Gregg MacPherson

Following from Daniel, it's a good practice to advance a few frames after a good take, if there's a chance the camera is going to be worked on at all. If you pull a mag get the plastic cover on the pressure plate right away. Another important thing to learn is the gate check practices and protocols. Best to get read in by a pro AC, maybe the Black and Blue chap has all that on his pages. I can say this. Be super clean with your loading practices, keeping the bag/tent, your arms and mags really clean, then there will be less hairs/dust to start with. Learn the gate check and the protocols. You can't do it by pulling the mag, you have to pull the lens. Some people can shine a torch town the front of a zoom and see hairs in the gate ok. I found that really hard. Anyway, my two cents...even if you have almost no crew, or untrained crew, you can try and follow good practices or protocols.

Hopefully it will just unscrew. At first I thought, looking at the photo, it was maybe an adapter screwed into the C mount, but then why the little lever. The diameter looks big enough to hide the TS lock ring. There are one or two (perhaps literally) ACLs around that have had an Aaton hard mount installed. I almost bought one. It was remounted by a famous Aaton tech who also worked on Eclair. I couldn't find a photo unfortunately, but I think it looked different to the picture above. Gregg.

Can you have it swapped back to the original TS mount. There are good long term advantages once you have the adapters that go on that. Jean Louis may know if this is easily do- able.

Opinions about the max voltage may vary. Andrew at AZSpectrum gave me a 15.6V maximum in advice about the ACL II with latest motor. Don't know if earlier versions are different in this respect. We need to be clear when talking to these guys whether they are referring to the nominal voltage or the actual measured voltage. A ten NiCad cell pack is nominally 12V but almost 14V fully charged. These issues have been covered before on the forum. Some useful info may be there.

Really excellent work. Thanks for sharing video.

Just about to ease the lockdown here in NZ. I've been having a massive tidy up at my place. Some of it long overdue. Some of the film looked good for scratch tests etc but some had a fine dust or mold on the outside of the rolls. There was a clean 400' can of 35mm Ilford PAN F in that pile. We'll see....

The front of the 10-100 T3.1 zoom rotates with focus, so if you want a clip on MB it probably has to be round. If you can't find one you may have to adapt something yourself. Lots of news and doc cameras had round rubber sunshades on the zoom. A step up adapter formed a housing for series 9 filters, which I think will cover that lens. Rubber hood screwed onto that. I think you will find the basic filters, CTO, NDs, in 3x3 or S9, but what's available cheap second had will be limited compared to 4x4. So the option might be to try putting together a light 4x4 system with rails. There are some 4x4 MBs that are very light. I saw an all plastic Petroff one that was absurdly light but still strong. I see what looks like the same MB (but may not be) on eBay sometimes cheap used.

There were rubber clip on (clamp on) lens hoods for those zooms. There was a square one that took two 3x3 filters. Have seen them occasionally on eBay. f you are patient there are some inexpensive light weight matte boxes you could adapt.

With the early non orienting ACL view finder the image would rotate clockwise as you rotated the finder anticlockwise. I would just re-orient my body/ head so that the image felt level. Worked well. Maybe you can do the same.

I don't know these cameras well. Almost bought one a long time ago, but my registration test didn't look good so I passed. The take up belt i assume is referring to the magazine take up belt. All the CP16R, CP16As that I remember had an external belt driving the mag take up. You may find a manual online. A manual for the CP16R, R/A was easy to find. Experts will know if there are common parts, design features.

I would go crazy if I didn't have a laugh now and again. I read that many Australians are so frustrated right now that they want NZ to annex AUS...read about it here...scroll down for the map...North Island, South Island, Big Island, or as some prefer, West Island https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12320969

The benign we utopia of Nouvelle Zealandia is going into what they called level 4 lockdown in 48 hours, all except essential services closed, everyone except essential services isolated at home with social distance discipline. But the govt is keeping the payrolls going somehow, and self employed people are eligible for support. Cooperation from banks, some quite good measures from the govt to help. We are doing this earlier than most countries might. We only have about 100 cases, with population about 4M, and only a couple that aren't recent arrivals on aeroplanes. But numbers are poised to grow exponentially, so hopefully these early measures work.

A workaround to avoid the embedded youtube image in a quote...right click on the image, copy URL in menu, delete image, paste in URL, choose the "display as link instead" option at bottom. Or just delete the sucker...

