Geoff Howell

SUCCESS! just got the films back from telecine! Everything came out great apart from some quite bizarre over exposure problems with a Fujica AX100 in an underwater housing; the camera seemed to be fine above water but as soon as it went under (even just a few inches with more than enough available light) everything would become incredibly over exposed and out of focus. any ideas as to why this might be happening? presumably it must be a problem with the meter?

6 years can't be right can it? about three years ago I was looking to retrain as a colorist and was sitting in on lots of telecine sessions in order to learn Da Vinci; there was tons of super 16 from various TV dramas. I don't like it but I can sort of see where the BBC was coming from when they banned 16mm. The faster more grainy stocks do look pretty nasty when heavily compressed to mpeg4; and while there are plenty of really affective tools for reducing said grain; I'm guessing the fast turn around for much of the TV work didn't allow time for these to be put to use. I remember an operator complaining whenever there was a take with a hair in the gate, apparently these could be very easily salvaged through a number of different methods but they would just move on to the next hair-less take because of tight time constraints

just heard from the the lab, the film should be back in a couple of weeks; fingers crossed. in the mean time I've just bought a job lot of expired r25n (various dates between 2003 and 2009), not sure how it's been stored but I've shot 5year out of date un-stored Tri-x with no problems (there's also plenty of example's of 20yr old+ un-stored K40 on Youtube) and given the slow speed of r25n plus the fact I only paid around £15 for 550ft of film I figured It was worth a look. regarding the modifying of the single8 cores, I've been reading a Japanese film blog which mentions the reloaded Cinevia films jamming and how this could be alleviated by only loading around 30ft of film instead of 40ft. so it looks like any attempts to improve the cartridge capacity could be counter productive.

if anyone has any single 8 R25n or RT200n they'd like to sell I'd very much like to hear from you. even just a couple of cartridges would be most usefull thanks

I'm not sure, would I be correct in assuming all the Kodak film is produced using the same (or at least very similar) base? From what I've heard the Fuji stills films that are being re-cut and re-perfed for Single 8 are on an even thicker base than the Kodak stock and have been known to jam in some of the lower end/smaller cameras; dose anyone here have any experience of that? I've been shooting tests with a P2 and AX100, the P2 seams happy enough with the film moving through the gate with no problems (as far as I can see), the AX100 tends to jam when first loaded but seems ok once it gets going.

yeah, learning to process at home is definitely on the to do list. For the time being though I've sent the film to the Super8 Reversal Lab in the Netherlands; fingers crossed! next up (if my test films are a success) will be trying to improve the capacity of the Fuji cartridges, I read that I should be able to cram about 40ft into them but don't think I'm getting anywhere near that; maybe around 30 at a stretch. Having examined the cartridges in detail; the cores on to which the film is wound seem to be a bit on the needlessly big side. reducing their diameter by about 3mm should free up enough room for around 20/30 seconds of footage at 18fps. I'll wait and see what comes back from the lab before I spend anymore time on this

thanks everyone! lots to think about. with regards to emptying the cartridges on to spools; as long as the emulsion is facing outwards dose it make a difference what way round the film is wound? what I mean is once the film is exposed I'll be winding it out from the cartridge's take up spool and on to an empty 50ft spool resulting with the end(last frames to pass through the camera) being at the center of the 50ft spool. This would be the opposite to when I send 16mm for processing with the start of the film being at the center of the spool.

Thanks, this had indeed crossed my mind and there's an arts council funded lab that dose courses in diy processing quite close to me. however I'd rather stick with sending the film off to a lab for the time being as I'm still finding my feet with regards to testing out Kodak film with my single 8 cameras and adding DIY processing into the equation will potentially complicate things.

For the past week or so I’ve been experimenting with loading Tri-X and Vision3 50D in to very old single 8 cartridges. My technique is pretty straight forward; I simply pull the out of date 1960’s/1970’s Fuji film out of the cartridge, cut it at both ends (leaving about an inch attached to the spools) I then use tape splices to attach the Kodak film and wined it back in to the single 8 cartridge (in a changing bag of coarse), so far it seems to be working pretty well! I’m putting about 25ft of film in to each cartridge as the thickness of the Kodak base doesn’t allow for fitting a full 50ft into a Fuji cartridge. So, as it stands the contents of 1 super8 cart = 2 single 8 carts. My question is: dose anyone have any suggestions about the best way of having my reloaded cartridges processed? My first concern is about potentially having to pay for processing per cartridge and not per foot of film (like I would with 16mm) , this would effectively double my lab costs; while I don’t at all mind doing this for my test films; in the long term this doesn’t make much financial sense. Would it be worth my while to empty my exposed film on to one big spool, stick it in a can and send that to the lab instead of a stack of reloaded cartridges? If I were to do this what would be the preferred method of joining the separate lengths of film together? Would I be correct in my assumption that tape splices would be at risk of dissolving in the baths? Also, on a slightly unrelated note, dose anyone know what's going on with single 8 in general? Wittner has sold out of all their color stock and has no current plans to get any more, Retro Enterprises (are they still open???) seems to also be out of stock although there’s something on their Japanese website about more coming soon, dose anyone know anything about this? thanks

perhaps it's worth swapping out the bulb for an LED light source

sad but hardly surprising. IMHO they really needed to have made a MK2 non- proprietary memory card version of the camera. The cost and spec of memory/hard disks etc is constantly falling; who on earth wants to be tied in to a system that only uses specially made, extremely expensive media

