What is the definition of a home cinema ?

[Steve Lee]

For me the last cinema that I worked in, the number one screen had a magnificent pair of silver festoon curtains that were sixty foot wide. I had taken it upon myself to rewire the top and bottom lighting battens so that both of them had eight separate circuits. Fortunately we had a control desk that could be programmed to do a slow crossfade, which meant the audience was being entertained from the moment they walked through to doors, by watching the curtains slowly crossfade, rather than looking at a plain pair a curtains.

I would always choose appropriate pre show music to suit that particular film, even if this was a one off screening.
On the occasion of a long run big hit film, I would stop between the ads/trailers and the future, allowing time for the audience to take to their seats. and in doing so would find a particular track.

I will use Titanic as an example. I had found a wonderful version of the song "beyond the sea" ( Bobby Darin), that had been used in the film Funny Bones. It was perfect, the right length and appropriate subject.
Knowing the projector and how long it took to get up to speed, I would lace the leader in the gate on number 8, and would wait for the display on the CD player to hit -28 secs and then hit the start button. This meant that the last second of the track corresponded with the fadeout of the certificate on the screen, without cutting the last note off.
As the film was in scope I would on this split second hit the masking button, allowing the masking to chase the screen curtains back, opening up the scope screen to the Fox fanfare at the same time as the tab lights fade out.
Doing all of this meant the presentation looked fluid, as if somebody cared, and I did. Most of the time it was meet with a round of applause.
And it is then you know you have done your job right.

But you are right Chip, it's all about showmanship.

[Ed Gordon]

Here is an example of showmanship from the 1960's. United Artists sent detailed instructions on how to present the 70mm "roadshow" version of West Side Story:

For the proper presentation, please follow these directions:

1. From the start mark the first 28 feet of the reel is black. Over this, from the surround horns only, comes the sound of 3 separate whistles.

The first whistle starts at 121/2 feet. At this point the curtains should be opened slowly and the house lights lowered by 25%. Since the time required for opening curtains varies from theatre to theatre it must be timed so that these operations are completed by the time the overture design fades in at 28 feet.

NOTE: If any of the house lights are directed on the screen, it is necessary that these lights go out completely by 28 feet or they will wash out the design when it is projected on the screen.

2. At 414 feet from the start mark, when the red color dissolves to the blue, the house lights should be dimmed completely or to the level at which the picture will play. This operation must be completed by the time the title WEST SIDE STORY starts to appear on the screen.

It is most important that the opening is handled in this fashion. If it is not, if the house lights are dimmed all the way at the beginning, the audience will expect the actual picture to start much sooner than it does.

If the opening design is played with the house lights well up the audience will accept the music for what it is—the overture.

Please be good enough not to start closing the curtains with the appearance of The End" title on the screen. There are still 5 minutes of end "credits" to be shown before the picture is completed.

Technical Information bulletin for West Side Story.pdf

[Paul Adsett]

Great to know that level of showmanship is still practiced in many home cinema's such as Chip's and Ed's, but forget it at the local multiplex!

[Dave Bickford]

In the late 1970’s when I was a young teen, I painted a 4’x8’ sheet of smooth paneling white and nailed it to a wall in a spare room. I even stapled some multi-colored Christmas lights around the screen for ambiance before the show. Viewers had to sit on folding chairs or a beanbag chair or even the floor. That was my home cinema back in the day. Projected many a film on that screen with my cheap GAF projector. I thought it was awesome back then, but I would aim much higher than that today! 😀

[Ed Gordon]

That was awesome Dave. As a teenager, you had more showmanship than today's megaplex managers.

To paraphrase Fred Allen:

You can take all the showmanship in the current movie exhibition business, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a megaplex manager's heart.

[Brian Fretwell]

I'm sure the back garden (commercial) cinema that has been resurrected in the Black Country Living Museum has more showmanship than those.

[Mike Newell]

Remember the collector who had 5 or 6 sets of motorised curtains vertical and horizontal on Armchair Odeons. I struggled with one.

