A and I warning: mis-labeled stock for Stills

[Charles Haine]

If there is already a topic going, I apologize, I searched for it but "a and I' is hard to search for in this forum since you can't search for words with less than three characters.

 

I teach cinematographer at LACC, and I had my students doing an assignment which involved shooting motion picture stock canned for still work. A and I has been experimenting with starting this process up since we unfortunately lost RGB a few years back.

 

They've had some schedule hiccups, but they seem to have figured it out, however, when we watched the film in class today, only the Fuji 500 seemed to look correct. The films they labeled as Kodak 500T and 100T, which we saw projected on slides of scenes shot side by side with the Fuji, looked like they had been drastically under-exposed.

 

However, when we got to the part of the test where we over and under exposed, the over-exposure didn't seem to fix the problem.

 

Investigating the edgecode, I realized that the 500T stock, which they told me as 5218 (and I worried might be 79 or 29), was actually 5296, a stock discontinued in 1995!

 

Image my further surprise when I discovered that the 100T, which looked about equally as bad as the 500T, was 5247, a stock discontinued in 1983.

 

So, if someone wants to see what really expired film looks like, you can get some at A and I at the moment. I've emailed them and hopefully they will remedy the situation, but I wanted to give a warning that, at least in the short term, A and I is still having hiccups.

 

I'm still really excited for the service, and hope the hiccups get worked out soon.

 

charlie haine

[Brad Grimmett]

Yikes! Thanks for the heads-up.

I just bought a couple of rolls of both the Kodak and Fuji 250D. Did you guys shoot any of these stocks, and if so, what stock did you find it to actually be? I haven't shot these rolls yet, and it would be nice to be able to expose correctly.

[Charles Haine]

it would be nice to be able to expose correctly.

 

 

so far, they've been pretty consistent with the ISO rating of the stock (96 was a 500T stock, only 12 years ago), so you ought to be able to expose them correctly.

 

The drawback, of course, is that they might've sold you an older 250D that, even if exposed correctly, won't yield a pleasing image.

 

We haven't checked that yet, but I'll get in touch with my students and see if any of them shot that stock (or any other) and I'll post it up here immediately, so if it is retired stock, you can at least save yourself processing costs.

 

charlie haine

[Charles MacDonald]

We haven't checked that yet, but I'll get in touch with my students and see if any of them shot that stock (or any other) and I'll post it up here immediately, so if it is retired stock, you can at least save yourself processing costs.

You should be able to identify the stock from the edge code on the negatives. (if the lab did not run them through a notcher to make them ready for a printer)

[David Mullen ASC]

May be safer to get sample stocks on still camera cartridges directly from a Kodak or Fuji rep and then take to A&I for processing.

[Richard Vialet]

I've shot one roll of 5205 and developed through A+I when they first started this a few months ago (they had like a month turnaround...jeez!). And I got the slides back and they had this heavy magenta cast on them. All my other AFI classmates had the same problem as well. I brought this up to A+I and they gave me extra film and said that they think it was just bad stock. They mentioned that they're really still getting the hang of it (they shortened their turnaround time to like a week now). So they ARE really trying to get it right. They also mentioned that people have complained about the slide prints coming out reversed (with the emulsion side as the image side). They're trying to deal with that as well. If they can work out the kinks it might turn out to be a pretty cool service.

 

Got a roll of Eterna 500T that I'm excited to shoot this weekend as a small test.