Simon Wyss

I beg your pardon, but if one pushes the film will be overdeveloped, not overexposed. What a confusion here !

Best way to destroy a camera is to leave it to the public for a week at an exposition

My, oh, my. 35-mm motion picture film is formatted, it is the oldest movie film format still in use. The picture image size and aspect ratio will be defined by your camera's aperture which typically is 24 by 36 millimeters (8-perf. film advance). Any movie film lab should be prepared to run your 5 feet through the machine since they all add pre-exposed check strips to the rolls in regular intervals. It's more a matter of explaining the contact person that you choose the double sized frame for technical reasons. Sometimes a small present can work more than 10$. Depends also on the gender.

Yes, and concentrate on lighting

Your first question will be answered no as long as we discuss alterations of first development. A true reversal film consists of two mixed preparations: a higher speed and commonly pachromatic sensitized and a low speed unsensitized one. The difference in speed may be of the factor 10 or more. Camera exposure will actually not affect the low speed (fine) grains. Now you can follow every explanation. Push first development results in more contrast and more graininess, push second development which only blackens the residual low speed salts results in higher max density of the positive. Keep in mind that the negative out of first development has a medium gamma value, while the complement of the dissolved and washed-out negative will be a higher gamma picture. The negative-positive procedure can offer more latitude due to the fact that the usable contrast range may be slid between two separate films. The reversal film, strictly spoken, has latitude Zero since processing can only follow the film manufacturer's recommendations plus laboratory experience to produce the best of it. There is just so much silver salt available from one blend emulsion. Exposure is given, so everything comes into form perforce.

Would it be below your dignity to indicate your name in full like everybody else does in the forum? The other question is: What has film processing to do with your goal? I think you mean scanning. I shouldn't have made myself heard here had you not written processed. To process film is to put it into chemical baths and dry it afterwards. Sorry, that's my profession.

There is one rule in the movie thing, only one, but that one must not be broken. Your public will not forgive you in doing it. This is the rule: Guide the spectator, lead, take her and him by the hand, entice them to listen to you, to follow the line of your pictures. One can study that so well with Chaplin. The shots are simple, no camera movements most of the time, but he forces us to enter his ideal realm ever deeper. Do not let a listener down once you have begun to tell a story. It's mutual, they want to hear more of it, you serve and steer at the same time.

Oh, well, no. Your pocket cameras rely on a pressure concept where rather strong side pressure and a short-way back plate brake the film. This because the claw will have to move the entire mass of upper spool and film. Different it is with toothed feed rollers. In the H cameras only a section of the running film, the little mass between feed and take-up sprocket is in play. One cannot compare full-scale constructions with half serious mechanisms, although these 25-ft. spool cameras almost invariably produce remarkable steadiness, I do admit. Servicing will do them good, no doubt, especially the take-up friction demands to be maintained.

If I might stear the attention towards the laboratory section of a film budget: This is a more or less inherent and rigid part of the overall costs. Now I can't understand that cinematographers dont' want to pull a maximum out of it any more. Instead of talking us lab folks into the best of work we can possibly do one fears us, nails us only down to film-out quick-quick-hurry. You always receive solid things from the lab: processing reports, dailies, projection, synch work, grading/timing on an accurate and repeatable base. I say, either you make a film or you don't. When you go chemical then live it!

It's a matter of how much. Since most Double-Eight cameras exerce quite a bit of pressure in the gate the perforation tolerances (deviations) tend to cause worse steadiness compared to higher class mechanism such as with professional cameras. A Mitchell movement can digest rather bad perforation because there is only little pressure (in front of the aperture) so that the film may slip after when the register pins enter the holes. Even better this issue with fixed conic pilot pins like in the Bell & Howell 2709 where the almost free floating film cannot help but being perfectly centered on the pins. I'm not saying anything about silenced (blimped or self-blimped) cameras. Good perforation is genuine. Any reperforated stock is slightly worse. You stand or fall with the combination camera-film. Some have a more effective claw movement, some give too much side pressure, and so on.

Is this guy you?

Far from the topic but close to the title: I'm so amused by «Pubic Enemies».

I am still at work, slow though, with our Gigabitfilm, ISO 40, advertisement short in 35 mm. The stock undergoes reversal treatment but then we need to produce an internegative and positives on Gigabitfilm HDR, ISO 32, for enough contrast on the screen. The original is rather grey and white than black and white. The pictures blow me out the shoes, even the third generation shows no grain.

