Saving the cineplex

Upstairs in one of the dark, dusty projection rooms at Brooklyn’s Pavilion Digital Cinema, owner Bud Mayo watches an employee struggle to lift a 50-pound reel of 35-millimeter film out of its giant metal canister. After placing the film on a shelf the size of a tractor wheel, the projectionist will manually splice reels, inserting ads and trailers that will get fed into a bulky projector. The process can take as long as four hours. Mayo shifts his weight. He’s impatient, and with good reason. Near the projector sits a sleek network server system it looks like a stack of industrial hard drives – that can do this entire job almost instantly, with a few clicks of the mouse. That server is the heart of Mayo’s new digital projection system, and Mayo says it will do more than just save time. It might just save the nation’s movie theaters.