Aapo Lettinen

if you have a 16mm rewinder and some core adapters (for example the type of core adapters used in Arri and CP magazines) you can attach cores to it and if being very careful it is possible to wind 35mm film with this type of setup too even without any split reels or platters. I personally use 16mm winder this way for both 16mm and 35mm because I don't have split reels or 35 winder... the film may cone very easily so you have to be careful if winding film with this method. And using the wide 35mm rolls on the narrower adapters may let them fall off relatively easily. But the point is that you can manage without a 35mm winder and split reels if you have to. It is just more challenging and there is some additional risks to the film

hmm then the CP16R starts to sound pretty OK deal if one specifically wants to have the hd video tap and the S16 converted body with a PL mount. One can get Arri SR's for cheaper but when they are converted to S16 and PL mount and video tap added they cost much more. The video tap on that CP16 compensates the slightly worse ergonomics and viewfinder limitations of the camera body. If you only need 24fps crystal speed then it should work pretty well for narrative work I think. Does not work on gimbal use but steadicam and sticks would be OK and it should not be too bad for handheld either I believe

do you mean this package? http://www.visualproducts.com/storeProductDetail02.asp?productID=2053&Cat=17&Cat2=30 It seems to have everything needed for basic shooting. Though if choosing from their inventory I would choose this SR2 for various reasons, especially viewfinder related ones http://www.visualproducts.com/storeProductDetail02.asp?productID=1981&Cat=17&Cat2=30#bigPic . Don't know if it goes over the budget though. The get a affordable PL lens from elsewhere... maybe even a Soviet zoom lens adapted to PL mount if it just fits the camera.

the CP16R is a good camera but both the Aaton LTR and Arri SR are way better than it by my opinion. A bit more expensive as well and you still probably want a PL modified one. Probably you could get the CP16R with S16 and video tap and lens at the same price than the Aaton or Arri without the tap and possibly without a lens

the original unmodified basic packages seem to run at about 2K on eBay with the very basic 12-120 lens. So to me it sounds like it could maybe be about 6K camera package if the lens is pretty basic. There is not many price references though but modifying cameras is always expensive which raises the price and those mods cost a lot to make

Is it PL converted as well and has a video tap? the price depends on the lenses included... if it has good primes then they are worth a lot. It is possible to modify the original CP16R electronics to multi-speed crystal sync where every speed is Crystal and not only the 24fps like in the original model. I am developing this type of modification for my own CP16R at the moment and I believe the AZ Spectrum could do a similar style modification as well. Just saying so that you know it is possible to repair a electronically non-working CP16R as well if you find one for cheap and there is no mechanical problems with it or the mechanical problems can be solved relatively easily... this could save you some money though the camera would probably still need the video tap and S16 modification etc. I calculated that I should be able to make the new electronics for about 1K or a little less

Hi you all! I am going to make an adapter to fit different type of lenses (I was thinking B4) to my CP16R because original lenses are not easily available and I'm thus looking for the exact FFD of the original CP16R lens mount. Does anyone happen to know the exact FFD of that mount? by quickly measuring it was somewhere around 40mm or so but one would need .01mm accurate to be able to work on the adapter ? I can take the other mount dimensions from the lens cap at reasonable accuracy.

I am developing a "universal crystal motor" system as well which is just a basic simple brushed dc motor with encoder and control electronics installed which can be fitted to different camera bodies by the end user... by making the mechanical fitting by yourself one could install this to different camera bodies with reasonable amount of work. This may be handy if you want to save on costs and the system does not need to be perfectly optimized in size and weight for every camera body (which would require designing it from ground up every time and choosing different components for every different version like using different type of motor and speed selector interface for every camera. that is pretty expensive) . I am just choosing motors for this system, let me know if you are interested in having one ?

you can ask AZ-Spectrum about the modification possibilities as well http://www.az-spectrum.com/acl.html

by "new" you mean completely new or modifying an existing Eclair motor to work with it? One can use either a carbon brush DC motor or a brushless motor as a base for crystal sync motor. Brushless is smaller and higher power compared to weight and size but the control electronics are more complicated to make which is why I am making one-off modifications only to carbon brush motors where the circuitry is easier to design and manufacture. If you can fit and couple a brushed or brushless motor mechanically to your ACL then it is possible to make that motor run in Crystal Sync no problem. If it is not supposed to be mass produced (being a one-off modification) I would use a brushed motor for the task to save lots of design work and costs and especially time. You need to know the approximate power the motor needs to be in Watts. And need to figure out then how to couple it to the camera mechanically. The motor needs some kind of encoder disc which is used to get RPM feedback for the Crystal system. You need to know the gear ratio between the motor and the camera as well so that it is possible to calculate what the actual motor RPM would be for each frame rate. You can usually figure out the gear ratio just by marking the input axle and turning it watching the shutter and calculating revolutions needed per frame. You need to also figure out which framerate presets and possible additional features you would need and what type of user interface the motor would have to select different speeds (buttons, switches, rotary switch, thumbwheels, display+buttons, etc.) After having this information it would be possible for you to fit the motor mechanically to the camera and leave the electronics part to someone specialised in that. These systems need custom programming and circuit designing and the boards can be challenging to manufacture and assemble and fine tune, so it is easiest to concentrate on the mechanical part and outsource the electronics stuff :) If your original ACL motor has the brushed motor itself and the mechanics still working, then it would be possible to just update the control electronics and keep the rest of the motor original. This would save lots of mechanical work so would be cheaper

