Technical Information

One of the biggest parts of the Cinema is the Projector. Needless to say, without it, showing films would be an impossible task! I'm willing to bet most of you won't realise exactly how technical a process projecting a film is. In a digital world of the majority of cinemas still use 35mm film - and we are no exception!

Behind the scenes, there's a highly trained team of projectionists, volunteering literality hours of their time to the cinema in order to bring you each film showing. This part of the site is dedicated both to them and our projector!

We are very proud of our projector and associated equipment, as it makes us one of the best equipped student cinemas in the country (and best equiped cinema in Lancaster!). We show 35mm film at Lancaster, using a Century C series projector, a 1600W Xenon lamp and a OCR long-play platter system. Connected to all this is a Dolby Cat-702 Digital soundhead and an analogue sound head, leading to a Dolby CP650 digital sound processor (the latest sound processor from Dolby!). We have a turret lens system, capable of handling both widescreen and cinemascope formats. To your average audience member, that probably doesn't mean very much, but it means that we can handle every newly released film, and can provide the viewing public with Dolby EX sound, which has to be heard to be believed. Dolby EX gives the audience 7 different channels of sound coming at them, from 15 different speakers round the auditorium, sent by 4 powerful amplifiers.

Additionally, we have a digital video projector and DVD player connected up to our CP650 sound processor. This gives the Cinema the opportunity to play DVD films, such as shorts and the large amount of British films that do not have a distributor, and are therefore only available on DVD.

Last edited by Student Staff (2007-02-18 14:28:55)