Diagonal Blue lines

[Evan Warner]

Hey Guys,

 

Last saterday we spent a day doing pickups for a short film I'm working on. The day went really well but when we called the lab to go pick up the film they said it had big problems. Here's the details. We were shoot 16mm 7218 in an eclaire ACL. What is appearing on the film is blue diagonal lines going both directions. This happen through out all of the film which is very suspisous considering the following.

 

1. We shot the material on 2 Weekends

2. Becasue we are film students the gear was returned and sucessfully used by another film ( which I camaera assisted for) inbetween shoots with no problems.

3. It happened in both mags which we used.

4. We used two rolls of film, both sealed, one directly form kodak and the other still new but from a fellow classmate from about a month ago. It had been refridgerated.

 

I gather that because it's blue that it is an emulsion scratch and is unfixable. None of my profs or the guys at the lab said they had ever seen anything like it before. The lab guys thought it might be caused by pressure of some sort. They asked us if we had rewound the film which of course we had not. My prof thinks it was caused by the lab but they will be the last ones to admit it. Regardless, has anyone else ever seen this before? Here's a diagram of what it looks like. Also apon a closer look it appears as though the blue streaks go through the fame line and apear on the next frame in some cases. What do you think?

 

Evan

[John Pytlak RIP]

Hey Guys,

 

Last saterday we spent a day doing pickups for a short film I'm working on. The day went really well but when we called the lab to go pick up the film they said it had big problems. Here's the details. We were shoot 16mm 7218 in an eclaire ACL. What is appearing on the film is blue diagonal lines going both directions. This happen through out all of the film which is very suspisous considering the following.

 

1. We shot the material on 2 Weekends

2. Becasue we are film students the gear was returned and sucessfully used by another film ( which I camaera assisted for) inbetween shoots with no problems.

3. It happened in both mags which we used.

4. We used two rolls of film, both sealed, one directly form kodak and the other still new but from a fellow classmate from about a month ago. It had been refridgerated.

 

I gather that because it's blue that it is an emulsion scratch and is unfixable. None of my profs or the guys at the lab said they had ever seen anything like it before. The lab guys thought it might be caused by pressure of some sort. They asked us if we had rewound the film which of course we had not. My prof thinks it was caused by the lab but they will be the last ones to admit it. Regardless, has anyone else ever seen this before? Here's a diagram of what it looks like. Also apon a closer look it appears as though the blue streaks go through the fame line and apear on the next frame in some cases. What do you think?

 

Evan

 

Diagonal scratches or pressure marks may occur if the film has ridden up on the flange of a roller. They could also occur if the film was rewound onto a core and pressed against the metal flange in an attempt to get a more even wind --- a burr or rough spot on the flange would produce a diagonal scratch or pressure mark.

 

Does the mark go through the entire roll, or does it come and go?

 

Not likely on the raw stock, as you had two rolls from very different batches with the same problem.

 

If it occured on a processing machine, the misthread likely would have affected other film run before or after yours.

 

My first suspicion would be poor rewinding technique prior to processing.

[Travis Cline]

John

 

i don't think this is what happened to Evan's film, but a few months ago I was working on a film and the lab called us saying we had a similar problem with our neg. I never saw the negative so I could say exactly what it looked like. They said we had a blue line something or other. sorry I don't remember the term. We looked at our reports and all of the film with this blue line problem came from the same batch of Kodak film. If I remember correctly it was all 5277. Fortunately all the blue was outside the 16x9 area anyway, but we sent all the remaining film from that batch to Kodak and they replaced it. It was during production though and I never got a chance to ask anyone from Kodak what that was or why it occured. Do you know about that or is my information to sparse to talk about it. Thank you for your help.

 

Travis

[Charles MacDonald]

Diagonal scratches or pressure marks may occur if the film has ridden up on the flange of a roller.

 

 

Hard to guess without seeing the negatives, but could this be static. We are in winter, when buildings get very dry. IF there were discarges, they would look blue and be very random.

