Crazy homemade film cleaner!

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

 

[Perry Paolantonio]

haha. yeah they're scratching the hell out of that film. That is all so wrong it's not even funny. 

wow.

[Dan Baxter]

Here's another one that was shared on social media.

 

[Todd Ruel]

I get that these DIY film cleaners are scratch factories.

But what do you guys recommend for those of us who don't have Lipsner Smith machines or BSF Hydras?

I'm using a clean cotton handkerchief and 91% isopropyl right now.  How could I do it better?

[Tyler Purcell]

Wow insane, I can't believe thats an actual thing. lol 

[Perry Paolantonio]

13 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

I'm using a clean cotton handkerchief and 91% isopropyl right now.  How could I do it better?

Pec Pads, and never less than 99% pure isopropyl. You can buy it on Amazon by the gallon or in quart sized bottles and it's not expensive. 91% has too much water in it and that can damage the film. It also takes longer to evaporate because of the higher water content.

Pec Pads aren't the cheapest but they work well and you can get a fair bit of film through one if you're careful about how you fold it, and how wide the film is you're cleaning (for 8mm a single pad can do a 50' roll if you're careful). As soon as it starts to look dirty, you need to move the film to another part of the pad. 

Before we got our cleaner we did all our cleaning by hand this way. It just takes a little longer but works well. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

23 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

I get that these DIY film cleaners are scratch factories.

But what do you guys recommend for those of us who don't have Lipsner Smith machines or BSF Hydras?

I'm using a clean cotton handkerchief and 91% isopropyl right now.  How could I do it better?

 

I use Webril litho pads. Only because I had a case left over from the graphic arts days. Webril is so-so. It is very soft and when you run into broken sprockets it can pull the cotton apart. To wipe up small sections I use large size Kimwipes.

 

 

I use Filmrenew. It is deep cleaning, slow evaporating and $. I will have to try 99% alcohol.

Vitafilm is also a good cleaner. 

I've also used Edwal cleaner. It is $$, fast evaporation and has low cleaning abilities due to fast evaporation. Slow evaporation allows the cleaner to work on loosening the deep dirt. You can test this all yourself. Use some dirty film. Clean with a fast evaporation cleaner then clean the same section with a slow evaporation cleaner. Compare the two. If you are not getting much more dirt, then your fast evaporating cleaner is pretty good.

 

B&H won't even ship it anymore. Edwal is good for a fast clean of still film more so than movie film. It has skyrocketed in price.

[Todd Ruel]

12 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Pec Pads, and never less than 99% pure isopropyl. You can buy it on Amazon by the gallon or in quart sized bottles and it's not expensive. 91% has too much water in it and that can damage the film. It also takes longer to evaporate because of the higher water content.

Pec Pads aren't the cheapest but they work well and you can get a fair bit of film through one if you're careful about how you fold it, and how wide the film is you're cleaning (for 8mm a single pad can do a 50' roll if you're careful). As soon as it starts to look dirty, you need to move the film to another part of the pad. 

Before we got our cleaner we did all our cleaning by hand this way. It just takes a little longer but works well. 

Okay, that’s good advice, Perry.  Thank you!  I’ll order those supplies off of Amazon.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

There was a topic on cleaning films here around '08. They had a couple of dead links that were archived on the Wayback Machine.

Here they are...

Cleaning Film (archive.org)

KODAK: Recommendations for Cleaning Photographic Materials: Tech Pub CIS-145 (archive.org)

 

 

 

 

Edited June 22 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Tyler Purcell]

We do most of our cleaning as Perry states. It works ok, the wet gate at 4fps, does the rest. 

[Dan Baxter]

Kodak used to have a list of solvents on their website, that list is reproduced elsewhere though for example on the NFSA website (it leaves out some of the columns though). On the Archived page all the text is invisible, so making it visible and taking a screenshot, here it is (source) :

Mirror: https://i.imgur.com/KHeUrGS.png

Edited June 22 by Dan Baxter

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

This is a high-grade alcohol for cleaning. Comes in glass. About double the price of plastic 99% bottles.

