on the bandwagon and started to make their own 70mm projectors. But that’s the history of our projectors, it’s a universal projector for 70mm and 35mm prints. This was brought about in 1955, and they made them until the mid-1960s.

JT: So this is a 1950s projector?

DB: 1958, these ones. These have the 35mm gate in at the moment, but you can easily remove it and put the 70mm gate in. You have magnetic audio, which was intended to be much better than the normal optical audio. You also have other things like Dolby Digital and DTS (at the top of the projector). We can lace the print through anything really.

“It looks a bit like something out of 1970s Doctor Who with Jon Pertwee…”

JT: Are you similar to us in the Arts Picturehouse in that you get most of your 70mm prints from the National Media Museum in Bradford?

DB: No, they can come from anywhere. Could be from Warners, Fox, whoever owns the prints really. We’d run them on reels with changeovers, so the projectors are basically identical.

JT:S o we’re now looking down through the portholes into Filmhouse 1, which is the biggest screen here?

DB: Yes, it’s the largest one we have here, with 280 seats. Now have rebuilt these projectors ourselves: mechanically, electronically and all the rest of it. So nowadays with cyan soundtracks you need to have a different kind of reader on them (red light rather than white light). The other thing we’ve done is to rebuilt the motor drive, to give it a multi-speed capability for silent films. The projectors are designed with a set of belts and pulleys, but when you change these belts and pulleys, all it does is give you fixed speeds, which are no use if your silent film is running at, say 19.5 fps. So what we do is run the machine, at 24fps.

JT: To describe this process to our readers, there’s a familiar whirring sound as the projector kicks into action. It looks a bit like something out of 1970s Doctor Who with Jon Pertwee, there’s a digital read-off dial and a big knob which David can twist to adjust the frames per second. That’s very swanky.

DB: When you run a silent film, there’s no other way to check the speed than to run the film, look at the screen, and turn the dial until it looks right. There’s no other reference point that really works as far as I’m concerned.

JT: Until it looks like Buster Keaton is walking at the correct speed on the screen right?

DB: Yes, and it could be any speed, even if someone advises you that “this film runs at such and such a speed”. I wouldn’t trust it till I’ve looked at it visually.

JT: Is that the same rule of thumb as aspect ratio? Look for the clock on the screen, and check if it looks like a true circle?

DB: Hummmm, aspect ratios are something else. They’re all subject to themselves. When you depart from Academy Ratio, which we did in 1952, from that point onwards you need to be quite careful about which aspect ratio you’re dealing with.

JT: Did you enjoy THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL for its multiple aspect ratio changes?

DB: That was alright. It sort of pops in and out within its own frame. You could let it get on with itself. The way that we work here, we say what was the year of production, what was the country of production? If it’s 1955 and it’s Europe, it’s probably this. If United States, it’s probably that.

JT: These are the days before companies like Apple with their standardised devices which work on all their products?

DB: Correct, there’s all sorts of ways of getting it wrong.

JT: So if we turn around, away from the portholes and projectors, we have all the bits and bobs needed to fix projectors and splice film?

DB: Yes, but the next bit of kit you want to see is the equipment next to our 70mm projectors. We’ve got a theatre management system (TMS). And this kit is the first point of ingesting for our DCPs (digital film format for cinema). We then send the files over to the screens overnight, as the screens are busy in the day playing films. When you’re running films, the individual servers for each screen don’t really like to ingest anything, it slows them down. We have an 11tb store for films attached to the TMS.

JT: Now we’ve moving over to the other side of the projection booth, in front of the digital projector, to a rack that’s about 8ft high, filled with lots of interesting looking bits of hardware.

DB: This is where we have alternative content like beta tapes, DVD, or even a laptop plugged in. There are also various patch fields for video and audio in this rack. If somebody is using a laptop from a stage, we can send it down to a different screen, or onstage intros and Q&As. We have monitors which allow us to look into different screens from up here in projection too. It’s not good enough, in my view, to have a TMS which tells you a film is running. I want to know that it’s running and I want to be able to see it and hear it – which we can do from here. Over here (walking across to the centre of the room) is where we make the DCP’s. This is the part which costs the money – this is £70,000 worth of equipment. It’s called DVS Clipster, and is made by Rohde & Schwarz. It’s what the film labs around the world use to make DCPs. So Technicolour, MPS, Arts Alliance and Deluxe all use, or used to use this equipment. The reason it costs so much money is that it’s very, very powerful, flexible and fast. If you want to make a DCP at home, with open software, it will take ages. You can’t put a film festival’s worth of films through it fast enough. So we have to get 100 hours through it in a couple of weeks, which you can’t do unless it works fast.

JT: So this bit of kit is the DCP beast of the industry?

DB: Well in numbers, if I were to send 100 hours’ worth of video to London to a lab, it would cost me £100,000 a year. So it made financial sense to buy one for here, and do the work ourselves.

JT: So you have Clipster on this computer here which is the software speaking to all this hardware around you and helps make the DCP. I think you’re known here in Filmhouse for distributing content, which hasn’t previously been digitalised before – like the “Children on Film” season, and the “Martin Scorsese Presents” Polish Cinema season.

DB: Yep, that’s a bit of what we do here. Anybody who’s run editing software would be able to pick it up very quickly.

JT: I’m very impressed to see the Blackadder and Fawlty Towers books by the computer too! Vital to your operation here?

