It is amazing. There have been thousands of years of study, by some of the greatest minds ever on the planet, yet we barely understand the incredible mechanics and capabilities of sight and sound.
Yet somehow you are responsible for presenting high quality sound and picture to please the patrons with those mechanics and capabilities in your auditoriums.
Lesson Number One: Don’t feel like you are the only one with confusions or questions in these areas.
From Aristotle to Newton, mistakes about light were asserted as truth so strongly that scientists were told they couldn’t believe their eyes if it disproved those ‘experts’. It was only 110 years ago that Einstein proposed what seems to be the best working theory for light. For a long time his theories were so advanced that they were untested. But now, every year it seems, some clever science person (or group) makes progress toward proving another piece of his ideas.
More recently, there was a long and hard 20 year transition from film to digital projection. A lot of lessons have been learned. And now some projectors are changing again, to laser light, and some cinema theaters are converting to Immersive Sound. Sound is another area that is filled with as much magic (and art) as it is filled with science.
All these things beat toward one consistent march…to better fulfill the Director’s Intent.
There’s always something to learn. So, again – the point is: Don’t be feeling like you’re the only one who still has confusion in these areas, these areas that are so important to qualifying the sound and picture in your auditoriums.
We will not only work on the confusions, but we will practice, and there will be checklists so that we won’t have to worry, “Did I forget something?
Be certain that you let us know if we skip a step in explaining these things. If there is a lingering misunderstanding, make certain that we haven’t left a word properly defined. Use the Comments below, or write to us on the “Contact, Please” page.
Touch is called a ‘sense’. At the end of our finger tips, behind the skin, there are about 3,000 nerve endings that can distinguish pressure and pain and cold and heat. They receive information – they are receptors. They are part of several hundred thousand nerve endings in both hands. Some of these are used to interact with muscles to make movements when they get instructions through the brain to do so.
The point is that there are many different types of nerve endings, each for sending information about the world around us to the brain …and there are nerve endings for sending instructions to parts of the body from the brain.
The nerves in the human eye are called a photoreceptor. The beginning of the word, photo-, comes from the Greek word that means ‘light’. These nerves endings are light receptors. They are highly sophisticated. We will study them later. They are part of the Human Visual System.
The point is that we can use their sophistication to our benefit when we want to decide if a movie is playing correctly.
We will also learn that the ear is part of a highly sophisticated set of receptors. Again, like the eye, the ear is part of a system also.
Our purpose is to be able to do is use these systems – sight and hearing – to transmit information from your evaluation – looking at the screen and listening to the sound in the auditorium. Instead of the information end at your body and thoughts, you will transmit the information about the picture and sound quality to the technical people who have the job of maintaining the quality in the auditorium.
If it seems like there is a whole lot of transmitting going on, that is because it is true. That is the basis of being responsible for a section of a system.
The trick is to have a system to handle all this transmission.
A checklist is a device in a system that receives your information and can transmit it to another person. But why a checklist? The simple answer is that we want to organize our transmission is the way that the person who will use the information can get the best benefit. So it will include the who (you, if you fill out the form), the when and the where, and then the what.
If you just told the technician that someone complained about the audio in one of the movies – that the sound on the left side wasn’t working, for example – the technician would have to go into each room and check the sound. It wouldn’t be very good information.
So, we collect the information in a particular manner. Step 1, then 2, then 3, etc., and we send the complete set of information. The tech can visit and handle the problem quickly. You are a hero.
So, onward. Nothing will be more complicated than that. But just like that checklist system, there are always details. The magic is in the details. Have fun with the magic.