Duncan Brown

Sure! Duncan

Looks like there is a motor teardown/investigation in my near future! I'll be sure to take pictures. Duncan

Anything tricky about disassembling the motor, or pretty straightforward and is obvious as you get it apart? I'm a whiz at reaplacing bearings in random things, but have never tried to find replacement brushes for a small motor before. Do you have a source? Any insight as to why that's even there? It does seem like it would make the viewfinder image that much less bright when filming. Duncan

It's a brand new one from Sean Charlesworth. Which to be fair, may not act identically to a real Arri one would (if you could still get them), but I'm pretty confident he knows what he's doing. So I'm not ruling that out, but again the absolutely unwavering speed at which it runs makes me less suspicious of things like that, which would likely present as a more erratic result. Duncan

Just realized the red and yellow paint dots on my motor no doubt stand for "2" (red) and "4" (yellow), if you're using the standard resistor banding color code. Not sure if that's an Arri thing or some repair shop thing. Duncan

I'm only familiar with the wind-up reflex Bolexes, not the EL, but isn't there an equivalent to the "Bulb" setting on a 35mm SLR: the shutter stays open as long as you hold down the shutter release, then closes again when you let go? I can't remember off the top of my head, but you set one lever one way, then push the little shutter release knob away from you rather than pulling it toward you like normal? (As opposed to the single-frame animation setting where it does the normal shutter spin open-closed, but waits to wind it until you release the button.) So just like with Bulb on a still camera, you open the shutter, manually fire the flash, the let the shutter close again. As long as your ambient illumination is far below the brightness of the flash, it never really figures into the exposure. Duncan

I'll accept about anything as a possibility! I'm new to Arri cameras, though I have a lot of experience with cameras and electromechanical things. There are no indications that the camera is in desperate need of lube (though as some point I will lube it or have it lubed professionally). And I don't know how the speed governor works in these motors but I would think up to a point the governor would hide a lot of ills like bad bearings or brushes by just working harder/hotter to maintain its set speed. Duncan

I'll jump in this topic because it seems related... I just got a constant speed 24fps motor for my 16S off of ebay (picture below). It's the kind with the transistor on the side. When I run the camera with it the tach reads 23fps. Using an iPhone app called "Video Tachometer" it seems to be running at 22.83fps. No wandering, it's very consistent. How can I tell if this is an 8V motor (if it's a 12V motor could that be the problem?) Or were the simpler Arri motors always 8V? I'm using 7 NiMh "F" cells in a pack I built, so that's nominally 8.4V. If it's the right motor, how do I tweak the speed - assuming the tweak range even goes that far? AM I correct in thinking that even if the camera were a little old and sticky in the lube department, a constant speed motor would just work harder but still keep a constant speed? The fact that the motor and mechanism don't sound like they are struggling at all, and that the speed is dead-constant makes me think that it's just the motor inherently adjusted too slow. (Tangentially-related question: why is there a matte black stripe dead center on each of the two mirror portions of the shutter? It certainly makes seeing what's going on with the app easier! So maybe that's why it's there...) Thanks, Duncan

I'm sort of an accidental pinball machine historian, so I have a ton of experience scanning old paperwork for stuff. If you want a nice PDF copy of that catalog before sending it off to the ASC archives or wherever, I can do that for you. Random example, to prove my bona-fides: http://www.backglass.org/williams/kordek_archives/united_grey_parts_catalog_100.pdf Duncan

Another forum user kindly pointed out to me privately exactly what I am missing, and it's the pulldown claw slot on the cartridge. That is on the opposite side from the sprockets on the drive wheel. The pulldown claw is critical, so you need perfs on that side (against the bottom plate of the magazine) no matter what, end of story. Since the drive sprocket nubs are on the other side, that means you either need double-perf film... or you need to thread the magazine in such a way as to avoid that drive sprocket... and one such way was shown earlier in this thread. Oh well, it was a nice idea... Duncan

A couple of more: Funny thing about using film. No backsies. The first piece of glass we dropped onto the cinderblock BOUNCED a few inches into the air and then clattered to the ground, never breaking. If you've ever had tempered glass interact with concrete you know this is impossible - tempered glass vaporizes in your hands if it so much as gets a whiff of concrete. But there it was. 450 ft of expensive Estar film through the camera, now utterly unusable, and nothing to do but thread in another roll, and slam the glass down harder the second time. Duncan

I just downloaded it and (allowing for me knowing diddlysquat about using OpenFX or Resolve) I actually got it to work pretty well pretty quickly. For the moment I can just use it to convert the footage to use in FCPX, but who knows maybe I'll become a convert! I have several still-photo slide and negative scanners that I've been using for years (Nikon and Epson). The 16mm scanning is only the last 5-10 years. Duncan