with the magazine costing about 2k or 2.5k when David could make a whole new camera for 5k? sounds very economic :D

one of the issues with Aaton XTR and similar style cameras is that they are not very gimbal friendly. Nowadays one would want to have the possibility to mount one's new expensive S16 camera any way one likes and the very long magazine of the XTR combined with the mass distribution of the camera body does not make it the best choice for modern filmmaking all the time. Maybe if there would be more mag options. The issue was that one needs to have very high build quality on the new camera. Whether it is a copy of the existing Aaton designs or a completely new 2020 design. It does not make it any cheaper if it is a copy of the old cameras if the build quality has to be the same unless one has a supply of readily made old camera parts and can just custom make a few new pieces to get the system working. If one needs to manufacture all the parts to build the camera, there would be more sense to just design a completely new camera and make that instead like the OP was already doing. Then one would get rid of that old mag design as well

People can make anything if it is paid for beforehand.... A dream to come true S16 camera as well if there would be enough backers. It would be possible to make dslr fo factor or slightly larger Amira too. It just needs making very complex custom signal processing circuitry which is too expensive to make to a camera only sold in quantity of hundreds or thousands. It is basically ASIC vs. FPGA where the fpga's are used for low quantity products like cine cameras and asic for large volume product like dslr. The asic is much more energy efficient and thus needs less power and less cooling which makes the camera smaller. This is why the current mirrorless cameras can have cine capable image quality and raw video with fraction of the power requirements and size compared to similar cine camera. And still be cheaper

I would expect that at least 200 cameras would need to be pre-ordered in the first batch to cover all the costs and to make the manufacturing process economic and automated enough so that it lowers the price of the mechanical parts even a little bit. Maybe more. If the movement is complicated and the film transport is anything else than the very simplest one, then it would be uncertain if the 1k price range would work at all. I would expect this type of design to be in the 2500 to 3000 USD range for the body and one magazine depending on the features and the manufacturing batch sizes and the overall quality of the design. But like Heikki and others said before, the custom mechanical parts are very very challenging to get for peanuts. That is why modifying existing cameras tends to be much cheaper than building completely new ones... you don't need every gear and axle and claw and fitting to be custom made. Magic bullets can happen in the electronic world but in the physical world it is much harder to make miracles especially if they need to be cheap. And one can't build good cameras without making most of the film transport with traditional mechanical parts which need to be good enough quality to make it steady and functional

it does not sound there would be anything which could be patented in that design but as long as someone isn't willing to copy the full design with similar manufacturing quality but being much cheaper, you should be fine. This type of designs are ones where people will want to use the original product, not some Chinese copy which is uncertain in quality and reliability. Maybe you should make a Kickstarter project out of it and see if you can collect enough backers to make the system possible? I don't believe that the body itself could be mass produced for that low price if it needs to be good quality but you never know. As for the additional speeds, one could most likely just use the same motor and run a external speed reference signal to the system to get different framerates. Selling complete extra motors would be unnecessary unless the camera is capable of very high framerates and the additional motor would be for those (for example the normal internal motor being capable of from 8 to 50fps and the external motor would allow from 24 to 150 fps for example). Though with a clever design and some work you could just build all the extra speed in the main camera body without bumping up the price of it much. The user interface may take some space though which would make the camera a little bit larger compared to a single speed version. Depends on the interface you use and if it has a display or not. One could think of a design which resembles the Photo Sonics 1VN a bit. A sideways L-shaped body with the shutter and motor on the body but the whole film transport is built into the magazines. The camera body itself is simpler and more affordable but every single magazine costs a fortune. Way to make lots of money out of it! ? (maybe the Photo Sonics is not the best reference for a affordable camera. they are clearly built to very high standards and were crazy expensive back then. Movements made like Swiss clocks and the electronics top notch too. My 1VN has very freaky motor cables which are nothing I have ever seen before, I think the wire is made out of silver or some other very different metal than is normally used for in-camera wires. best of the best for the government which had endless money supply ? )