 

Just a guess....

[David Mullen ASC]

Sounds like static or pressure marks from winding, either in camera or at the lab.

[John Pytlak RIP]

John

 

i don't think this is what happened to Evan's film, but a few months ago I was working on a film and the lab called us saying we had a similar problem with our neg. I never saw the negative so I could say exactly what it looked like. They said we had a blue line something or other. sorry I don't remember the term. We looked at our reports and all of the film with this blue line problem came from the same batch of Kodak film. If I remember correctly it was all 5277. Fortunately all the blue was outside the 16x9 area anyway, but we sent all the remaining film from that batch to Kodak and they replaced it. It was during production though and I never got a chance to ask anyone from Kodak what that was or why it occured. Do you know about that or is my information to sparse to talk about it. Thank you for your help.

 

Travis

 

I don't know about your particular situation without more details, but my group at Kodak is the one that actually evaluates any film samples returned with a problem. Again, blue lines would likely be a pressure mark or light abrasion, so if Kodak accepted blame, I suspect it may have occured on a perforator. As noted, I suspect the diagonal lines seen by Evan were caused during a manual rewinding step, perhaps as film was rewound and inspected prior to processing.

[Travis Cline]

Thanks, I'll try to get more details and ask you again.

 

Travis

[Evan Warner]

Hey Guys,

 

Thanks for the responses . Considering all of the factors involved , we came to the conclusion that it was the lab becasue we never rewound it in any way. Although they won't admit it was thier fault they also won't deny it either so they have agreed to give us free processing for the rest of our pickups. With some film that the university is willing to give us we have come out finacially even although we of course have to invest quite a bit of time and resoucres into reshooting what we did. Regardless, it the best we can ask for given the circumstances. I'd still like to find out exaclty what caused it but we may never know. I just don't see how pressure liek that can be caused in camera. If the loop were off I'm told the camera would sound funyn or not run at all. This was not the case at all.

 

Cheers

Evan

[Dominic Case]

When you say "blue" I presume you mean that is the colour you see in the print or the telecine transfer. On the negative itself that would appear yellow.

 

If that is the case, then you have pre-development scratches (more strictly, pressure fogging). That doesn't say if it's the lab or something that happened before it reached the lab. My guess (I'm afraid) is that it is indeed something at the lab, exactly where John suggests (manual inspection on the rewind during make-up before processing).

 

But that's a guess: without actually seeing the negative it's hard to be any more certain.

 

While most labs will readily support you to the extent of covering your stock and processing for the footage that was damaged (and it sounds as though that's about the extent of what your lab has offered, though all in the form of processing), they can't accept responsibility for the cost of the re-shoot. After all, the actual processing cost is the same whether the images are pickups or exploding helicopters, or a once-in-a-lifetime shot of an endangered bird in a mating ritual. For bigger shoots, that's where negative insurance comes in.

[Evan Warner]

When you say "blue" I presume you mean that is the colour you see in the print or the telecine transfer. On the negative itself that would appear yellow.

 

If that is the case, then you have pre-development scratches (more strictly, pressure fogging). That doesn't say if it's the lab or something that happened before it reached the lab. My guess (I'm afraid) is that it is indeed something at the lab, exactly where John suggests (manual inspection on the rewind during make-up before processing).

 

But that's a guess: without actually seeing the negative it's hard to be any more certain.

 

While most labs will readily support you to the extent of covering your stock and processing for the footage that was damaged (and it sounds as though that's about the extent of what your lab has offered, though all in the form of processing), they can't accept responsibility for the cost of the re-shoot. After all, the actual processing cost is the same whether the images are pickups or exploding helicopters, or a once-in-a-lifetime shot of an endangered bird in a mating ritual. For bigger shoots, that's where negative insurance comes in.

 

Very true. It's just a unfortunate event to happen. How does negitive insurance work? Not that it would help here but I'm just curious in general.

 

Cheers

Evan