Jock Blakley

Kodak no longer offer 800 ft rolls in 16 mm, although it may be possible to special-order them. I don't know about Fuji's current offerings on that front.

What infrared film is it in particular? Ektachrome Infrared Film (EIR) is designed for E-6, and to the best of my knowledge that was the main 16mm IR stock Kodak made. Alternatively if it's one of the Aerochrome films then it's intended to create reversal images in Process AR-5, but can also run with some colour differences in E-6. Process in AN-6 or C-41 to receive negatives. You will have more luck finding a 16mm E-6 lab than any of these others, but as Charles points out still minilabs that retain the capability for 110 film should be able to run this film. The key thing to note is that LABORATORIES USE INFRARED LIGHT TO VIEW FILM DURING LOADING AND SOMETIMES ALSO IN THE PROCESSING MACHINE. You'll need to find a lab that can work without any IR light, and actually do so when you ask them to.

I would be highly doubtful, given its age. In any case, colour processing for any type of Kodachrome film has been unavailable now for a year, and for many many years for that particular type of Kodachrome.

I'd almost be inclined to say that VISION2 50D was a step backwards from the beautiful saturation and contrast of EXR 50D - hopefully a trend that won't be repeated this time around. Other than that though, new film, excitement, yay, etc.

There is also the Remjet-removal step that is not necessary for C-41. As a rule C-41 and ECN-2 films will not give optimum colour if those processes are interchanged, although some people do report success (on the other hand, from tests done by an acquaintance, 5201 *hates* C-41). ECN-2 films must have their Remjet removed before undergoing machine-processing in C-41.

Laboratory Aim Density frames are usually included in a laboratory's standard leaders and are used for quickly checking the colour and exposure of an intermediate or print. Nowadays they're supplied by Kodak either as a piece of film duplicated from the originals shot when the system was devised, or as a DPX of the new Digital LAD patch. Going back a bit laboratories used to devise their own - I've seen ones from Eclair, Rank, Atlab, and Cinevex since the '80s, and there are dozens more before then. Either way though - they're not shot at the head of each reel of camera negative.

Vincent pretty much has it down: 2.39:1 or 1.85:1 are the two choices for mainstream theatrical exhibition, and 16:9 / 1.78:1 for television. If you shoot in 1:85 it's very easy to crop down to 1.78 for television - only a little trim from each side. Oh course you can get arty and use all the other various "standard" ratios out there - Silent or Full Aperture at 1.33:1, Academy Aperture at 1.37:1, "widescreen" 1.66:1, Superscope at 2:1, TODD-AO and Panavision Super 70 at 2.2:1, original CinemaScope at 2.55:1, and the grand poohbah of wide, Ultra Panavision 70 at 2.76:1. Of course the way you acquire your footage may introduce technical limitations.

Just bear in mind that sometimes short ends don't always find their way back into their original cans.

Why is this in the Super-8 forum anyway? The 24 x 8.5mm frame is closest to Techniscope's 22 x 9.47 mm - and either way it's 35mm. Albeit with a frame rate that's useless for full motion and a hellish post-production workflow unless you've got plenty of time or some nice automation happening. If you did happen to be blessed with an automatic-advance scanner though - either automatically advancing a ~230 mm strip or automatically advancing the entire uncut roll, either way IIRC some Canon and Nikon models did one or the other - you could hope that the Lomokino's registration was accurate and probably get more than decent results. Which kind of leads me to hope that somebody will find a way to adapt the Lomokino's movement to a motor-driven 100-foot-load camera :P

You can shoot film outright for less than you might think. Talk to Kodak or Fuji directly to buy your stock - you're probably entitled to a student discount of some sort. Find a good lab and see if they offer discounts, even if it's only a "package" discount on processing and scanning - and scanning can be pretty cheap if you're only going out to standard definition. Again, shop around; there might be an affordable lab a bit further away from you if you trust the postal service or a courier. You can also get your stock costs down by ensuring you don't have to shoot more than you need. Do plenty of rehearsals so that everybody knows their stuff and wasted takes are minimised. Consider even doing a full run-through shot with whatever camera you can find - even a phone camera - but that way you can make a very rough cut and see how you film works without committing a single frame of film. However you do it shooting on film is a very rewarding experience and I hope you succeed!

