Mark Dunn

Is the sink in shot?

If not you may be able to cheat the camera further out into the room and  use sticks.

From what I can see, the spool flanges have to be flexible as they are levered apart by the sprockets when the mag is attached. This is why the camera is so small. So a metal spool simply won't fit.

I'm guessing OP doesn't have any of that equipment, and this is presumed to be colour film.

This looks like a twisted screw (like a corkscrew) going through a shaped slot? If you can dismantle and clean and polish the screw and slot, and the rack on which the bulb travels on its two rods, this will help. I don't know about grease, but there's no sign of it on that photograph.

"4mm." was actually the 3.81mm. DAT cassette. Evidently nothing came of this because DAT was never used for video.

1 hour ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You gotta have good casters. I never moved a Steenbeck, but I have a lot of heavy chrome wire shelving that I move around all the time. I've always been short of space. Consequently, I stack the shelving units one or two units deep. If I need something from a rear unit, I have to move out the front shelving units to get at it. 

That's where my old Steenbeck castors went- onto a home-made studio trolley I made out of a folding camping kitchen unit and a piece of chipboard. The Chinese sellers tend to rate castors by the total weight carried on all 4 castors, not singly, so watch out for that. Anyway a ridged concrete floor did for mine. The replacements are actually Turkish and I can move the Steenbeck with one hand now. Move. Not lift.

Sounds like Moviola had a good salesman in NZ lol.

No just an idea based on observation and how often they get mentioned. But Steenbeck's 1990 brochure does say that they had made 25,000 up to then. The electronic redesign in the late 70s (most of the -01 models) did make the machines more capable, but there are dozens of ICs. I don't know what it did to the reliability, my '00 (January 1973) is the 1965 discrete-component design. Before that they used valves and 3-phase.

When I worked on weapons trials from 88-91 we used a 2-plate Schmid and a 4-plate popped up here (in Torquay, IIRC) a while back.

All the other flatbed are essentially copies of the Steenbeck- they really did invent the flatbed. From the start they had a single motor, all the others I believe had multiple motors with that complexity. I think of all the rest only KEM got it right. I don't think it's snobbery, it's just a question of survival in numbers. The relative simplicity has a lot to do with that- the only real impediment to a Steenbeck's survival is the price of timing belts. The only parts I've really had to renew have been resistors and capacitors.

CT scanning still uses X-rays.

14 hours ago, Joerg Polzfusz said:

But wasn’t Vistavision 35mm?

Yes, 8 perf horizontal, a similar size to the 35mm. still frame. In fact a lot of stop-motion used to be shot on Nikons with a long-roll film back. Temple of Doom is a famous one. It was  then extracted to ordinary 35mm. of course.

Presumably this is one reason a lot of VV cameras ended up with Nikkor mounts.

Flatbed Moviolas seem to me to have been a minor item for the company, almost an afterthought because they needed to have the option in their product range. I don't think they were very well thought of. They certainly don't seem as well designed or engineered. There's a reason 'Steenbeck' became a generic term- they probably accounted for 90 out of 100 flatbeds. Of the rest, 7 were KEMs and the other 3, maybe a Cinemonta, a Schmid and a Moviola.

I don't think Daniel is looking to acquire one.

Working out a putative hourly rate I looked up the Texas minimum wage. Shocking.

2 minutes ago, Geffen Avraham said:

It would be nice to have a quiet sync-sound 8-perf camera out there, so the whole film could be shot in a unified aspect ratio.

No one's ever made one as far as I know, and it's not easy... Arri techs tell me that even getting a 765 quiet at 5-perf is hard...

Well, most if not all dialogue is looped, so it's probably not essential. As long as the talent can actually hear themselves lol.

13 hours ago, Simon Wyss said:

inconvenient are the sheer size of flatbed machines

Witness the not-so-infrequent posts on here about how to move one. The 4-plate will just wheel through a UK door with the top hinged up but a 6-plate is a dismantling job. I bought new large castors for mine after a rough floor trashed cheap Chinese ones. Starting at about 125kg, it takes a few beefy grips to lift one.

