Simon Wyss

Oh, now I'm feeling sorry for you. $ 500 for such a Bolex, not more!

If the opticals are not mint, don't touch such a camera. A second thing is the mechanism. Most Bolex cameras are dry, i. e. they were not well enough administered. The steel axles can wear out their bronze bearings, especially the one most important claw joint.

Believe me, I know some about movie apparatus. He who sells a camera has never owned it. You let go your well maintained camera only reluctantly and then for a solid price. Correct, a cine camera can be taken as a thing like a bike but also as an instrument. An instrument may not be tuned. Only, when the frame is cracked you cannot tune your piano any longer.

As my grandfather used to say: The dot on the i of a woman's beauty is her nose.

http://25frames.org/php_personen/show_person.php?p_id=597

We have a Debrie Matipo 35 from the early 1920s with the WRR light control incorporated. We don't have a step printer with 8-perf pull and VV aperture. But again, our facility is closed. I am planning to move to America to start a new old lab there.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Let the eyes be our eyes and lenses be technical imitations, Imitation of Life.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052918/

The physical f-stop limit is f0.5, which is one stop faster than the famous planar used by Kubrick.

The theoretical limit is f 0.5, in practice one ends at f 0.53 where the light is just grazing the front element. F 0.7 is already very tricky to compute. An alternative is the mirror lens.

In 2004 I've been asked to set up an endless 16-mm film projection for Kunstmuseum Basel. The print went 106 seconds at 24 fps. Upon inspection of a worn acetate print I found out that the action lasted only five seconds. It was repeatedly printed from looped negative.

They had a Japanese projector, a quick shifter, which hacks into the perforation. So I offered a better construction, a Siemens & Halske 2000. A looping device on top of the projector conceived by a Frenchman was left there and the film threaded straight through it. Nobody would see that there was only a three-foot length laced up. This time I had access to a polyester-base positive.

I joined the ends with pressure-sensitive transparent tape, lubricated the film and had it run at 24 fps for seven weeks, six days the week, from 10 a. m. to 5 p. m. The splice broke exactly three times (its purpose as protecting measure for the whole). No wear whatsoever on that sniplet after 211,680 (two-hundred-eleven-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty) runs.

Of course, a longer copy will not last that much because of more dust collecting on it due to static charge. Scratches must be expected.

I am a student and i have always problems coming in. So here i go again:

 

I understand about the shutter speed. Mainly i have worked in still cameras and i understand what they do in still cameras. But how shutter speed works in video (I mainly work on Sony 250 P). How shutter speed works with frame rate fps?

Some one please explain this a bit.

I'd better keep my mouth shut because my knowledge of video is from the days when one referred to the thing as video. What I know is this: NTSC and PAL television have a line duration of 64 μs, read-out duration of 12 μs, so the horizontal image duration is 52 μs. You have a vertical ratio of 92 % to 8 % between picture and dark gray non-picture which can be understood as what a physical shutter would cover.

With wet gate, the lab can do good answer prints to time out or in many things but with optical printing how much leeway is there?

Hoping I understood you well: Optical copying bears the crux of increasing contrast (Callier effect) but today this poses no more problems. Eastman 5272/7272 produces pretty soft internegatives. In Black and white we can go as low as gamma 0.3 today in order to counterbalance contrast build-up.

The rest is same as with contact work, dry or wet.

What is the technology that produces this RGB light? Is it lasers or LED's? In the old days when I knew something about printers, it was an incandescent source split out by dichroics into RGB, controlled, then re-combined.

-- J.S.

We have a high power L. E. D. that emits Red, Green, and Blue nearly from one point. This is helpful inasmuch it can also be placed rather close to the aperture. A long throw is optically more convenient but not feasible with all printer makes.

The prism block consists of two glass elements cemented together with Canada balm. Do not try to open.

How much did you pay for the camera ?

Hello, Monica

Welcome here !

Color? I filmed in B&W and filtered out everything below 600nm.....

