Mark Dunn

I can't help you with your choice, but despite what you may think English is not widely spoken day-to-day in France, so without some French you won't get on well. Good luck anyway; France is a great place and a little French goes a long way.

What about film? You know, workprints, Steenbeck, splicer, all that sort of thing. Look at the prices before you decide.

Fair enough, the Mekel speaks for itself.

Two-thirds of a stop is quite a bit of over-exposure for reversal. I'd want to be closer. It depends how accurate the metering is; if your test looks OK, not washed out, then go with it. But since you do want to project, I think you'll want it accurate, even erring on the side of underexposure.

That's what I was aiming at. Being British I was rather roundabout about it. Fortunately my rather more direct Canadian ally came to my aid. Even though I had taken his contribution somewhat for granted.

I was bound to upset someone, shooting from the hip like that, and I'm sorry. Of course we couldn't have survived without the Dominions, Empire and Commonwealth. I'm well aware of their contribution. I even know about the Eagle Squadrons. I should have taken more careful aim at the notion that we had a choice between Hitler and Stalin.

Well I can. My country paid a very high price for victory and I would remind you that for over two years, we paid it alone. Hiljacking the name of a series of films about the fight against a monstrous tyranny for this dubious middle-class spat between well-off people operating in a free market is a bit rich. And yes, you have touched a raw nerve. You're only free to express such a daft opinion because England kept Hitler at bay while America thought about it.

PAL players play NTSC DVDs, don't they?

Then you wouldn't be allowed to import it. Tell me about it. The EU has just destroyed our barometer industry by banning mercury. Hasselblad had to discontinue a very popular camera, the X-Pan, because it had a tiny bit of lead solder and it wasn't a big enough seller to be worth redesigning. How many £1500 cameras were going to end up in landfill? I'm not joking. Mobile phones and Ipods are one thing, but the film industry is one of those comparatively small markets which can't afford to redesign its products on some passing whim.

Am I alone in thinking that a post like this should be in the classified section? With the knocking copy removed, preferably.

The OP is referring to the old VNF stocks which were discontinued a few years ago. So 7285, which you used, is all that's now available, but it uses the E6 process which is generally more expensive to run.

In bright sunlight at f/16, the shutter speed required is the reciprocal of the ISO rating. But at 24fps your shutter speed is only 1/60. So you're OK with the 64ISO, but you'd need nearly f/32 with the 200. So yes, you need some ND, especially if you want to control depth of field. The square filter holder will get in the way of the other lenses on the turret, if you want to change quickly. So you'll probably be better off with screw-ins. Buy the largest size you need and stepping rings for the other sizes.

Rackover is just for focusing, through the film base. For shooting there's a parallax-corrected side finder. Incidentally, only about 328 BNCs were ever made; they were used to shoot the Wallace and Gromit films, and Nick Park's studio owns about 30 of them. Since they cost about $5,000 in 1930 they've been very well looked after.

Why not edit on film? For what you'd pay for a transfer you could probably find a pic-sync, Steenbeck and splicer. That's film-making.

Don't you use the can tape or the sticky can label any more?

It's enjoyable enough if you can put up with Anthony Steel, but I'm not sure they even bothered to crop and squeeze the stuff they copied. It looked stretched to me. Yes, definitely Ribena. And a granule or two of coffee in water looks more like Scotch than cold tea. Anyway, have you actually tried cold tea?

This is most likely a battery problem. Try some new or freshly recharged ones. For extended use you can make up a battery pack on a long lead and keep it in your pocket, although off a tripod your hand should keep the batteries warm enough- they're in the handgrip, aren't they? 30F is barely freezing and I've shot in snow loads of times. It's nothing like cold enough to affect the stock or the lubricant, I wouldn't have thought.

Pardon? 16mm. is one perf per frame. 35mm. Techniscope was 2-perf, but that hasn't been used for a long time.

I'm more of a Georges Périnal/ Osmond Borradaile 3-strip fan myself. And not a fan of remakes. Zoltan Korda's 1939 version was magnificently restored in the 90's without a DI in sight. Mind you, the claret looked more like Ribena.

Project it and time it. You can't get tight sync, but you're not making that sort of film anyway. Not on one uncut reel of Super-8.

One of these. The ST-600 is a decent projector, by the way; mine is going strong (with a new belt) after 28 years. But for that very reason they can be quite expensive on ebay. That will show a whole 400' film, 20 minutes or so. Your loop probably isn't going to be that long, so the idea of a bin might suite you better.

I think you can usually thread an automatic projector by hand if you really want to- my Super-8 Elmo you certainly can, it's just a bit fiddly, and you have to be careful not to scratch the film. But if you're buying a projector specially, and old manual might be cheaper anyway. I would probably put spools on the projector and then lay the film over top of the spools to guide it. If it needs to be quite long, you could run it carefully into a pillowcase in a big waste bin, rather like on an editing table. A fair length of film will behave itself quite well handled in this way. I'd certainly trust, say, 50' of film in a bin. But it really does need to be attended.

Good high-speed cine is jaw-dropping to look at. It's even more fun to create, but I was lucky- the military was paying the bills. We would only have called the Milliken medium-speed, anyway- high-speed was 1000pps and up, to 10,000. The film travels at a hundred miles an hour and you go through a 400' roll in about 3 seconds. You will find things a lot more leisurely at a few hundred. At least you'll be able to stop and start; at 5,000 fps it goes right through in one go, and you clean the camera with a hoover and a pair of tweezers. Good luck.

AGE don't say whether or not they've converted the Milliken to short-pitch- I suspect not, because they say specifically that the Photosonics IS short-pitch. The lower framing rate is because of the shortage of sprocket teeth, not the different pitch. I think you'd want to do a run test if you used short-pitch. It might just run noisy rather than shred the film-on a 100' roll you could do a few tests right up to top speed. You'd want to test the camera anyway.

You can get long-pitch single perf to special order. The difference in pitch isn't enough to be noticeable when loading but obviously is significant at high speed. You're really talking about medium-speed, I think, up to 4 or 500fps. If you're not finishing on film, you might consider staying in standard ratio and cropping in transfer. That might be cheaper than converting, and you can stick with the double-perf the camera was built for. A sudden thought. If you have to have sprockets adapted for S16 anyway, they can presumably be changed to short-pitch at the same time.