I have a nice little Excel sheet which I use to verify the frequency calculations if needed. Here it is used to calculate the CTC countermatch value between 1/10th frame increments. As you can see one can't get 5 decimal accuracy for every and all speeds, that is mathematically impossible

By my opinion it is too much hassle for very little real benefit (at normal temperatures even the lowest quality normal crystals can generate a reference signal which is accurate by 4 decimals and the camera mechanics itself or the phase locking algorithm is not capable of doing any better than 3 decimals. The 4 decimal accuracy is barely detectable by instruments and one would definitely not see the difference in the final image. keep also in mind that the 16-bit ctc used for frequency generation does not divide all frequencies at exact accuracy and the 4th decimal is often a little off for this reason. that can't really be helped because it is mathematically impossible to divide all the frequencies by 5 or 6 decimal accuracy) . I can test how the current crystals behave in high and low temperatures but I am pretty sceptical that a extremely stable and accurate clock is really needed for this application (or atomic clock like the gps referenced system) . It is a marketing point which sounds nice but is it actually more useful? most likely not. ------------ It is, however, possible to wire a tcxo oscillator afterwards in place of the normal crystal if someone really wants it. I will need to add extra components anyway to make the tcxo work correctly with the 328 so I could just make a small additional circuit board which has its own power regulator and other parts, the oscillator and which outputs its signal to the same clock input pin of the controller than a normal crystal would. Then I could outsource the problem of the microscopic parts to the additional circuit board so it is less risky and more fun to assemble the system and I could use different style of parts according to the customer's needs.

The problem is, if you want to have a CHEAP, SILENT and SYNC SOUND CAPABLE camera for peanuts you are totally screwed and the options are extremely limited. Sync Sound Capable can be done for cheap but Silent as well? in most cases, no. There is lots of very basic 16mm camera models which have a "wild" motor or a centrifugal regulator for motor speed like in Kiev16 etc cameras. Or even electronically stabilised ones like some Bolex and Beaulieu and Arri models. If the camera already has a electric motor it can usually be relatively easily modified to crystal sync by either using the original motor or replacing it with a different motor. Usually these modifications are mechanically easy because very few new mechanical parts need to be machined. If you would want to crystal sync modify a camera which does not have any electric motor originally, then it may involve very signifiant effort to design and machine all the extra mechanical parts needed to get it work. Modifying a camera to crystal sync does not make it silent though. And making it silent, cheap and still easily usable for normal work may be so much effort that the project needs to be abandoned. The movements and other mechanics in cameras like the K3 are just too noisy and require enormous blimping efforts to even try to make it work for any kind of sync sound shooting. And then it is big and heavy and awkward, it may be difficult to focus and see anything from the viewfinder and load the camera and so on. The specific problems in most originally MOS cameras are that they are mechanically noisy to begin with and no one has thought back then that one would want to use electric motor with them so they don't support it and you need signifiant (often time consuming and expensive) modifications to make it work at all. If wanting the old camera to be relatively affordable, capable of sync sound, modern enough to have usable lens mount options and reflex finder and still low noise there is not many other models one could use other than the Eclair NPR and ACL and the Cinema Products CP16R. The Aaton LTR or XTR and the Arri SR series would be great for low budget use but they are so expensive now that they are most likely out of reach. Cameras like Kinor16CX-2M would be otherwise great (pin registered, easy to convert to S16, good quality affordable lenses) but they are very noisy compared to those Aaton/Arri/Cinema Products cameras and additionally they are pretty rare nowadays so one would most likely not find one in good condition even if wanting to purchase one. So what one can do if not wanting to build a totally new camera from scratch?? One of the options would be to purchase old Auricon cameras to get the movement and some other important mechanics and then build a new camera body around them with spinning mirror shutter and EF or PL mount. I don't know how ideal that is but the movement itself is pretty good, the CP16R uses most of the same film transport. May be problematic to get the shutter angle anywhere near to 180° though. And it is much easier to try to get a non-working CP16R for cheap and just update the electronics to return it back to work. Or to purchase the Eclair camera if one happens to find one which is in good condition and is affordable

I actually like SMD soldering. it depends on what kind of footprints you have used for the parts... much nicer if they are "handsoldering" style with slightly longer pads so that one can take advantage of the surface tension of the solder. but most of the oscillator parts are not really meant for hand soldering and are a pain to work with by my opinion. All the normal crystals I have tested have been able to keep frequency accuracy of the camera accurate by at least 4 decimals so the accuracy of the crystal is better than the mechanical accuracy of an old camera system even if it's properly serviced. So in the most cases it is not necessary to use really accurate oscillators because you won't see any difference at all. Maybe if freezing the camera to -30°C or -40°C but most of the cameras don't work in that range anyway and one rarely sees that kind of conditions anywhere where sync sound shooting is actually needed (too cold for actors and crew)

