Super 8/Regular 8 Gates

[Will Montgomery]

What price range is a Super 8/Regular 8 gate for a Millennium or Spirit?

 

Are there any used ones out there or are they special order from the manufacturers?

 

Guessing 50-80k?

[Robert Houllahan]

What price range is a Super 8/Regular 8 gate for a Millennium or Spirit?

 

Are there any used ones out there or are they special order from the manufacturers?

 

Guessing 50-80k?

 

 

I think you are in the right price range the gate for the Millennium is available new from Cintel and the gate for the Spirit-1 is probably no longer available new ( I checked a few years ago and they had a few unbuilt 8mm gates but they may be gone now) so someone would either have to find a used Spirit gate or engineer a new one.

 

-Rob-

[Oliver Christoph Kochs]

AFAIK in Germany there's only one Company that does a telecine on these high class machines.

They use a Millenium 2 and a Da Vinci. The company is called AVP.

You can e-mail 'em info@avp-vt.de or call 0049896913878 and maybe they tell you what they paid for it.

I know that they spent 500.000 Euro for the whole complete new system that they have running for two months.

[Will Montgomery]

Thanks.

 

Guessing I should just call the source in Germany,

 

Cinelicious and now I guess Spectra in LA both have Super 8 gates on the Spirit and Pro8mm has one of only two I know of for a Millennium.

 

I'm sure you'd have to have one for the love of the format, would take a long time to break even on such a specialized gate.

[K Borowski]

Don't forget, Will, there is a substantial stockpile of old film out there that has never been transferred, or transferred off a wall to VHS. I'd assume digitizing home movies from pre-1980 is a big part of the business strategy for supporting these gates.

[Will Montgomery]

Don't forget, Will, there is a substantial stockpile of old film out there that has never been transferred, or transferred off a wall to VHS. I'd assume digitizing home movies from pre-1980 is a big part of the business strategy for supporting these gates.

I totally agree, but 99% of those people couldn't understand paying more than $20 for one reel to transfer. They are also the same people that threw away their films after they transferred them to VHS in the 80's. Seems hard to tie up a million dollar telecine suite for $150 an hour when there should be $500/hour commercial work coming in right? Super 8 also would probably take more time to even get a decent color correction because of so many varied scenes so it would be like a 3 or 4 minutes of machine time per minute of film...

 

I'm eternally grateful that Cineliecious, Cinelab, Spectra, Pro8mm and others support the format at such a professional level but I'm not sure it makes financial sense unless you get your equipment for a really good price and you're as good as they are at marketing their services. Possibly having interns transfer at night or something but that might diminish the quality of work.

 

That being said, I was interested in pushing my local telecine house to pick up a Super 8 gate for their Spirits or their Millennium but $80k would be a tough nut. Just hoping someone had one laying around for $30k or something.