That relieves us of trouble. <_< No, honest, I don't hope you had blank negatives.

This forum seems to be full of **(obscenity removed)** heads... I don't get why so many people on here get pissed off about others using 35 mm rigs in the digital realm, just sounds like jealousy to me, the idea of normal people now being able to afford and shoot professional looking video because your still stuck in the past with your outdated camera rigs (probably still using film?) trying to justify it with 'skill is more important'. Skill is more important, but get off your **(obscenity removed)**ing high horse, if you think 35 mm in the digital world is just a trend, you're wrong buddy, it's the present/future.

What concerns me: I'm not jealous. It's rather anxiety that I have to discuss matters with people who are not in touch with the past. But I'm not in the digital realm and know only very little about data compression and things like that. I have perforated chemical film in my hands.

Hey, great! In case the Jap doesn't want to serve you any longer switch to your cell phone or MP3 player which should allow HiFi recording. I'm not too good in these things.

I guess you saw this with Alphacine:

Q. Sound Transfers

1/4" or DAT to 16mm fullcoat or 35mm edit stripe is available at $45/hr. There is a half hour minimum and sound stock is not included in the hourly rate.

Have fun.

There we are in full discussion. I'd support a wide film section.

Look, additive colo(u)r printing has to be understood in connection with the films, i. e. Red-Green-Blue are distinct fields within the spectrum. With subtractive printing you employ Cyan-Magenta-Yellow filters for which must be said: Cyan lies between blue and green. Yellow is quite a narrow band between green and red. But Magenta does not exist as a light colour. You won't find it in sunlight. It is half red, half blue - two colours that are way apart from each other. A transparent magenta filter lets simply pass red and blue. Our eye-brain complex understands this as a colour. Balancing is therefore much more intractable and has always been.

Manufacturers would have designed their -color materials for red, green and blue since 1950.

You can't develop quarter points out of -color stocks. The corridor given by Eastman Kodak which one can keep up embraces about two points like between 24 and 26. So the customer sees his precision sunk in the suppleness of the combination film-chemistry. We more or less beat around the bush while still maintaining varying batches within one printer point.

Chemistry changes? The most important factor is time, then comes agitation, next temperature and last composition. The film does more to the process than the baths do. You understand that it is a simple task to control time. Agitation remains constant in a given machine. Temperatures tend to change at slow paces.

We now know that the printer light output is pretty constant. There is nothing else we can do than have test strips processed and measured. Densitometer readings are "calculated" back: It's collected data to show the degree of change necessary to parameters. One method to clear out chemistry faults is to replace the developer as a whole, I mean dump one after the other like with one-shot preparations.

We must not confuse different things. I find it hard to accept the approach of perfection when we're at dailies and first answer and soon after negligence when a picture goes into series. What the paying public is served can be sort of different from what the director saw.

No trick specialist runs out of a batch of duplicating stock during a given production. Such a man is a beginner, although it's been reported that funny things have been sold to producers. He who manages to persuade a cinematographer into his mistake is a genius and I am looking for that man.

Hoping everything is totally unclear now, I'm going to bed.

Don't you, Karl, think I'm a metric guy. I've been raised on foot and inch and line.

Glen, it was crystal clear to me from the beginning that the films run in perpendicular fashion. What stirred me up to some slight extent is your request for 5-perf 65mm print. Projectionists will refuse 65mm prints. VistaVision furthermore has the picture image aspect ratio of 1:1.85 whereas Todd-A. O. 70 mm is standardised to 1:2.2(5).

But it is a pleasure to dream of a brand new printer that is going to occupy another room for a single order of 4000'.

about .8 mile, ~4000ft, oh yeah and the B roll will be a DTS timecode track.

Now, let's see - $ 200,000 to build the machine everything included divided by 4000 equals $ 50 the foot.

Serious, you can't find anybody who did that job, can you ?

How about wet gate from VV to 5-perf 65mm print?