Hi, George Had you shot on polyester base film and not in CinemaScope the negative assembly were a fun thing to do. Welding machine, you know. I should come to NYC and do the job with Hammann equipment. 2000 splices sounds like five weeks. I am used to work exactly and I have a soft touch.

Mmm, I'd like to close the subject by saying that all film is sensative to light in one way or the other but that filmmakers are far more sensotive.

Can you? Consider how the image is finally displayed. Ambient light with an electr(on)ic monitor, beamer image, LED arrays, front and back projection. We have a consistent environment with darkness alone. We can install a white surface with almost identical properties in any corner of the world with limewash. Our discussion on contrast revolves around the (film) positive. Copies can be made on a variety of stocks. For instance, Orwo LF 2 is a fine grain stock, orthochromatic, on a colourless base. Maximum density around log 5. Or Gigabitfilm HDR 32 which can be brought to any gamma with densities up to log 4.5. One has to know what one wants to show.

Brian, I fully agree with that but things change, though. James & Higgins of EKC are fine, so is The Theory of the Photographic Process edited by Charles Edwin Kenneth Mees, if you know it. The question was: Is there a film which might offer more exposure latitude and react with a useful steepness? One can ignore Gigabitfilm. My answer remains positive. Gigabitfilm is processed with its own very special chemistry. Any gamma between 3 and 0.3 is feasible. The emulsion will always be completely developed out to full density (around log 2.4). So classic theory doesn't hold true any longer. By the way, Gigabitfilm curves have a very short toe portion and then a very long straight one until Dmax. www.gigabitfilm.de

Wait a minute, Karl, I have a camera with a shutter opening of 345.6 degrees which means 96 percent light and 4 percent dark. Video is not closer to 360 degrees. Check under AONDA

First point: wrong. The more contrasty stocks in fact can digest more latitude, up to the contrast of 1 to 10,000 with sound negatives (log D 4 to 5). Second point: Yes, Gigabitfilm. You will be able capture nine stops, a mathematical contrast of 1 to 1024, with it at useful gamma values. But beware, who can take such contrasts to the screen?

Well done, simple and straight. Makes me think about time, about the flurry-hurry of us «normals».

I wait for a producer to decide on a silent again, hand cranked, lit with the sun and carbon arcs. It may be a one-reeler, poetic, black and white, madly made. I wait for someone to rediscover the charme of 16 frames per second projected with three-blade shutters on the projectors, with carbon arc lamps. And no popcorn. Slower, please, slower, more intimate. More upright.

John, will there be any underwater shoots in your film?

I perfectly understand your confusion. It derives from the fact that any given film can be processed in various ways. Let us stay with black and white, because all this does not apply to colour stock where (almost) everything is standardised. Now, as you certainly know, there are different films. One is a highly sensitive rather low-contrasty emulsion, an other one reacts more harshly, and so on. A developing formula given, different stocks may be processed with the identical chemistry and then characteristic photographic curves established. Yet, we must not forget that we can develop a film to a certain contrast while not developing it out to full density. So, a film's contrast range will be defined only when developed out. To change contrast at full density we shall have to employ other chemistry. That is why there are so many formulas, and sometimes somewhat mysterious ones. I have to say, as a lab manager, that the cinematographer needs to develop her or his taste in order to cook or to let others cook. Of course, there is only so and so much contrast to be displayed on the average cinema screen. Starting from the cinema conditions and calculating backwards over the printing process, the camera original and its treatment we finally arrive at certain light(ing) levels for the shoot. That is what I have been teaching in courses since years. Back in the Fourties a director of photography would have called for more or less light with stop 1:5.6 already set. Admittedly there was nothing around like hand held cameras, cinéma vérité, available light filming or more than 200 ISO.

Guillaume, give it five minutes at 20 degrees C, fixation six minutes.

Was in Hollywood, payed a visit to Larry Edmunds Bookshop, and found The Technique of the Motion Picture Camera by H. Mario Raimondo Souto, third edition. Souto writes about the viewfinder system of the Arriflex, that it was developed in 1931 (nineteenthirtyone), two times. First time on page 44, second time on page 108. Now, isn't that an assist? How does this widely travelled member of the SMPTE come to say 1931. And he mentiones Erich Kaestner. Only that Kästner was not with Arnold & Richter before 1933 . . .