 

You can also buy it in 55-gallon drums.

Edited June 24 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Robert Houllahan]

On 6/17/2024 at 11:43 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

 

These imbeciles probably charge as much or more than a lab does for cleaning in a Lipsner and you get scratched film too!

They probably also scan film on those piles of junk SD scanners and charge full price for that substandard scan.

Edited June 30 by Robert Houllahan

[Todd Ruel]

Okay, all.

I took Perry’s advice and bought Pec Pads and 99% isopropyl alcohol from Amazon.  I started using the Pec Pads & alcohol on some 1970 Kodachrome film.  I noticed that some yellow chemical was coming off on the pads.

Question:  is this some kind of yellow dye from the film?  I thought it might be nicotine, but nicotine is usually a dull, dark, ugly yellow.  This stuff is brighter than that.

Follow-up Question:  if I am, indeed, removing the dye from the film while cleaning it, is this bad?  I mean, am I removing enough of the dye to make it too hard to grade the film later (or allow my Archivist to do an initial dye fade correction)?

Should I just abandon this method and potentially use some other chemical to clean Kodachrome?

I’m stumped.  I followed directions, and I’m getting results that look like I’m doing more harm than good.

[Dan Baxter]

On 6/30/2024 at 1:19 AM, Robert Houllahan said:

These imbeciles probably charge as much or more than a lab does for cleaning in a Lipsner and you get scratched film too!

Looks like they're having some trouble with their "professional" transfer machines:

But yeah, Tobins which were designed for 2005 not 2024. 😛

[Robert Houllahan]

10 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

Looks like they're having some trouble with their "professional" transfer machines:

But yeah, Tobins which were designed for 2005 not 2024.

None of those machines should be anywhere but in the landfill or metals scrap.

[Andrew Wise]

On 7/3/2024 at 12:39 PM, Todd Ruel said:

Okay, all.

I took Perry’s advice and bought Pec Pads and 99% isopropyl alcohol from Amazon.  I started using the Pec Pads & alcohol on some 1970 Kodachrome film.  I noticed that some yellow chemical was coming off on the pads.

Question:  is this some kind of yellow dye from the film?  I thought it might be nicotine, but nicotine is usually a dull, dark, ugly yellow.  This stuff is brighter than that.

Follow-up Question:  if I am, indeed, removing the dye from the film while cleaning it, is this bad?  I mean, am I removing enough of the dye to make it too hard to grade the film later (or allow my Archivist to do an initial dye fade correction)?

Should I just abandon this method and potentially use some other chemical to clean Kodachrome?

I’m stumped.  I followed directions, and I’m getting results that look like I’m doing more harm than good.

I’ve seen this same thing, someone told me it was a wax they applied to the film after processing. But I’m not sure if they were guessing or speaking from first hand knowledge. 

[Tyler Purcell]

On 7/2/2024 at 10:05 PM, Dan Baxter said:

Looks like they're having some trouble with their "professional" transfer machines:

Gak, insane someone built those machines at all. What total junk. 

[Dan Baxter]

4 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Gak, insane someone built those machines at all. What total junk. 

That's a bit unfair to Clive, I'm sure that in 2005 for $3,500 they were a bargain. They had a clear purpose, it's just unfortunate they're still used for that purpose now, same with these:

[Tyler Purcell]

2 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

That's a bit unfair to Clive, I'm sure that in 2005 for $3,500 they were a bargain. They had a clear purpose, it's just unfortunate they're still used for that purpose now, same with these:

Cheap doesn't mean good. 

We have hundreds of thousands of feet of 8mm and s8mm films that were poorly transferred on these machines and it's just a shame. People paid good money for a projector transfer. The videos you posted, he even said that it was all about money to him and unfortunately the transfer business if successful, should be about preservation and delivering quality. I think people are starting to wake up to that point right now. 

[Dan Baxter]

7 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

We have hundreds of thousands of feet of 8mm and s8mm films that were poorly transferred on these machines and it's just a shame. People paid good money for a projector transfer.