How many miles are we talking of ?

You're not meaning that you don't do any sensitometric control work, right? Not every batch of print stock (or negative stock, reversal stock, light sensitive printing paper, etc) is exactly the same. I have to think that you must still do density and linearization checks every so often to keep all of your systems working together properly.

Of course we countercheck raw stock. The trimming goes optically (condensor). Let me add that also r-g-b are of very constant wavelengths. Deviations have been a dispute subject with other people of the branch here in Europe, and when I wanted to explain that I regard them (deviations) as variables of the processing, not of light or manufacture origin, imagine what storm broke out. Our WRR printer light control system seems to be too precise for some colleagues.

I know someone who pushed a 35 mm Photo-Sonics up to over 400 fps . . .

Q. Is there any new technology with printers at all ?

A. Well, yes. We have replaced the incandescent bulb by an r-g-b gun that reproduces light amounts exactly from day to day and over years. When you order 25-25-25 you get 25-25-25. This printer light control actually replaces a sensitometer. The accuracy lies within fractures of the thousandth of unit. You have 50 steps. With a 0 no light is emitted. And then you have complete freedom with programming. You may want 34-28-11 for frame 1, 49-2-17 for frame 2, whatever. You can introduce a flash effect by entering 0-0-0 for frame 15,367. Frame 15,367 will receive no light and thus be blank after processing.

There are no more limitations to editors. Cuts can be literally only one frame long. A programme holds up to 32,000 values for each printing light colour. We deal with Excel files.

Q. What is the working speed of the printer ?

A. Step printers can be run at changing speeds between 1 and 25 frames per second.

Q. Can you repeat sequences ?

A. Oh, yes. Press a button on the control unit, zero the counter once the printer is laced up, start the machine.

I know that ARRI stems from Arnold & Richter. Their first cameras were the Kinarri, closer to the Akeley. There is no such thing as an Arriflex 1 or I, it is just the Arriflex. I know that the camera was in use at Berlin, 1936. One more similarity with a Bell & Howell design? The gearing is basically that of the 2709 turned by 90 degrees. The Caméclair of 1920 has a six lens turret. Most certainly nobody noticed any brand in Los Angeles had a prototype been used. It's about a license agreement.

On a historical trail

Arri states that Erich Kurt Kästner, 1911-2005 (not to be mistaken for the writer Emil Erich Kästner, 1899-1974), joined Arnold & Richter in 1933 and acted there as designer-in-chief. Note that he had 21 or 22 years of age then.

The Arriflex is still the most compact and most lightweight 35-mm movie film camera with a three-lens turret.

After many years of research on the development of the motion-picture film camera I am near conviction that this camera is older than what they say at München and has its origin somewhere else, presumably in Chicago, USA. Many technical points indicate that A REFLEX evolved almost consequental in the Eyemo line and everything that was not covered by Mitchell.

The Californians went the studio line: Standard (1920), High Speed (1925), Newsreel Camera (1927), Beamsplitter Three Strip Camera for Technicolor Corp. (1932), Blimped Newsreel "Sound" Camera (1934). The Bell & Howell Standard Cinematograph Camera of 1911 was banned from studio floors from about 1929 on. In that year the Eyemo got its three-port turret. One needed money in Chicago. What to do ?

The Olympic Games were up to Lake Placid for February and summer 1932 in Los Angeles. Bell & Howell Co. opened affiliates in New York City and in Los Angeles in 1932.

Is it not astounding that two people in Germany should have found the design and not a most active research and development department with experienced engineers ?

Is there anybody out there who could follow until here and would share some thoughts on the subject ? Someone with a dismantled Arriflex is politely asked to make some measurements on various parts in the imperial system. I think there can be found some inch values . . .

come on guys, calm down... :rolleyes:

Sometimes you have to make experiments (and errors!) to find out how stuff really works.

We're not upset. That is the sound of rolling commerce.

He's got it !

[Freely adapted from