You may find your perforations aren't quite as you expect them to be if you take that approach ;) I have half an idea in my head about how such an operation could use the space inside the perfs on 35mm strip to make a 16mm slit and 8mm slit, which would then be appropriately perforated. The whole thing kind of relies upon them getting 100 ft lengths from the manufacturers though, which suggests some sort of special arrangement as (AFAIK) no Fujichrome stock is available in 35mm bulks. The joy of conjecture, eh?

You may find a very pesky bit of film damage by the name of a "perforation" in the way of widening the gate on both sides ;) This is the reason you can't use 2R film for Super-16. 1R film, on the other hand, reserves that side of the film for an optical or magnetic soundtrack. Since 99% of 16mm shot nowadays never goes near a projector, the soundtrack area is not needed and you can use it for picture. On the other side though you still have a perf, so no luck with widening. And even if you by some luck didn't have a perf in the way, you'd still run into the Keykode printed into the film. Ultra-16 only gets away with the both-side-widening by widening between the perf areas on both sides so you end up with a centred aperture that doesn't use the full height of the Regular 16 frame.

To expand a bit further: Standard-8 and Super-8, as well as Standard 16, are 4:3 (1.33:1). Super-16 uses the area of 16 mm film usually reserved for the soundtrack to expose an area with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. 5-perf 65 mm (for 70 mm prints) is 2.20:1 and is called either Todd-AO or Super Panavision 70. Ultra Panavision 70 uses an anamorphic lens to squeeze a 2.76:1 image into the 2.20:1 frame. 15-perf horizontal 65 mm for IMAX is 1.35:1 in camera but is cropped to 1.43:1 for projection. 35 mm has always been a bit more flexible though: The original "silent" or "Edison" aperture is 4:3, which was consequently adopted for smaller film gauges and also for television. When optical sound was adopted this was placed at one side of the picture area and resulted in the "Movietone" aperture of 1.15:1 which greatly annoyed the majority of the industry and lead to the "Academy" aperture of 1.37:1 that was pretty much the universal standard from 1932 well into the '50s, and which is often mistaken for 4:3. From this Paramount cropped the top and bottom of the Academy frame to create the 1.66:1 ratio used for some time in many "widescreen" movies. At the same time Universal took the cropping even further to create the 1.85:1 "widescreen" standard. All 1.66/1.85 release prints are made by cropping the widescreen image out the Academy frame, but it's possible to shoot 1.85:1 using 3-perforation pulldown to save money at the cost of not being able to make contact-printed release prints. Super-35 is also 3-perf pulldown, but uses the soundtrack area in addition. Alternately you can go back to the Edison aperture and add a 2x anamorphic lens to get the 2.55:1 of original CinemaScope, or add the same lens to the Movietone aperture to get the standard 2.39:1 Panavision aspect used today. 2.39:1 can also be achieved by cropping Academy, or Super-35, or by shooting in Techniscope (2-perf). If you run the film horizontally and expose 8 perforations like for 35mm still photography you get VistaVision, but it was always intended that 1.85:1 frames would be cropped out of the 1.50:1 native frame. Anyway, as you can see, you're sort-of right and sort-of not-right. In many cases it is indeed a simple affair of shooting 1.33 or 1.37:1 and cropping to get what you want (and indeed before the days of the Digital Intermediate it was very common to get a print of a film intended for 1.85 presentation but with the full 1.37 frame exposed and ready to show), but there are many formats designed to provide better quality or lower cost if you're prepared to lock yourself into a specific ratio. If you'd care to know more (and you probably should :P ), take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pulldown

One set-up I once saw used IR-pass filters from still photographic suppliers (may have been Hoya, but a few years have passed now) over the emitters... seemed to work fine.

Not the case for DTS - it's printed with no offset from the frame to which it is synchronised. Instead the installer measures the offset between the gate the reader and then programs the DTS playback unit to simulate the offset.

Thanks John. A pity, but an understandable one. Probably missed the boat by forty-odd years.

