Mark Dunn

If you search on "Bell & Howell Model C" a lot comes up. brianpritchard.com is also a good source. Brian is ex-Kodak. He may chip in here if he's still around.

The first shot-to-shot grading cues were Debrie clips- metal staples attached to the film just before the cut, detected by contacts on the printer. Later, the edge of the film was notched to activate a microswitch. By the 70s, the grader created a punch tape with the printer commands and the cueing was by frame count.

Yes.

On my 1600 the flipper is held in place by spring tension and it's attached to a shaft running through the stack of switches that make up the selector. If yours is actually loose it suggests that something has come detached. My speed selector (what you're calling the flipper unit) is held in by a couple of metal claws screwed to the barrel of the selector which dig into the wooden underside of the table. I wonder if the disc is a modification. It would help if you could post a photograph.

London prices in 1981 were about £0.25/ft for an A/B roll answer print. The contemporary exchange rate makes that about 60cents. Grading wasn't charged separately but there was quite a high minimum charge IIRC, so the fee was obviously built in. Maybe quoting a low footage rate made a lab appear more competitive.

Sorry, 2000ft. Print stock.

I have Agfa print stock cans with the primary marking in metres, with feet after: 610m/200ft.

Still working for me today.

A Nikon-F to C-mount adapter ought to be easy to get, but you may need lens support for all but the lightest lenses. Also, stills lenses are usually rather long for 16mm. A 10mm. isn't considered very wide on 16mm. but it is an extreme wide-angle in the stills world. There seem to be some inexpensive c-mount lenses on ebay so maybe the budget will stretch that far. You can re-sell them afterwards, or maybe the college will take them on. You can get a long way with a 10, a 25 and a 50 or 75.

As I said, to my ear the narration is unaffected, only the music has the wow. So it's a problem with the source that's built in to the sound mix.

The end music too- in fact it's just the music. They did a transfer with severe wow and didn't do anything about it. If it had been the print I think wow that bad would have been noticeable on the narration as well. ISTR this would happen if you tried to transfer a wild source to mag with the recorder set to pilotone. The speed hunts up and down trying to match a non-existent sync pulse. But it's been.....quite a while. Sad to think that the producers knew that the film was faulty and still sent it out. Money talks, and they didn't have enough. It's painful to listen to.

Of course the lens would be very long on 8mm, but maybe that wouldn't matter for a test. My thought would be that a modern lens is sharper, but not all that much sharper, and that the limiting factor is a frame smaller than your little toenail. 8mm. can look very good with a modern high-res scan; maybe it doesn't get much better than that.

The only modern 16mm. cameras that must have 2R stock are medium-and high-speed, or should I say were, as all that is digital now. The only person to use 35mm. high-speed in the last decade or so has been Christopher Nolan.

No, don't do that again. Looks like a €100k accident waiting to happen and an insurance company saying, "You did WHAT?"

Note also the fact that, although it's used more loosely in photography and film, the term "stop" refers strictly to the size of the aperture, which varies logarithmically with the diameter. This is why f-numbers have that 2, 2.8 4, 5.6 sequence- the multiple is the square root of 2. This applies equally to the intermediate f-numbers. They arose when mechanical shutters were nothing like as accurate as they are now and a tiny difference in shutter speed was an irrelevance.