I ran into a huge production problem this weekend, and while the rental people are trying to figure out what happened, I thought I might post here and see if anyone has ever had such a similar problem:
BASICALLY, 2 weeks ago I started shooting on this 16mm short with an Arri SR II. Our stock was ORWO UN54 100D Black and White Negative. It's an uncommon German film stock, but it is definitely legitimate. Personally, I like the look better than any other black and white on the market.
Anyway, we shot for about 6 days (16 rolls) with almost no problems, but on the 6th day one of our mags started making an insane noise and when our ac opened it up in the changing bag the film spaghettied out like crazy. We hand rolled it and put it aside. The next day, after doing some high-speed stuff the same mag started to have problems again. It lost it's loop, it started to tear perfs and again it made a horrible loud noise. We switched it out for a new mag. The next day we started using our new mag and were doing some highspeed stuff again and both of our back-up mags died in exactly the same way: loud noise, lost loop, and torn perfs. It was saturday and no rental house was open and we were in Pennsylvania, we had to end the shoot 2 days early.
Since then, we have been trying to figure out what happened. Some people have told me that some Arri-SRs are callibrated for Kodak Color Negative and need to be re-calibrated for thin black and white stocks. Orwo is definitely a thin stock, but I didn't think that such a small problem could destroy 3 mags, especially since Orwo is supposed to have a callibrated short pitch. I've also heard that it could be a worn-out pull-down claw.
Has anyone had any similar problems trying to shoot a lot of black and white 16mm negative Ilford or Orwo or Fuji because of thinness or uncallibrated cameras? Any advice would help because I'm worried that the rental house is going to blame Orwo and that Orwo is going to blame the camera.
Thanks,
Sam