In the theater, last week, seeing Harry Potter, I was surprised to see cigarette burns. I looked up, and saw only one projector (as I had expected). Do they still insert the cigarette burns on continuous platter movies? Or is there some tech I don’t know about?

When I ran a projector, a million years ago, we were able to show the same movie in two or three theaters by cycling through the individual reels. You could start movies a half hour apart and show the movies in two different theaters just by keeping ahead of the reel swap.

Dunno what’s changed. I know they went to continuous length platters in the 80’s, but I never noticed a burn on a continuous. ANy film geeks out there?