Thinking behind 64T?

[Martin MacDonald]

Hello all,

 

I was shooting a music video last weekend in super 8, using E64T. It was shot in a room that had no natural light - the only light there came from work lamps (very tight budget here!) and the fitted lights in the room. The place was aglow - we almost needed sun glasses just to be there, but still we struggled to get a decent exposure reading in the camera. The film came back today and looks great, so obviously it was a correct reading.

 

But i started wondering - and i am pretty much a novice, i've only been into super for about a year and shot as much as i can afford which isn't much - is there some hidden reason behind having a tungsten balanced film that is so slow? To me it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but because it exists i guess there is a reason. Meanwhile the daylight equivalent is faster...

 

Confused and curious...

 

Cheers

 

Martin

[Phil Rhodes]

Because it's super-8 and you need as many grainses as you can possibly get your hands on, and because tungsten lighting is loads cheaper than HMI, and if you're shooting super-8 you probably don't have much money.

 

...I guess.

 

P

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Well it saves you for putting a blue filter on for those outdoor scenes you want to look, blue. And, as Phil mentions, T lighting is a lot cheaper than D lighting, 64 has a lot less grain, and you can expose the film as a daylight stock with an 85 filter which looses a lot less light than if you tried to bring a D stock inside with an 80 filter (the 64T with an 85 filter would be a 2/3 stop correction, so essentially you'd be at 40ASA outside, which is pretty comfortable). Also, it can be a creative choice. One of the reasons I can think to use it, just off of the top of my head, would be if I were in a location which was pretty well illuminated naturally and I wanted it to have a dark feeling with a few points of light really bringing out areas of interest. Now, one could try to bring down the overall light levels in the room, but that is not always necessarily possible, or one can go to a slower film stock, like 100T or 64T or the like, and then add in a few very bright spots here and there.

[Anthony Schilling]

Super 8 64T originated from 35mm still film in 2005. It was supposedly used in 35mm for furniture adds and whatever. With 35mm stills you could use longer exposures a lot easier with such a slow film. When itroduced in S8, it was the closest reversal in speed and balance to replace K40 (40T). Slow films are typically finer grain, but in reality with 64T... the 100D has finer grain in daylight, and even the 500T negative (7218) had finer grain under tunston light from my experience.

[Tom Jensen]

It's mostly used for exteriors with an 85 filter.

[Richard Tuohy]

A synic would say Kodak's choice of 64t for super 8 was intended to use up large quantites of the film they had sitting around in cyrogenic coffers that they had little other use for at the time. This was my impression when they introduced 64t in s8. On the other hand, a replacement for k40 had to come from an existing emulsion line - they couldn't design an entirely new emulsion for super 8 at this stage in s8 history. If it wanted to be tungsten, their choice was 64t, 160t and 320t all from the same generation of film technology. Of these, the 64t was the finest. But nowhere near as fine as the 100d which is from a much later generation of film technology. Now, there are no more tungsten balanced colour reversal emulsions available at Kodak. But they would feel that they have covered tungsten balance with their vision negative stocks. Kodak will always have to think about dividing their market too much with too many options. Still, we are lucky to have the e100d in super 8 now. It is a much better super 8 stock. Just have to use blue gells on your tungsten work lights, or get yourself some daylight fluro lights.

rt

[Martin MacDonald]

Thanks all. Makes sense...

 

and if you're shooting super-8 you probably don't have much money.

Yup!!

[Alessandro Malfatti]

But hey, look at the bright side: You can use an 80 filter on your camera, and have an ASA rating of 25, so when shooting interior you'll get that classic "it needs a metric poop-ton of light because it's color"-look, together with the saturated colors of reversal it can give results that look a bit like the old three strip technicolor: Saturated, about fifty shadows, the obvious blast of light on your subject; you know. What was the rating of the original 3-strip technicolor, like 12 ASA? I think it's a bit of a challenge to go against what this film is good for, exterior filming with a comfortable range of light you can shoot in, from brightest sunlight which you'll barely make at f22, to dusk's twilight, where a 2.8 aperture can at times be achieved, and use it for artificially lit interiors with that ridiculously low sensibility.