Here you go: http://vimeo.com/7795956 Skip to about the half way mark. You should definitely track down some of the mk1 pre 1970's cartridges; they're so easy to open up compared to the later models. I've managed to collect about 6 of them (mostly through ebay) that I plan on using once my supply of r25n runs out. Also be aware that single 8s notch system is way more complicated than super 8, there are in fact 3 completely independent notch's on each cartridge; each designed to work with a different type of camera. For instance, a camera like a fujica P2 will read the notch located on the underside of the cartridge but a fujica AX100 will only read the notch on the left hand side of the cartridge.

I'm a bit confused about this whole thing: are their guidelines only aimed at content produced in-house or dose it cover independent productions also? Is the 'no 16mm' policy just a 'we won't pay for content to be shot on film' policy or is it a blanket banning which would forbid the broadcasting of films like Hurt Locker and Moonrise Kingdom?

I want some engineering genius to build me a miniature Vista-Vision type deal based around a super8 cartridge. like a regular super8 camera except the cartridge is loaded on its side and the pull-down claw has a much longer stroke moving 4 perfs per frame! Of course you would only get around 37 seconds of film before having to reload, and how such film would be scanned or projected is a bit beyond me.......... ok, I'll admit it I haven't thought this through very well :wacko:

I was quite excited about this however, I'm not sure why they are so reticent to put decent resolution samples on their website, the sample clips they've uploaded are really terribly encoded so it's impossible to get any sort of feel for what the machine is capable of.

it apparently uses a ccd, has 12 stops DR and will go up to 50fps at 1080i cheerio BMC mk1 pre-order!

As long as the green screen is very very evenly lit with no shadows it should work. However the overall quality of the key that you'll be able to pull from 16mm remains to be seen; I'm just not sure it has the sufficient definition to get the nice well defined edges you'll need for compositing. Back in the day when effects people were still using film the rule of thumb seemed to be to use the largest format you could get your hands on, ILM had vista vision, EEG/Boss used 65mm

Ha! you're right! They've just updated their website:

dose anyone have any experience with an outfit based in Lille called 'Super 8 France'? unless I'm mistaken they seem to offer processing for Fuji R25n in house with a three week turnaround Also, dose anyone know of anywhere in Europe where I can order some single 8 Cinevia 100D? A friend is going to South Africa next month and I was wanting to lend her my as yet unused Marine8, getting film for the thing is proving to be an uphill struggle :(

what's the registration on your footage like? the only loading error I've ever had that resulted in focus issues also resulted in the film bouncing around: not a crazy amount but similar to what you see in a lot of super8 footage.

If you're wanting to make a fast buck in renting out; the C300 is the way forward. Everyone had a good laugh at this camera when it was announced at the same time as the Red Scarlet but in the past year I've seen a huge amount of footage from the Canon pass through the edit suites at work and not a single frame from the Scarlet.

I think people would experiment with whatever they had to hand, I know on Picnic at Hanging Rock they used materiel from an old wedding dress to create that dreamy, soft diffused look, and on 2001 A Space Odyssey the visual effects department used a pair of really old 1930's womens tights to create the diffused glow around the planets and stars, I believe Kubrick referred to this material as a 'pre-war gauze'

this thing just appeared on Filmshooting.com. The only thing that interests me about it is the fact that it's sprocket-less, other than that the small reel capacity, fact it spits out jpegs and won't in it's current state scan negatives limits it's usefulness to me. Also, if you're going to design a sprocket-less machine why not make it compatible with both super8 and 16mm?

interesting, I wonder if this is a non-issue for the folks repackaging 35mm stills film into super8 cartridges as presumably they can make adjustments to the pressure plate within the actual cartridges

Just to clarify when you say 'hand-cranked' do you mean like a Lumiere brothers type thing? or do you mean a camera with a clockwork motor (like a Bolex) that needs to be wound up or 'cranked'? If the prior; you won't be able to find a hand-cranked super8 camera as the format was only invented in the 1960's. However, I'm sure with some expert 'MacGyver-ing' a super8 camera could be adapted for such an operation! are you familiar with the Lomokino? Also, it's possible to shoot 16mm for around the same cost as super8 (sometimes cheaper!) but there are a number of factors you need to take in to account.