Kodak use those four-digit numbers to specific film products that are each different. The 5 prefix indicates a 35mm or 65mm film on acetate base, and the 2 indicates a camera film. Replacing the 52 prefix with 72 would indicate the same film in 8mm or 16mm, replacing it with 22 would indicate the same film in 35mm or 65mm with an ESTAR base, and 32 ESTAR in 8 or 16mm. x3xx numbers indicate lab and print films. Accordingly '219 refers to VISION3 500T, which indeed replaced '218 (VISION2 500T). To say they have "very low grain" is a bit of an exaggeration though, unless you're comparing them to VISION 800T '289. Other stocks have different numbers because they are different stocks. They have different sensitivities and colour balances, although visually most of the VISION family films are designed to look the same so as they can be easily cut together. As a basic rule though you can expect that as sensitivity rises so does "graininess", while dynamic range and sharpness would be expected to fall. Kodak's Motion Picture Catalogue will explain each film in more detail, as will the product literature.

I know it's a forlorn hope, but what's the current status of the COSHARP set-up? It's very exciting to hear of a production in 65mm again regardless of how it's distributed... photochemical reduction prints would be amazing and photochemical 70 mm prints would be beyond belief, so a 4K DCP would more than decent. Weird though that both times Ron Fricke has done something in 65 mm and everybody says "last 65 mm for sure", they've been followed by a more mainstream 65 mm production the next year - Baraka then Hamlet, and now Samsara then The Master.

Given that the British Empire doesn't really exist any more it would be hard for any nation, let alone Canada, to be "a part" of it. Since the passing of the Canada Act 1982 (UK) and Constitution Act, 1982 (Canada) there have been no legal ties between the two nations. The same process occurred with the Australia Act 1986, and has happened in many other nations. Indeed it's due to the Statute of Westminster 1931 that there can be a "Canadian Monarchy" - the Statute gave full legislative independence to the dominions who then assumed the British monarch as their own - hence Elizabeth II is the Queen of Canada who also just happens to be Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island and also Queen of Australia and also Queen of New Zealand and also etc etc

Phil: the term "telephoto lens" describes, if you wish to be exact, a lens that employs telephoto optics to provide a focal length that is far longer than the actual length of the lens. A "conventional" lens will focus at infinity at a certain distance from the film plane, and distance between the film plane and the lens' optical centre is the focal length. This is fine for lenses of "normal" focal lengths but obviously becomes impractical when the optical centre needs to be 300 or 400mm away from the film plane to provide a long-focus lens. To counter this, the lens is designed with at least two optical groups - one at the front which is a simple short-focus lens, and one at the rear which is the "telephoto group" that optical extends the light path and simulates a lens a much greater focal length than is actually present. Almost all long lenses in general circulation these days are telephoto designs - the main area in which non-telephoto lenses are still found is large format still photography, as they are as a rule much cheaper. The tradeoff is that they require much more bellows draw and thus less light reaches the film. At the other end of the scale, retrofocus lenses were invented to solve the issue of wideangle lenses and lens mounts that were further from the film than the focal length.

I don't know the Lomo one personally, but the pre-war Biogon design acquired by the Soviets and manufactured as the Jupiter-12 by KMZ can be easily identified by the huge and frighteningly-exposed rear element,as you can see here:

I can't help you with New York, but as Antti Näyhä points out we've got it hitting our 63-foot-wide screen at the Astor here in Melbourne in just over a week. The print is a glorious Todd-AO 70mm issue that we own, and it's phenomenal. Not to be a fanboi, but there really is a huge improvement in resolution and sharpness in the 65 > 70 handling even over a 35 > 70 blow-up, let alone 35 > 35, and in this print you notice every single detail. Plus there's the whole other story of Dolby SR Six-Track Magnetic sound... You know you want to pay a quick visit to Australia :P On the subject of Samsara, we're informed that a 70mm release is unlikely at this point due to budget constraints - a great shame given the effort of shooting it in 65mm. A key difference is that Baraka was of course finished optically, whereas Samsara (if IMBD is to be trusted) is being finished via an 8K DI. I view that as a bit of a let-down - cheaper for them to get to a BluRay release but making 70mm prints near to impossible because of the cost of 8K film-out to 70mm.

Process E-3 was superseded by Process E-4 in 1974 and in turn again by Process E-6 in 1976. While it is chemically relatively-straightforward (as old reversal processes go), I don't believe any lab will be able to recover images from the sheets in colour. Film Rescue International, I'm told, will process it in B&W. Their website isn't very clear on the point, nor on whether they can accept sheet films, so an enquiry in advance would be advised.