Oh but there IS a plugin for Resolve! http://www.filmlabs.org/index.php/technical-tips/invertcolorneg/ Wait, Resolve is free? Let me go look at that. (If you need to own a BlackMagic product to get it free, I'm OK there too, as I use an UltraStudio 4K in my scanner setup). My still image scanner programs do it not with a template per se, but built in settings for each kind of known film (Kodak Gold 400, Portra 800, etc.) But it seems like you could also help it along by using some blank areas of any given film to help calibrate it. Duncan

I do white balance the digital camera before scanning, and lock it in to that setting (because trying to white balance against that orange film would be a disaster!) My understanding of the orange mask is that it is affected differently by image on the different color layers, so it's not as simple as subtracting out the orange (or the blue, after running the negative filter on it.) Print film and photographic paper are built to reverse the effects of the orange mask precisely, as are any number of still film scanning programs. It's not a mystery how to do it, for those in the know, it's just a mystery to me why FCP X users aren't provided with any tools for this by anyone (as near as I can tell.) Duncan

As to the focusing of one of these cameras - it's definitely something done as part of the locked-down setup of the camera before the shot. The Photec has a little focusing prism you clip in place in the film path (colored bright red so you don't forget to remove it again!) and then a little window you open on the door and peer through to line up and focus the shot. It's really not very user friendly! Then you load the film and hope you didn't accidentally move the camera or bump the focus or any of a million other things. There's no viewing system or focusing at all on the Traid 200V, but of course with that fisheye lens there doesn't really need to be - you just have to imagine the shot in your mind and aim the camera accordingly. Duncan

As promised:

I'm astonished I even have to ask this - but no amount of searching these forums or googling provides an answer. I have some 16mm negatives I scanned in with my film scanner (a heavily modified WorkPrinter-16 HD), and I want to edit it in Final Cut Pro X just like I do all the reversal film I've scanned. The "Negative" effect of course just flips the orange mask to blue, so that's no good. My still film scanners all know how to deal with color negative film, why on earth does FCP not? How has nobody at least created a for-purchase plugin I can use to do it? I found an "OpenFX" plugin that does exactly what I need, but no support for FCP with that. And there are any number of FCP plugins offering to give me the "film look" to my digital footage, but of course that's not what I want! I've got all the "film look" I need in this actual film... What am I overlooking here? Thanks, Duncan

I have a few Photec high speed cameras (up to 10,000fps) and they can take 100, 200, or 400ft daylight spools. As was mentioned, you generally are only interested in a fraction of a second of "action" anyway, so the only problem with the short length of film is timing the start of it properly, against the action in question. But 100ft of film is plenty when filming at lower speeds anyway. When shooting 10,000fps with 400 ft of film, a large majority of that film is spent just getting fully up to speed... It's a little frightening to hear it running, even more so when using acetate film that's shrunk too much from the .3000" perf-specing specs and the film explodes when it reaches speed. I really need to re-scan the films I shot with it many years ago, now that I can do it in HD. Will try to remember to post back here once I've done that. Duncan

Yes, I used a Tenergy charger for my re-celled R16 battery. But instead of cutting up the old charger, I bought the correct new 3-pin DIN socket and soldered it on the wires from the Tenergy. Making very very very very sure to get the correct wires on the correct socket pins of course! The old charger isn't going to do much of a job charging your re-celled battery, assuming it's much higher capacity with newer technology (NiMh) cells. Duncan

New user, dredging up zombie topics seems to be my thing. Long story, but I've recently been given a Cine-Kodak Magazine 16 camera and want to run a couple of films through it for nostalgic reasons (nostalgia on the part of its owner, not mine!) I've bought some magazines to reload, I have lots of film, and I stumbled across this thread and have what I hope is not a really stupid question: If you spool some single perf film off of its original reel or core, onto an intermediate reel... then spool it back onto the little plastic core from a magazine... is it not then turned the right way around to have the single row of teeth on the drive wheel pull it properly through the magazine along the original film path, with the emulsion facing the outside? No need for all this hackery with different paths and turning parts around? Or am I missing something? Duncan

Ha! Thank you for the thorough breakdown. I guess what I meant was that, especially in the 1950s, there wasn't so much esoterica in oils that Arriflex would have likely had one designed for them. They certainly would have chosen wisely from among available lubes for each different application within the camera. My camera seems to have been serviced by Chambliss twice over the years, but not for a long while (unsurprisingly). It runs quite well (after replacing the rubber coupling with the one Sean Charlesworth sells) but I'm worried about running it too much without at least topping up the spring ball oiling points. Sounds like a good quality machine oil is all I need there. Thanks, Duncan PS to Michael Leake: as to the Amazon idea for the grease - I see lots of Kluber lubricants there, but not one I can match up with Isoflex 18/05. DO you have a link?

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but it seemed like the right place. I've contacted Arri trying to buy some but no reply yet. But come on, someone must know the equivalent "real world" oil and grease? Oil only gets but so esoteric, and in 1952 even less so. Surely "Chronosynth 1/8" is just 10-weight or something, and "Isoflex 18/05" is just Molyslip or something, right? Duncan (recent purchaser of a 16S)