How Do I Know If My Film is Single or Double Perf Whist Reading the Canister and/or Cartridge?

[Owen A. Davies]

Just bought a 400ft foot spool of expired Kodak Vision 2 200T film off of eBay to use for my Super 16 camera only to realize the film is double perf. I went to read the canister to see if I missed that detail before buying only the come to the realization that I never once saw film being labeled as single or double perf on any canister or cartridge before. Is there any way to tell what you're getting before you buy your film? (Off third party sites like eBay that is).

Edited January 28, 2022 by Owen A. Davies

[Travis Shannon]

Double perf=2r

Single perf= 1r

The Kodak motion picture buying guide/price list has a very helpful segment on how to read cans.

[Charles MacDonald]

https://www.kodak.com/content/products-brochures/Film/How-to-read-a-Kodak-film-can-label.pdf

will give you what the label means.

if you get the kodak price catalog, it has a listing of current and recent "sp" numbers.  these are a decription of each type of roll that Kodak sells.  I clipped a part of the table for 16mm film to give you an idea of the contents.  the can will show for example  "sp457" or the film type like DXN457.  the same SP number may be available in different lengths.

 

[Nicholas Kovats]

No one is stating the obvious. You can shoot your 2-perf 16mm film stock purchase in your 1-perf Super 16mm camera. And not the other way around. 

Edited January 31, 2022 by Nicholas Kovats

[Duncan Brown]

14 minutes ago, Nicholas Kovats said:

No one is stating the obvious. You can shoot your 2-perf 16mm film stock purchase in your 1-perf Super 16mm camera. And not the other way around. 

I think the point is that if you shoot 2-perf in your Super 16mm camera, you're going to have holes in your lovely wide images.

Duncan

[Nicholas Kovats]

The perf dimensions nor orientation nor positions of the sprockets change for R16 to S16 conversions. It is the gate that is machined. 

[Duncan Brown]

On 1/30/2022 at 9:05 PM, Nicholas Kovats said:

The perf dimensions nor orientation nor positions of the sprockets change for R16 to S16 conversions. It is the gate that is machined. 

Correct.  It is machined in such a way that light from the lens will expose that portion of 2R film that has perfs in it.  So while you can physically run double-perf film just fine in a S16 camera, you aren't going to be very happy with the results.

Duncan

[Dom Jaeger]

1 hour ago, Duncan Brown said:

Correct.  It is machined in such a way that light from the lens will expose that portion of 2R film that has perfs in it.  So while you can physically run double-perf film just fine in a S16 camera, you aren't going to be very happy with the results.

Duncan

Yes, you would get half-perf holes in your image at the top and bottom of the right side.  You would need to crop top and bottom to about a 2:1 aspect ratio to get rid of them, a loss of about 1.2mm in height. Or crop it back to a R16 frame. Depending on the image brightness and how reflective the pressure plate was, you might also get some light bleeding into the image area around the perfs too.