Flatbeds had a few fans in the US- Spielberg used Steenbecks until Munich.

Thelma Schoonmaker used a KEM until, I assume, it just wasn't practical. The KEM is very similar but with a modular arrangement so it can be used for 16 and 35*.. They are even harder to keep going now.

*There are Steenbecks with interchangeable beds for 16/35 with the model suffix W (I assume for "wechsel"). The Cinema Museum in London has one. The coupling is mechanical so they run a bit noisier, although no-one would call a Steenbeck whisper-quiet.

A silent Steenbeck.....interesting, never seen one before. Maybe for print QC inspection at a lab? Considering it almost certainly needs $200 in belts, a bit steep.

BAck in the day Steenbecks cost as much as cars. They still do, last time I asked a new 4-plate was €36000. I paid less- much, much less. Dwight Cody still services them on the East Coast and he'll sell you a good one for $4000.

As to literature, I won't have anything you don't, and nothing in print. I rent Steenbecks. Well, just the one. LondonSteenbeck on FB.

17 hours ago, Bill Hunt said:

It’s the Kowa 16s Mark. 43mm rear thread which I’m pretty sure is smaller than the 16h.

It’d be nice if I could find a 1.3x projector lens—my problem would be solved, but I doubt I’ll find one.

The 8Z is quoted as 43mm as well. It has a focus rack, so you could adapt it. Vignetting was quite bad on my Super-8 zoom but it would probably work with Bolex primes, they're quite small.

Which 2x projector anamorphic is it? Some, such as the Kowa 8Z/16H, were intended to be used for photography as well. I had one for many years. It vignettes quite a bit at short focal lengths.

The Meteor 17-69 was the "standard" lens on the K3 and came only in its own bayonet-type mount. I very much doubt you would find a Meteor in PL mount. K3s in other mounts are all after-market conversions.

FYI the Meteor rear element protrudes about 40mm. into the camera.

2 hours ago, Wayne McFaul said:

Greetings. I'm new here.

I bought a K-3 a few years back from a Youtuber (who obtain it from Max of Russia). My intention is to get back into film mostly as a personal hobby. The camera has a Ultra 16 gate with a PL mount 'front plate' and with a 'full frame' 35mm lens. I'm hoping to find a wider angle lens preferable in a super16 form factor.

My question is with the flange distances of PL lenses in general. Somehow my FF lens works on my camera. So with that, can any PL lens work on a PL mount cameras like my K-3?

I'm hoping someone can clarify this for me.

Cheers

Any PL lens will fit the mount but the limiting factor is how far the rear element protrudes behind the mount, as the mirror must clear it. It's more likely to be a problem with a w/a lens. You would need to check, carefully.

After years of inactivity I needed to be able to carry my grandsons so I started this (scroll down, 'bodyweight for beginners') every day.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/07/the-muscle-miracle-can-i-build-enough-in-my-60s-to-make-it-to-100-even-though-ive-never-weight-trained

I don't worry about not being able to do planks and I do the press-ups from the knee.

Take a roll-up thin mat with you. Floors are hard.

Point the dome towards the light, and you measure the lights separately so that you can establish the lighting ratio. So, shade with the hand so that only one light is being measured at a time.

A rim light would typically be brighter than the key, but I'll let others (preferably David) say by how much.

I don't know what you mean by 'dome in or out'. It should be fitted as specified by the meter manufacturer.

A spot meter reading has to be interpreted according to the reflectance of the subject, so I wouldn't be using it to determine exposure as such.

The Wollensak lenses were on the shelf when I worked at a weapons range. They'd been used on the high-speed Fastaxes before they were all Nikonised in, I assume, the 80s. But our 'standard' lens was a 500mm. mirror, so the 1/2" wouldn't have seen much use. We did have Zeiss 10mm. for the 16S, though. Got to use it once when I blagged a trial sponsor into letting me shoot a doco on 16mm.  instead of U-Matic.👍

Looks like new.

Very nice job.