No, this company uses a projector to transfer 8mm. They project it onto the wall and film it with a camcorder or something.

2005 - 19 years ago is when those TVT-8's and super-8 model transfer systems were made available. How much did scanning home movies cost on a Rank-Cintel with an 8mm gate in 2005 (was that even possible)? LaserGraphics didn't make an 8mm scanner until 2013 and Filmfabriek didn't exist either until 2011. If you read Clive Tobin's old website you clearly see it says "Replaces Elmo Transvideo".

19 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

The videos you posted, he even said that it was all about money to him and unfortunately the transfer business if successful, should be about preservation and delivering quality. I think people are starting to wake up to that point right now.

That AVP guy is the average type of person using a Retroscan to sell scanning services to "hobbyists shooting film" and to home movie clients. He thinks it's good enough, and as long as the service provider think that the service they're delivering is good enough in quality they don't care about matching professional work. Most of them do not understand how much better the scan could look because they've never actually put their test film through a professional scanning system to check how much in the way of colour and detail they're missing. Some of them probably only really do occasional film transfer jobs as well.

Most small mom-and-pop places including small film labs are too scared to pay $35,000 for a scanner let alone $60,000. There are people that say publicly that Filmfabriek charge too much! As long as you have places like AMB Media LLC ("Kodak Digitizing Box"/"LegacyBox"/"Southtree") and that Black Lab Imaging place I linked to doing even worse quality work you'll still have the people doing transfers on their 20-year-old TCS TVTs or their 10+ year old Retroscans etc.

On the topic of cleaners, they're certainly not going to spend $50,000 for a Hydra if they won't spend it on a scanner!

[Chris Worner]

On 6/30/2024 at 1:19 AM, Robert Houllahan said:

These imbeciles probably charge as much or more than a lab does for cleaning in a Lipsner and you get scratched film too!

They probably also scan film on those piles of junk SD scanners and charge full price for that substandard scan.

The horror, it is worse than you think!

 

[Tyler Purcell]

9 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

2005 - 19 years ago is when those TVT-8's and super-8 model transfer systems were made available. How much did scanning home movies cost on a Rank-Cintel with an 8mm gate in 2005 (was that even possible)? LaserGraphics didn't make an 8mm scanner until 2013 and Filmfabriek didn't exist either until 2011. If you read Clive Tobin's old website you clearly see it says "Replaces Elmo Transvideo".

Those TVT's are projectors, they have pulldown, sprocket dive, standard projector gate, it's a projector. I don't know how they break the light, but even if they use LED's (which I doubt) it would still be a poor solution for transferring film. It's only one step better than an Elmo transfer machine.  You could very easily convert any projector to achieve the same results. 

Also, cleaning isn't horribly difficult. You can build a machine without a considerable cost, using off the shelf parts. I've seen many and they work really well, even on alcohol. The only reason we haven't built one, is because we don't have any room for another machine. 

 

[Dan Baxter]

7 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Those TVT's are projectors, they have pulldown, sprocket dive, standard projector gate, it's a projector. I don't know how they break the light, but even if they use LED's (which I doubt) it would still be a poor solution for transferring film. It's only one step better than an Elmo transfer machine.  You could very easily convert any projector to achieve the same results. 

Well basically yes, but I think you're missing the point of the Elmos/Tobins: they are supposed to be plugged into a VCR or a DVD recorder directly so you can record straight to NTSC (or PAL) with no computer involved. That's what they were always supposed to do, and they do it in real-time unlike a comparable "frame-by-frame" Moviestuff doing 1fps or whatever the speeds were back then.

What Got Memories is doing with them is not how they were designed to be run - that's the whole point. They're putting them to a digital file first on a computer that is hard interlaced to NTSC.

There's a German company that sells converted projectors using DLSRs for capture and they are cheap at about half the cost of a TVT-8 all run on free/open-source software. They bought-out the rights for those projectors it seems, unlike other companies that converted projectors in the past. That goes directly to a frame-by-frame digital file with no interlacing in real time, but of course they're still converted projectors using DSLRs instead of machine-vision camera so they'll have their own limitations. But for a broke hobbyist that just wants something basic they can use themselves they're OK for the price.

