Aaton 35

[Mike Panczenko]

I have never used one, but something seems odd to me. It has the reputation of being the hardest 35mm camera to load. As the Aaton XTR is known as the easiest, why didn't Aaton simply design the mag in the same way. Aaton owns the design for it, I'm assuming. Why mess with success? The 35mm BLs are like the SRs, the 35-3 and 35-2C are like the 16mm BLs, the Panavision is like the Elaine (which I've never used, so correct me if I'm wrong), etc. The 535 is like the SRs and BLs, it seems to me, except that the sprockets are caught automatically. Why did Aaton design their 35mm model so differently?

[Adam Frisch FSF]

I'm guessing they didn't want a coaxial mag in 35mm since the mag becomes very

wide (like the 535). It also isn't very well balanced for handheld, somethig that's always

been an Aaton hallmark. By designing the Aaton 35 with a displacing in-line mag, the sit very nicely on the shoulder. The film loads are in actaulity taking "eachothers" place

as you film so the mags can be made very small. Actually, the displacing mag design of

the Aaton 35 was ahead of its time. Today the ArriCam LT has the same design and I

believe the handheld mags for the Moviecam did it too.

[Nathan Milford]

Has anyone loaded the new mags for the 235?

[Peter Martin]

The Arriflex 235 magazines are similar to the Arriflex 35-2C 60m mags. Easy to load.

 

Peter Martin

 

www.vantagefilm.com

[Eric Steelberg ASC]

It also isn't very well balanced for handheld, somethig that's always

been an Aaton hallmark. By designing the Aaton 35 with a displacing in-line mag, the sit very nicely on the shoulder. The film loads are in actaulity taking "eachothers" place

as you film so the mags can be made very small. Actually, the displacing mag design of

the Aaton 35 was ahead of its time. Today the ArriCam LT has the same design and I

believe the handheld mags for the Moviecam did it too.

Depends of the glass you have out front but I found it well balanced with Pimo primes and a matte box.

 

They were trying to keep the camera low profile and having a coaxial 35 mag would defy having such a small narrow body. It's actually a pretty brilliant design, methinks.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Eric, I think you misunderstood me - it was the 535 I was referring to when I said it wasn't very well balanced for handheld. A bit unclear on my part, sorry. I agree that Aaton's are very

well balanced - that's always been their forte.

[Sam Wells]

The 235 would almost seem to be closer to what the Aaton 35 was originally going to be (Godard wanted a 35mm camera he could "fit in his glove compartment"); the size & convience of a S8 camera - thus the original designation Aaton 8-35)

 

Well maybe not quite.

 

I'm not sure I want to see a 235 in person yet: I'll want one :)

 

-Sam

[John Sprung]

It has the reputation of being the hardest 35mm camera to load.

I wonder.... I'd say the hardest magazine to load would either be the MosKinAp 8M, or three strip Technicolor.

 

The fun thing about the 8M is that it's actually easier to thread the film around the wrong side of the takeup sprocket, so the first time you roll, you have both sprockets trying to cram film into the gate. Technicolor would be three times the work of a Mitchell per load, plus you have to keep careful track of red, green, and blue stock.

 

Hardest camera to thread, hands down, would have to be the Technicolor. You have to get red and blue into a bipack, and the green movement is 90 degrees perpendicular to the other two. It opens and threads from both sides, IIRC.

 

 

-- J.S.

[DanStewart]

plus you have to keep careful track of red, green, and blue stock.

 

er..

[John Pytlak RIP]

The famous Technicolor system used three strips of B&W film, with the light being split into red, green and blue records by a beamsplitter:

 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor7.htm

 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor1.htm

 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor6.htm

 

Kodak introduced the current "single strip" color negative/print system with integral color masking almost two decades later, in 1950:

 

http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/...t/chrono1.shtml

 

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/about/chrono2.shtml

 

The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester has Technicolor camera #D14 on display right now:

 

http://www.geh.org/fm/precin/htmlsrc5/mT25...html#topofimage

 

http://www.eastmanhouse.org

[Eric Steelberg ASC]

Eric, I think you misunderstood me - it was the 535 I was referring to when I said it wasn't very well balanced for handheld. A bit unclear on my part, sorry. I agree that Aaton's are very

well balanced - that's always been their forte.

Ah, yes I did misunderstand. My bad. 535 is a pig.

[Eric Steelberg ASC]

As a side note there is a good book on the history of Technicolor which is in the suggested books on this site. It mentions how Kodak killed off Technicolor by charging them more for the black and white matrices stocks than the new Kodak color negative film.

 

Thanks John! ;)

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, I've read the book and it's a stretch to say that Kodak through their business efforts killed off Technicolor. But they certainly has a hand in its demise.

 

I mean, the ease of shooting single color negative certainly killed off the 3-strip camera process. Even Technicolor knew that would happen someday and were working on their own monopack process. Plus at the time, the studios owned their own cameras and labs, so color photography was the only thing they had to farm outside for. With Kodak color negative, they could use their own cameras and labs for color work. In fact, the last few years of 3-strip movies were all made by small independent studios, not the major ones.

 

Kodak TRIED to thwart Technicolor's dye transfer printing process at some points in history, but Technicolor simply went to b&w companies like Agfa to get them to provide the materials necessary, so Kodak ended up giving in on that idea. Remember that Technicolor was also a good customer of Kodak products.

 

Dr. Kalmus had a good relationship with Kodak until he retired. His replacements, though, got into a financial competitive relationship with Kodak in regards to release printing, which was a mistake. Kodak kept raising the costs of the matrix and blank stocks to retaliate. Technicolor started looking for ways to cut costs.

 

The problem with the whole dye transfer process was that it was expensive to create the separate b&w matrices but the cost per print was lower than the Kodak print stock method. So if the volume of printing was high enough, the costs of dye transfer printing were competitive if not better than using Kodak print stock. However, the 1970's saw a decline in average print orders, down to a few hundred for major studio releases.

 

Technicolor lost faith in the whole process and saw the future being in providing color neg development for television, so closed down their dye transfer facility on Cole and kept their color neg development plant on Lankershim.

 

Now that print orders are bigger than ever, the problem has been that the dye transfer process does not allow the short turnaround times that studios have been accustomed to. Sometimes they deliver the finished negative two weeks before the release date, make several internegatives, and have a couple of different labs around the world start pumping out thousands of prints.

 

I'm sure if the rising costs of buying the b&w matrix and blank stock from Kodak were their ONLY problem in the 1970's, Technicolor would have gone to Agfa to make them.

[Nathan Milford]

Just FYI, those in NYC might be interested in this:

 

http://www.filmforum.com/films/events.html#color

 

"Robert Gitt, Chief Preservation Officer of the UCLA Film & Television Archive presents this entertaining history of movie color, from pioneering processes like Kinemacolor and Cinecolor through the development of Technicolor and other modern processes. The all-35mm program includes excerpts from The Toll of the Sea (1922), the first successful Technicolor film; Lon Chaney?s Phantom of the Opera (1925); the pioneer Technicolor features Becky Sharp (1935) and A Star is Born (1937); and much more. Approx. 90 min."

 

Anyone intrested in meeting up? Its 9/22 so it's a bit off... something to plan for.

 

- nathan

[John Sprung]

The other part of the Kodak/Technicolor relationship was that in the early 1930's, Leonard T. Troland of Technicolor got an extremely broad patent that covered pretty much any kind of multi-layer emulsion color film. Meanwhile, Mannes and Godowsky at Kodak had invented a single strip color film. All this is in Trimble's book, which I have in storage someplace.

 

 

-- J.S.