Mondo Knows Facts
A platter holds the entire feature on one reel
The print is spliced into a single strand and fed from a turntable Platter systems stack the whole film as one large roll on a horizontal turntable and feed it through the projector without a reel change. They arrived in the 1970s as multiplexes needed to move prints between screens and cut staff. A failure can tangle thousands of feet at once. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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A Geneva mechanism stops the film between framesA rotating pin turns the sprocket a quarter turn, then releases it to restPolarised glasses give each eye a separate imageTwo projectors send light polarised at right angles, so each lens blocks the otherCinema screen brightness is measured in foot-lambertsA meter aimed at a white screen reports how much light reaches the audienceCarbon arc lamps lit early cinema screensTwo carbon rods burned inside a housing to throw a fierce white beamVHS beat Betamax by recording for longerVHS could hold a whole evening on one cassette where Betamax could notDolby Atmos treats sounds as movable objectsThe mix stores a position for each sound rather than assigning it a speaker
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Tags: projection, cinema, 1970s
A platter holds the entire feature on one reel: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The print is spliced into a single strand and fed from a turntable. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.