Mark Dunn

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.

I was assuming that Stephen is going with what he has. Slating was essential when film and sound went from camera to sound transfer to syncing up/editing, all done by different people with no knowledge of the subject or what happened on the shoot. It was a standard to work to. Now all that infrastructure is gone, and it's just you, you can do what you like, you'll remember what you did. Maybe just tap the mic and call out the take number.

Slating is the simplest way, but you don't necessarily need a board- back in the day a hand clap was sometimes used for documentary, and I've even seen a mic tapped with a pencil. Logging is easier with a slate and a spoken ident, but if you don't have a lot of takes you may be able to manage without. More recently a marker light fogging a frame and a beep on the tape were used, but you don't have the kit for that. You also don't have any sync reference between sound and film, so you will have to line up by hand in post.

The 80A absorbs 2 stops, so you would meter at 25 with the filter on the camera. An undamaged filter shouldn't cause flare and if you use a filter holder you can line up your shot then drop the filter in for exposure. Gelling the lights will likewise cost 2 stops so unless you have a larger wattage lamp you will need to increase your exposure, but you will be metering at 100.

Flutter consists of rapid small fluctuations in the speed of the film transport, many times a second, as opposed to wow, which is a change over a longer period, say a second or so. These would both change detrimentally the pitch of the sound. I think 3kHz (3000 cycles in American) was chosen as it's about the middle of the range of frequencies that optical sound is capable of reproducing.

I conclude that the residue is actually little bits of shredded gear- so the most important property of the oil is its mere presence. Dwight's photograph of a partially dried-out fibre gear was scary.

To follow up, I'vejust confirmed the correct oil and I'm sure Dwight Cody won't mind me quoting him here. "No, we have not found the gearbox to be of need of a special lubricant. In fact, we used for many years a straight weight 30 motor oil. I switch to a 90 weight gear oil more recently for no reason other than it seemed more appropriate and perhaps leaks out less. What matters most I've found is keeping the level right (1/4" above the fiber gear). Otherwise, the gear dries out and can strip. Dwight" So I may switch to 75w90 next time.

In the 2016 price list I see 2383 listed at about $600/2000ft. That is only 30 cents/foot for the stock, but there will presumably be only a handful of 70mm. prints made so the old economies of scale are gone. It might be a price for replacement only, with neg cutting and grading already paid for.

You can't just connect adapters together, the FFD will be incorrect. The lens will be too far from the film. You will probably have a great macro lens, though😉

Perhaps this is precisely why they've bought RED?

The M42 FFD is much longer than C-mount (otherwise a plain non-optical adapter wouldn't be possible) so just plug and go. But your lenses will all be rather long for 16mm.

This designation is for a UV filter, not the lens. 52mm. is the diameter of the filter thread.. The lens details will be inscribed on the front, behind the filter, but it's likely to be a 50mm, a so-called "standard" lens.

You can buy 77mm. screw thread lens hoods. They don't seen to be expensive. A flexible one may be useful.

Above a certain professional standard, the equipment used has very little bearing on the look of the image. Art direction and post-production and grading are much more important. In the days of film no-one ever asked whether a particular movie was shot on a Panaflex, 2C, Caméflex, BNC or whatever. They might have asked which filmstock was used, as this might have had some relevance, but the choice was always quite limited, and before about 1980 there was none, except between manufacturers.

Selective darkening of a blue sky isn't what an 85 is for- it's to correct a film balanced for artificial light to daylight, and it won't have quite the effect you desire; as you say it affects the entire image. In digital photography I would darken a blue sky by increasing the saturation of the blue channel, or preferably by reducing the luminance. There's a limit to how much you can do this without affecting the rest of the scene. But the most effective way to end up with a deep blue sky is to start with one.

This is an occupational health and product safety rather than a specific film industry question. Generally the EU has the best regulation in this area and follows the precautionary principle. The UK is similar at the moment as it inherited EU legislation. Also generally, the US doesn't adopt the precautionary principle- you have to prove something is harmful, rather than the manufacturer having to assess the risk of harm. VOCs in particular are much more closely regulated in the EU and the definition is far wider. In the west it's usually assumed that China has very poor domestic standards, but of course its exports have to meet the standards of the importing country.