I was a head projectionist for about three years and then got promoted to technician where I would run around the state repairing projectors. There is a local art cinema near my house and I do a few hours of maintenance there a month and go in if there is a catastrophic failure.
I have only seen one film projected in digital. This was at a theater that was basically a bar with a 600 seat theater bolted onto it. It was so fucking bad I sat in the lobby drinking while my sister finished the movie.
First, the masking was off by a few feet. This is completely unacceptable. And the most egregious error was it looked like the anode wasn’t properly anchored. So the bulb was slowly drifting forward in the yolk. This gave it what we would call a “Cybill Shepherd” effect.
It used to take me around three hours to install and focus the bulb. I don’t think a single screen theater have the resources to do that. Well, they do, but they don’t want to pay the 100 bucks for it. Which is funny since the xenon bulbs run about 1K. And properly installed they last around twice as long.
There is a knob for amperage sent to the bulb. Generally I would start a bulb that was properly aligned at around 115 amps. Then gradually up the amperage to 150. At that point I considered the bulb dangerous. That would result in the bulb lasting around 2250 hours reliably.
The chuckelheads that didn’t respect the art of projecting films would just stick the bulb in and deal with it being dim. Crank the amps up to 175 and the bulb was shit in 1000 hours.
This was a massive exercise in frustration. Most of the projectionist made 25 cents over minimum. So I understand their frustration. I was pissed too, I got paged at 9PM on a friday night because they didn’t bother to put some oil in the projector so I would have to replace a intermittent movement when I was getting up on hottie at a party.
Shit, I guess I could deal with digital if projectionists were competent and paid properly.