[Alan Myers]

In the late 1970’s when I was a young teen, I painted a 4’x8’ sheet of smooth paneling white and nailed it to a wall in a spare room. I even stapled some multi-colored Christmas lights around the screen for ambiance before the show. Viewers had to sit on folding chairs or a beanbag chair or even the floor. That was my home cinema back in the day. Projected many a film on that screen with my cheap GAF projector. I thought it was awesome back then, but I would aim much higher than that today! 😀

This sounds perfectly fine to me Dave, as I said, screen one end, a projector on a table the other, thats all you need. Your still showing a film, not projecting a digital image.

[Steve Lee]

Thank you for your responses.

To start with I think this depends where you live in the world. Over in the U.S you refer to this as going to a "Movie Theatre" and yet this is referred to throughout Europe as going to a "Cinema" and no matter what language this is translated into throughout Europe it comes back as "Cinema".
But this changes when you enter the "Home Entertainment" world. A "home theatre" and a "home cinema" are referred to as totally different entities, and yet they are exactly the same thing, and why this is I do not know.

Back in the late 80s I had at home a 80" Sony front projection CRT television. I was lucky to have this at this time, and was only able to acquire this due to the company that I worked for was upgrading, and they allowed me to purchase this for a reasonable price. I think to the average household at this time it would have been a thing of dreams, due to its original high price ticket. But I never ever referred to this as a "home cinema" it was nothing more than a very large television.
Even back then I always looked at a "home cinema/theatre" as being a dedicated room where you projected film, as you would do in a cinema. Hence the phrase "home cinema", and was something I never would have dreamed that I would one day have.

Then in the 90s when laserdisc was given a new lease of life, thanks to Pioneer, We had a wonderful array of movie titles, and in most cases these had to be remastered for this format. It may have not caught on as Pioneer was hoping for, but it did give us one thing. That was the opportunity for the first time in our homes to watch movies presented in their original correct ratios. All of the publications on the subject at the time focused on televisions, even though there was home projectors available at this time, none of them ever got a mention.

We move into the 2000s with the advent of digital, which brings another opportunity to have a cinema in your home. Yes a 4k projector is a wonderful thing and does look like you are watching 70mm, as the image is not being blown up to a scale of a commercial cinema. But still doesn't have that magic and excitement of projecting film.
I always wondered why the company Texas Instruments dropped off the radar in the early 90s, as it seemed that everything you picked up in the 80s had their name on it. We now know they were focused on developing DLP projection.

30 years ago when we went to see a movie, we all knew what we were going to see. The image projected onto the screen had a look all of it's own. We are now using the same cameras and post production to produce movies as we are for television, there is no difference any more and that is sad.

Years ago I had the opportunity by chance to see the film Casablanca, at what was the Empire Leicester square London. To see this film on that massive screen with an audience that appreciated it was an amazing experience, and made me look at this film in a different way.
I recently purchased a copy on blu ray and after 5 minutes had to turn it off, I could not watch it.
It seems films from this generation like Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon ect, it is the actual physical film stock that plays an integral part of the movie. The grittiness of the film grain and the harsh contrasts, makes these movies what they are.
By cleaning them up to the point that they look like they have been covered in teflon, they have had their heart and soul removed from them, and I would still rather watch a 8mm or 16mm print of these at home, as it retains their full potential and magic on the screen.

At the end of the day I know it boils down to what we can accommodate in our homes, and everybody's circumstances or conditions are different.

I guess there is no real definition of a home cinema, it is what we make of it for our own personal needs and enjoyment that matters the most.

