100' Super 8

Terry Mester · April 12, 2007

Just to follow up on my previous Post, to convert 18 Frames / Second Film onto Telecine Video, a 3:3:3:2:3:3:3:2:3 Pulldown will fulfil 25 f/s Video, and a 3:3:4 Pulldown will fill 30 f/s Video.

Jim Simon · April 12, 2007

Yours was a third party reload.

If anyone knows who is still doing this, please inform.

Alessandro Machi · April 12, 2007

Just to follow up on my previous Post, to convert 18 Frames / Second Film onto Telecine Video, a 3:3:3:2:3:3:3:2:3 Pulldown will fulfil 25 f/s Video, and a 3:3:4 Pulldown will fill 30 f/s Video.

Where it gets tricky is if one wants to go from their edited tape master back to film, then the issue of the A & B video fields being inverted comes up.

Terry Mester · April 13, 2007

Our color lab head Bob Hume and I were talking about 100' super8 cartridges just yesterday. Bob said that Kodak used to make 100' loads that were in the same 50' cartridge. They managed this by putting the film on estar base. Bob said that they did not really work well because the thinner base routinely jammed in the cartridge making it more like a 30' roll than 100' maybe 50' is alright after all.

This jamming problem makes sense because the Cartridge Motor must gradually slow down as the take-up spool / reel of Film fills up. The slowing down of the Cart. Motor is predicted upon a prescribed thickness of Film. With a thinner Film, the Cartridge Motor will very quickly be turning too slowly to wind up the Film as fast as the Film Gate Sprocket feeds it through. There also needs to be some slack in the Film before the take-up spool. I'm surprised that it even lasted for 30 feet.

Kodak made a catastrophic and dumb decision in 1965 when they chose to have the new Super8 format use a 50 foot Cartridge instead of 100 feet. A 50 foot Reel of Film is 7.8 centimetres in diameter, but 100 feet is only 9.5 centimetres. The Super8 Cameras would only have needed to be about 1 cm higher to accommodate a 100 foot Cartridge. If it had been 100 feet, the Super8 format would be much more widely used today. A 100 foot Cartridge could have been easily loaded with only 75 or 50 feet of Film, and it would still have worked.