DB: We call it the Good Book or Testament. It helps us keep a sense of place when it gets quite stressful. So a DCP you’ll know, could be up to 100gb in size, so you’ve got to put that somewhere. And that somewhere is over here (walks to another 8ft-high rack, next to the 70mm projectors. This is a large network-attached storage system, which is about 48tb here. The DCPs end up on here. When they’re on here we can distribute them onto drives.

JT: I recognise these boxes from the Arts Picturehouse. They’re about 7” long, and normally contain and old-fashioned looking hard drive inside right?

DB: These are 500gb, and we slot them into this network. We can ingest off drives we receive, and we can also send content onto drives we want to distribute from this storage system. The DCP has to get out there somehow, and if someone sends us a file to distribute as a DCP, we need to make a safety copy first. If anything happens to the drive, if it gets dropped, or gets set on fire- all of these things have happened in the past – we need to be able to send out another copy from our back-up here. So one set of guys here are making DCPs from source material, and another set of guys are ingesting DCPs which have been sent into the festival.

JT: What’s the size of your team like here?

DB: We’re a team of four.

JT: And you’re doing this work year round with that team?

DB: Yes. So in the NFT in London, they have sixteen. I have four.

… can we say that we do 35mm so infrequently that we lose the staff and then do a bad job of it?

JT: In terms of team size in the UK, are you the second largest projection team after the BFI’s?

DB: I don’t know. I wouldn’t use the word large at all to be honest. When we receive a film for the festival, we’ll ingest it, and then we’ll validate it on the TMS. If it passes the validation, it’s fine, we hope – until it gets seen on screen, then you’ve got the KDM to unlock. If it doesn’t pass the validation, it’ll go to Clipster, which will do a full validation. And if it still doesn’t work, we can bust it apart and repair it manually in Clipster and re-wrap it.

JT: For readers who may not know, a KDM is a password encrypting the KDM, which will unlock it on a certain day at a certain time.

DB: If it’s encrypted , yes, the distributor can control where and when the file is opened.

JT: Back in the “glory days” of 35mm, you could get the new print of say, Star Wars, and have a secret staff screening the night before the release and no-one was to know any better.

DB: Now it’s all controlled. It’s called RSA Encryption. It’s asymmetrical. Anyone who’s interested, look it up. The Brits invented it. The Americans took the credit for it. It’s the sort of encryption that the banks use. When storage system is full, which it will be by the end of the festival, we empty it onto LTO Tapes.

JT: These look like chunky mini-discs from back in the day.

DB: Yep, they’re big fat tapes and this is what broadcasters use. What you’ve got in this projection room therefore is something where you’ve got your hand on the film straight away, you’ve got a medium-term storage solution, which would involve some transferring of film, and you’ve got a cold store, which doesn’t involve any spinning discs or anything, but would take you longer to retrieve the film from.

JT: So this final draw essentially looks like a safe, where you may have lost property stored, but for you it’s films for the festival and beyond. How quickly does it take you to fill up one of those drawers with films?

DB: We fill one drawer per year. We also have one more bit of kit, behind this rack which you can’t see. It’s a little PC linked to the storage unit by a fibre optic cable. We can use this to download content sent last minute to us over the internet, should we need to in an emergency. We did a feature film on this the other week, which was 146gb, and it took 5.24 hours.

JT: That’s better on waiting for FedEx and Parcel Force to deliver a new hard drive right?

DB: Yes, it’s worth trying to use this option, just in case.

JT: I’ve found this a really fascinating insight into how another film festival works behind the scenes compared to the Cambridge Film Festival. It’s great to compare and contrast operating practices. I wondered what your thoughts are being a Chief Projectionist in 2015 in the UK? You’re in a very fortunate position to have ended up here in Filmhouse I suspect?

DB: I can’t really speak for the industry in 2015, as I’m in a niche end of it, which is arthouse repertory – totally different to the commercial side. The two sides only ever shared one thing – which was that we showed the same type of technical film format. In commercial, when you go digital, which they’ve done, you don’t really need any staff to run it. In our world, we’re more proactive with the programming, so you need to be able to cater for different formats. With that being the case, you then need to be able to run 35mm, 16mm film. Things need a bit closer attention.

JT: So the job of the “classic” projectionist we can imagine, that will survive in rep cinemas like Filmhouse in Edinburgh and the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, but there’s not much chance of them coming back in multiplexes?

DB: I think you’re right to say that. You could say to me, how can you justify keeping your staff of four on if you only show 35mm once in a while? I would say, can we say that we do 35mm so infrequently that we lose the staff and then do a bad job of it? Therefore, in order to keep the skills of the projectionist, and to keep the product looking good on the screen and to keep a proactive programme, you need to hold onto the staff. How do you do that? I’m saying here, you keep them on board by giving them a whole load of other things to do the year round, like we do here in Filmhouse.

JT: As fellow workers in the film industry, we all know that when you start to take certain people away from their jobs, it makes it harder for everyone left in work to do their jobs.

DB: In a place like Filmhouse, we have the Clipster running all year around, we have a commercial operation with it, making DCPs for people who can’t afford to pay for them at a commercial rate. That keeps my staff busy, and keeps them on the books. It’s win-win-win.

JT: I couldn’t agree more! Thank you so much for letting me up into you projection room, and I wish you all the best for the rest of the festival.

DB:Thanks very much Jack. I’ve got some great guys up here making it all happen.