Goodbye remjet, hello AHU?!

[Steve Switaj]

On 8/10/2025 at 8:18 PM, Dom Jaeger said:

Can you explain to me why you think a variation in thickness would create more noise in the last 200ft of a 1000ft roll in an Arricam?

 

Crazy story - I once saw something like this on the old Mitchells

Back in the 90's when T-grain stocks were a new thing (gawd, I'm old) Kodak introduced a stock especially for VFX which was designed to give better bluescreen edges (the existing stocks often showed a faint magenta line at a hard blue edge because of cross-coupling at sharp transitions).

Thing was, at high speeds the first few hundred feet would show subtle density flutter in one of the color records.

I was at Praxis at the time, and the Kodak guys came up several times with test rolls for us to expose. We'd tape some test cards to the wall, light 'em up with 10K's to make sure the source wasn't flickering somehow, and just grind through the whole roll at 120fps.

Eventually, it turned out that the T-grains were vulnerable to mechanical stress for a few dozen milliseconds after they were light-struck.

Mitchells had a slipping-spring belt on the takeup side, and the winding torque, and hence the elongation stress on the film after the sprocket, would flutter as the spring slipped. Eventually, the takeup roll grew big enough and heavy enough that it acted like a flywheel to smooth out the torque flutter and after 200 feet the problem went away.

[David Mullen ASC]

From the Kodak website:

1986

EASTMAN Color High Speed Negative film, 7292 (16mm only). Tungsten, EI 320. Replaced 7294. First motion picture film to have "T" Grain. T-Grain is in the fast magenta and slow blue (N).

EASTMAN Color High Speed SA Negative film, 5295 (35mm only). Tungsten, EI 400. Greater blue/green separation and tighter tolerance perforations. Especially for blue screen applications. 

EASTMAN Color High Speed Daylight Negative film, 7/5297. Daylight, EI 250. -- Awarded TECHNICAL EMMY 1988. Discontinued 1997.

--

In 1986, Kodak released these three stocks with T-grain in some layers -- in 1989, they released the first EXR film, 50D, with T-grain in all layers. That period from 1986 to 1990 was a time when you saw DPs take sides whether to shoot normal low-light scenes on 5294 or 5295 -- 5294 had a slightly softer, less contrasty look.  Allen Daviau kept using 5294 all the way through "Bugsy" (1991) even after he had used the new EXR 500T 5296 for "Avalon" (1990). 5296 replaced both 5294 and 5295.