UCI are Awful

[Jonny M]

Went to see the new Bridget Jones film tonight, which was very good, had the whole cinema laughing, very clever as well.

However, it would have been a whole lot better if the damn thing wasn't constantly drifting in and out of focus, every time I've been to a UCI they always manage to screw something up, and it's normally focus related. Go to an Odeon, Vue, Cineworld etc, and I get none of these issues. These experiences leave me feeling that I could have had a better-than-cinema experience and save £6.50 by waiting for a decent SVCD to download, and you can't often say that about cinema, it's usually the best way to watch films.

Shame the UCI is the closest

</rant>

[TeePee]

My local UCI has a habbit of showing films out of rack (not properly aligned vertically), and on a couple of occasions with the gate plate mis-aligned and projecting the soundtrack against the wall... very unprofessional IMO.

[Shogun]

Gate plate?

[megah0]

Yup, watched this also tonight at the UCI in solihull, was out of focus, worst i ever saw was at the merry hill one watching matrix revolutions which was totally out of focus, so bad that everyone got free tickets for next time.

[TeePee]

The gate plate is part of the projector which sits in front of the film. It has square holes in it (for different aspect ratios) which give the film it's nice neat square when it hits the screen. Without it, you get sprocket holes appearing, along with the top and bottom of the previous and next frames of the film. With it in the wrong place (it's adjustable) one edge of the film can be cut off and the soundtrack (analog sound has an optical track alongside the frames of the film) projected against the wall. It looks obvious and bad.

[Shogun]

Always did wonder how they did the audio...

[Knoxville]

Yup, watched this also tonight at the UCI in solihull, was out of focus, worst i ever saw was at the merry hill one watching matrix revolutions which was totally out of focus, so bad that everyone got free tickets for next time.

Yeah i was in the same showing and it was abysmall tbh i've seen pot cam's that're better tbh

[Aaron]

I've never had any problems with my local UCI (Lee Valley). However, my local UGC at Enfield is appalling.

Either there's no sound or the ratio is wrong or whatever. And what's worse is the cinema is full of annoying chavs.

[Tom]

hmmm I go to a UCI and it tends to be spot on....but it is pretty new and probably one of their flagship's (20 screen megaplex thingy at trafford centre)

[Howard]

Makes me glad there isn't a UCI nearby.... Lol.

Our "local" cinema is an Ambassadors, which isn't great, but it's alright.

The right speaker hasn't been working in screen 1 (the biggest screen) for ages now. And the picture quality on many of them has been less than acceptable, with dirt and crap all over the picture. It's like watching it on a 1950s 16mm projector

[Ravens Nest]

There's a UCI and a warner brothers (now called vui or somthing like that)
And until your post Caged i hadn't realised that everytime i've had problems watching a film due to missing audio or focus it's been at UCI.

Hmm perhaps i should avoid there and go to the competition even though it's more money.

I remember watching Liar Liar and laughing at a scene were jim carrey is really losing his temper and when he starts shouting the sound goes off! but what made that quite humourous was nearly everyone watching the film didnt notice and was laughing

(Probably thinking like me that it was muted because jim was swearing his head off) it was only when it moved to the next scene and the sound hadn't come back and it took 10 minutes for someone to do anything about it.. that it suddenly wasnt funny anymore

[ACiD303]

UCI was the first Multiplex here, and was a bit of a bitch to get to - that was ages ago tho - I honestly couldnt say when the last time I went to a UCI . . . probably Batman & Robin - so my last experience there probably wasnt anything to sing to the birds about.

Now I have a Vue less than 10 minutes up the road, and a Ster Century (which is probably the best Cinema for cinematic experience) 20 minutes down the road. H

[Rave]

We usually go to The Filmworks in Greenwich and in general they're fine. The only constant annoyance is that they don't move the curtains to mask the screen to the correct ratio, so any film that's 1.85:1 has annoying blank lines down the side. One time they forgot to slide in the anamorphic lens on a cinemascope film, but I dashed out and grabbed a projectionist who sorted it out pretty quickly.

Always did wonder how they did the audio...

Well, the wavy lines running down the side of the picture are two channel analogue. If the film has surround, the cinema can use a Dolby Stereo processor to give a mono surround channel. This is the cinema equivalent of Dolby Pro-Logic (although it came before Pro-Logic obviously).

Since the early 90s, most films have had digital surround sound of one form or another, by far the most common is Dolby Digital. The digital soundtrack data is printed between the sprocket holes on the film, you can't see it with the naked eye like you can with an analogue track. It's on both sides so in theory a broken sproket hole doesn't make the sound cut out. DTS films have the soundtrack supplied on a bunch of CD-Roms, there's a special reader that syncs up with the film using a sync signal somewhere. Finally SDDS films have the digital soundtrack running down the side of the film outside the sprocket holes. In the 90s, it was quite common to find Sony/Columbia pictures only had SDDS as their digital soundtrack, and so you usually had to watch them in plain old Dolby Stereo since there were only about three screens in the country equipped with SDDS. Sony seem to have given up on this tactic though thankfully.

Rich :¬)