[Ed Gordon]

Steve, that is a nice summary of where we are and how we got here. By 2013 the conversion from film to digital was pretty complete. There are a few theaters around here that still show film, but of course, nothing new. I had thought that film makers would continue to shoot on film and convert to digital to edit and distribute movies. How naive I was! When I saw that the first generation of digital projectors in theaters only had resolution slightly better than a Bluray I was surprised and disappointed. Film is still being made, but the expense is so high that I do not see any path forward. What we have on film now, is about all we are going to have going forward. We are the old generation who grew up watching film. The new generation has little interest in film, and considering their love of Tiktoc videos, they may not have the patience to sit through a 2-3 hour movie. Hell, they don't even have interest in learning to drive a car. Film is not dead, but it surely is fading away. Someday (when we are all gone) people will marvel at the technology of the 19th and 20th centuries and view it as something quaint, just as our generation viewed handheld stereoscopic photo viewers and magic lanterns.

Got to go now. I see kids playing on my lawn again. Dam!

[Steve Lee]

Several weeks ago I came across these two videos on youtube. They are a tour of Kodak's Rochester factory, and they show how Kodak produces it film stock from start to finish. To say they are an eye opener is an understatement.
Only after watching them you start to realize why? film had to go from being used in the industry. We live in the world now where cutting emissions is paramount for survival, and sadly film is a non reusable recyclable commodity that uses so much energy and also produces hazardous waste it in production process. Let alone the chemicals needed to process it.
We used to joke at work years ago, after looking at a film poster and saying this movie isn't worth the film stock it was printed on. You can't even say this anymore.
Looking at the average crap that is being released on a weekly basis by the industry now, these films don't warant the hardrives that they are now disrupted on, let alone being printed onto precious film stock.

If you do watch the videos, I hope you find them as informative and educational as I did, as they are a true insight to how the one thing we all love is produced.

And that is FILM !


Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQKy1KJpSVc

Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAAJUHwh9F4

[Brian Fretwell]

That sounds like a good argument for not having done away with Technicolor dye transfer printing of release prints or, indeed the whole Technicolor three dtrip process as B&W film and chemicals would be slightly less polluting.

[Steve Klare]

To me, "Home Cinema" and "Home Theater" are two related but distinct things. For example, my nephew has a home theater in his house: It's a room down in their basement with a couple of comfortable couches and chairs for adults and carpeted floor and beanbag chairs for the kids. The question is "Do you want to watch something tonight?" and they put in a disc or go on some streaming service, maybe make some snacks and settle in for Family Time. Back when television was so expensive a family could only afford one (-and the Top Dog held the remote), this was often called a "TV Room".

There's a lot to be said for this: They could be retreating to their individual rooms and watching different things, as is quite common these days: at least there is a common experience and something to talk about later on.

In our house, we have Home Cinema. We go through the exact same introduction, but it's different. For example, we often start with film shorts and trailers whether or not the feature is on Film or Video. Their screen is an LED flat screen, ours is a roll-up matte screen with video or film projection. Their lights stay on, ours go down. When my stuff breaks, I do my best to fix it. When theirs breaks, they go to Best Buy with a credit card and get something newer, hopefully better, but probably not designed for the long haul.

I'm pretty sure they don't have a 16mm feature in cans under their couch, either...

We are enjoying a hobby, and they are just getting together for entertainment: nothing wrong with either.

I'm sure there are many people who will say you can have Home Cinema without film. I'm not militant enough to argue the point. (To each their own.)

Call it what you will, but our Home Cinema helped preserve our sanity during the worst of Covid: we all had it early on and were legally quarantined a little more than one week (seemed longer). For months before and after that, society basically ground to a halt and life became either the house or the supermarket. (We all went, and enjoyed it!) It was nice to say "Let's have a show tonight!" and have something good to look forward to all that day.

[Ed Gordon]

A proper home cinema should have one of these to introduce the feature:

It was made in Blender using a template created by someone knowledgable in digital animation. I made the mistake of rendering it on an old dual proc PC and as I recall it took about a day or two to render.

[Ken Finch]

Ed, I do the same as you but as my home cinema is a nod to the old U.K Associated British Cinema circuit I use the ABC day sets or the later EMI ones from my collection of dvds produced by Keith Wilton and personalise them via my computer editer to a dvd. Ken Finch.