14 hours ago, Chris Worner said:

The horror, it is worse than you think!

Interesting he says "yes I'm in it to make money" in that video. Typical art of the grift. Publicly shaming a competitor to make his very low-end company look better (according to Reddit his videotape transfers are no better than his film transfers). Real companies don't need to shame their competitors. You can see he has it plugged into a DVD recorder (as well as a Macbook) using composite video. He says "this is more than suffice for the average consumer". In the 1980's-2000's that may have been correct, but who is he to decide what is adequate for the "average consumer" now? Clearly this Phil guy knows that people are dissatisfied with low-quality work as someone sent him that film hoping for something better than what the last company did.

He puts out a LOT of misinformation. "Reels are spliced together ..." So what? For an actual professional company with a LaserGraphics or a Filmfabriek HDS it's not viable to thread tiny 50ft reels individually onto them as they take far more leader than 8mm/Super8 usually have so of course they have to be built up to 400ft or larger reels. They're not self-threading projector motors like a TVT or Elmo. This idea that they can't be broken down afterwards is his own invention. I discussed this last year with a friend of mine who actually does this work, here's what he said about one job: "I recently did a Super8 job with about 2.5hs of footage on 50ft reels. The customer wanted them off the metal reels so I combined them onto new 400ft archival reels and I didn't have to wind them back onto the 50ft ones, which was nice. I labelled them so the customer knows where everything is." If they customer wants them broken back down then they get broken back down.

Look how rough on film his machines are and his handling of his customer's film. He is also saying that his competitor's website is a scam because it has a fake 25% persistent discount, well doesn't his website say the same? 50% off - $20 per reel "after discount" with a $400 minimum order. Oh wait, this page says $15/reel "after discount" and as little as .12/ft. He blames the customers for not finding a better company. 16:30 in while he's complaining about the leader tape (which he should have removed BEFORE putting it through the Elmo) he snaps half a foot off the customer's film leader and presumably throws it away. So I wouldn't say he's being particularly careful with the film he's transferring. Towards the end he contradicts what he said at the start and claims "I don't need the business, I don't need the money". If that's the case why doesn't he just send the customers to a real professional? He also says his purpose is to "raise the standards" (of his competitors) - if that's the case why's he still transferring film the same way that he started 22 years ago? He is also telling people that the sound heads cost a fortune and are super rare, yet the German company I mentioned earlier sells their kits equipped to do sound and they're as cheap as anything.

As for everything he says about reviews and feedback, I'll tell you a secret: he deletes any YT comments critical of his work. Go on, try it. 😉

[Tyler Purcell]

1 hour ago, Dan Baxter said:

Well basically yes, but I think you're missing the point of the Elmos/Tobins: they are supposed to be plugged into a VCR or a DVD recorder directly so you can record straight to NTSC (or PAL) with no computer involved. That's what they were always supposed to do, and they do it in real-time unlike a comparable "frame-by-frame" Moviestuff doing 1fps or whatever the speeds were back then.

 

What camera did it use? I just see him using modern mirrorless cameras to capture MPEG4's and deliver that way. 

For the record, I have never once had a client who has  accepted MP4's for deliverables. I had one consumer client who wasn't a filmmaker not long ago and he wanted MP4. I delivered MOV's and he was so ecstatic how good they looked. He went online and bragged to his buddies on Facebook (he found me on Facebook and we are FB friends) that his old films looked better than the stuff his current (iPhone X) shoots. Well, he wasn't wrong, Kodachrome Super 8 looks pretty darn good when ya use a decent camera. 

Anyway, yea his "demo" of which showed him shooting the screen on his laptop, isn't very conclusive of anything. Clearly he doesn't have or understand editorial software, nor does he want to actually show the quality of what he makes, so nobody actually knows what he does.

There is a reason why I didn't start a transfer company before I had the FF. I could have with a projector and camera, but didn't because I don't like ripping people off. Decent quality or nothing for me.