Sorry, I should have looked harder before writing.. On the issue about lazy quoting resulting in repetition of the "embedded video" (thank you Phil)...could those be automatically turned into a small thumbnail etc, something less distracting and wasteful. Your embedded image above, I think I stumbled onto a Win10Pro tool to shrink it in the quote. Left click, image turned blue, more left click(s) and a resizing menu came up. Cheers.

Monetizing one's wisdom in one's old age is a real phenomena now. At least judging by the number of promos for masterclasses by legitimate looking old wise people. In the unwise speak of younger people, i'ts, like, a thing. My favourite one sofar is Frank Gehry's. ....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az-m56vUjgw The .... at the start of that URL is just to disable the huge Youtube screen that would otherwise automatically appear in the post.

Hey Tim et al, If I paste in a Youtube URL it appears as a bigish screen from Youtube with a play button. As an alternative, what about a very small thumbnail with a play button. Actually, if it's easy, what about options for a small thumbnail or just the URL itself. I often add something like .... to the URL so that it stays as text. But having to paste in a URL is far too onerous for some of these modern folk.... A surprising number of people are lazy when they reply, and the Youtube picture link is included repeatedly in the thread. Thanks for all your effort. Gregg.

I don't remember scratches. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. Gelatine filters can be really useful, so it's worth solving the scratching problem. Is it technique, or is there something about the camera? Does conversion to S16 have any effect? Checking the filter in the camera is easy. Pull the lens, pull the mag, inch the shutter.... The Wratten gelatine filters are high quality. In a jam we sometimes used lighting gells, no problem.

Got a reply from Andrew at AZSpectrum. He does a speed ramping gizmo that works for for Arri/Aaton/Panavision.. I don't think he will mind if I paste his email and URLs.. Hello Gregg, Thank you for your e-mail. Some time ago we designed the unit you are asking about. Currently all units are sold and we do not have them in stock. Information about this unit is on our website http://www.az-spectrum.com/sf.html Best regards, Andrew Zorawski AZ Spectrum 53-53 62nd Street Maspeth, NY 11378 USA ph: 718-779-1892 www.az-spectrum.com

Comparing 1918 to 2020...The higher level of education in 2020 and the saturation of free information may well save us from another real pandemic, but we are always vulnerable to what we do not know. History may save us, but we are commonly unaware of it. Learning basic facts about the 1918 flu I found quite emotionally devastating. I think we are all floating along in a vain, ridiculous, glossy mirage, completely inept at influencing the factual outcomes, the course of history, our own safety... This quite succinct, tight documentary on the 1918 flu. ...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c

Hey Aapo, any chance your couriosity extends to speed ramping for SRs. Some interest in that exists, or is infered elswhere on the forum... .....https://cinematography.com/index.php?/topic/82964-16mm-footage-has-vertical-streaks-aaton-ltr7/.....

Sent a message on that to Andrew at AZSpectrum. But what about forum member Aapo, who is fizzing right now about custom speed controllers for existing cameras. I'll ping him...

Just thinking out loud here, is ramping possible with a cleverly designed external controller for an SR..?

Sofar I thought your guesses were quite close to it. I think the OP should offer more info, and examining the neg should be an obligatory first or second step. Re the noise, if the claw is not engaged, not shifting film, then the film will be pulled through the gate by the drive sprocket. Noisy..Y/N? Like Jon O. I wonder what allows the partial image of the woman's head, bentwood chair, table edge. Is the claw sliding along the film and finally dropping into a perf, giving a moment of slack at the loops, positioning the film for that partial exposure. Or the opposite... So much fun and speculation from so little information...

Six plate Steenbecks are great. I had to make do with the Moviola flatbed version. Trust Bill to have chosen a Steenbeck...

There might be some more facts you can give that will help people diagnose it...Was the faulty 2 min section in the middle of a roll and the mag was never removed, but the camera was run/stop/run....? If so what stop/start points are there for the faulty 2mins..? If the mag was removed at some point(s), note when they were, especially either end of the faulty 2mins. Were the loops reset before the mag was remounted to the camera? Examine the film over the faulty 2mins, looking for tiny dents where the claw tip might have hit or scratched the film between perfs. Also look for scratching if the loops were lost completely and the film was being dragged through the gate by the drive sprocket. I see the alert at the bottom of screen that Dom is replying, but I'll send this anyway.