About the sound recording system I am developing for this camera. I checked the possibilities yesterday and most likely I will adapt the camera's original Auricon magnetic head to optical recording by removing the magnetic sound heads first and then building my own variable density optical head in place of them. The largest challenge is avoiding spill from the light beam to fog the rest of the film in the chamber so I will need to do lots of prototyping and testing. The main purpose for optical variable density sound is that one would get a scratch audio track which helps syncing when shooting documentary style material. I will use a external digital recorder for the final recording when making my own projects but a scratch audio track enables storing timecode information or a analog scratch track on the film which enables shooting without clapperboard 1-man band style and helps saving film stock. I have couple of documentary projects which would benefit a lot from this in-camera sound feature. A person who shoots for direct projecting can use the system for recording the final audio track directly on the film in camera. Price range of the optical sound recording feature will be under 1k but will need to make the full prototype first to determine the exact details. I will need to make a compensating system which varies the exposure according to the framerate and the sound quality needs to be reasonably good too.

the issue with most of the tcxo smd oscillators available here is that they are so small that it is challenging to solder them reliably with my tools. By small I mean the whole oscillator being from 2mm to 3.2mm in length and from 1.6mm to 2mm wide with 4 pads to connect to the circuit board. Additionally most models have the operating voltage around 3 to 3.6 volts max. when the 328 or other microcontroller I use needs to run at 5 volts to support the clock frequency of close to 20MHz. So I have to arrange the around 3 to 3.2V regulator for the oscillator separately and additionally deal with a very small component which is challenging to solder in place (and I need a microscope to verify if it's properly soldered or not) . So this is why crystals + smd capacitors has been much easier route for me than using smd tcxo oscillators (I have some but no design uses them yet. Some designs use those old Seiko VG-101JA though because one can divide usable frequencies from those directly using only a single binary ripple counter and nothing else)

oh I though you meant those serial controlled frequency generation modules. I use small-ish smd oscillators in some designs (for example one of the earliest designs was based on the Seiko VG-101JA 2.048MHz oscillator divided by binary counters and a bcd counter to frequencies of 125Hz, 160Hz, 250Hz, 320Hz and 500Hz at the same time and an additional 32kHz signal which is used as a sawtooth wave source of a analog PWM circuit) . Due to packaging options and price I am mostly using tht packaged crystals if a very specific frequency is needed (for example 2.4576MHz) or sometimes smd ones if the system is using microcontroller and ctc for frequency generation so I will just need to have some high frequency like 16MHz to work with. Though I like to use tht crystals for 16MHz as well because they are slightly easier to work with. Most of the other parts like all the resistors and capacitors and most of the microcontrollers are smd.

I like to use basic binary counters and bcd counters when only a couple of easily divided frequencies are needed and if it happens to be beneficial in other ways to. And when a more challenging speed is needed I am using a microcontroller running CTC program based which divides the frequency from the crystal the microcontroller uses for timing, mostly on the hardware level. In the case of this CP16R system, I am going to use only microcontroller (ctc) based frequency generation but it makes most sense to use my own software instead of choosing a factory made Chinese module for this. This is because it is easier to build the user interface for the system with minimal parts when I am making everything from ground up. I can eliminate most of the extra parts like additional microcontrollers which communicate with the Chinese module via serial connection. It sounds like it is more work to make everything from ground up but in this case it is beneficial and for me it is even slightly easier than to try to adapt an existing module to work with the system. The frequency generation is pretty easy after all and when building everything by myself I am able to choose all the parts I want to use for every design. Starting from choosing the crystals I will use and in which package every single part comes in :)

I started a new thread to document the progress with the CP16R crystal sync project. I will post updates of the sound system there as well when starting to work with it ? https://cinematography.com/index.php?/topic/85619-making-new-crystal-sync-electronics-for-cp16r/

I finally got a cheap enough CP16R to start working with my own Crystal Sync update for it. The original camera has the only available Crystal speed of either 24fps or 25fps depending on the gears used. All the other speeds are made with a RC oscillator which is not accurate enough for sync sound work and some of the available speed presets are not very practical. I am going to make a completely new Crystal Sync system for this camera which allows setting ANY crystal speed from about 10fps to about 40fps in 1/1000fps increments. All speeds crystal and accurate. So one can easily set the camera to all the speeds one likes and one can get 23.976fps as well as 24.000, 25.000 and 29.98fps with the same camera. I will update work-in-progress videos on YouTube. You can follow my channel A Lettinen or this thread for updates. The first video where I just briefly opened the camera and tested that the motor itself is working correctly and the mechanics are OK. I will remove all the original circuit boards and speed selector etc. and will build completely new electronics to the camera. So this update is possible for cameras which have broken original boards as long as the motor itself and the mechanical parts are intact. Part 1: opening the camera and testing the motor and mechanics