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Vaporite film preservation system


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Vaporate was a commercial film preservation system applied to movie film. The leader of a film was embossed with the Vaporate name to distinguish it and a certificate of authenticity was included in the film can.



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The Vaporate process seemed to work as this film (1932) did not exhibit any symptoms of vinegar syndrome.


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The thing with vinegar is that it's more about the storage conditions than anything else. We've seen film from the 1920s that was stored in a closet that had no signs of vinegar. And I have film (that I don't really care about) that I shot fresh in the 90s that is severely vinegar because it was in a box in my attic...

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Yes, the acetate goes to acetic acid. But Perry doesn't say if the 20s film is 16 or 35, so we don't know whether or not it could be nitrate.

IM (very limited) E magnetic film is more likely to be adversely affected. I've had differential shrinkage that causes it to waver through the Steenbeck so badly that it has to be held to the mag head with the thumb. If you pull it taut, only one edge is straight.This is 80s material. Quite smelly picture film runs fine. It shrinks, even in 20 years, but linearly.

If you have nitrate film, you arguably have greater problems, like working out how not to burn down your premises.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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When I was working as a volunteer on the Royal Aircraft Factory registry at Farnborough some years back the small quantity of nitrate was kept outside in a safe.

 

Yeah, it can be pretty volatile when it starts to break down. Not something to mess with. We do very little with nitrate, but when we have it's been small jobs, approved as stable by a trained archivist, and the transfer is supervised and the film removed same day. But man, it looks beautiful.

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The thing with vinegar is that it's more about the storage conditions than anything else. We've seen film from the 1920s that was stored in a closet that had no signs of vinegar. And I have film (that I don't really care about) that I shot fresh in the 90s that is severely vinegar because it was in a box in my attic...

 

Yes, heat and no breathing is bad. But with old films, they change hands and it is a crapshoot how people will take care of them.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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Yeah, it can be pretty volatile when it starts to break down. Not something to mess with. We do very little with nitrate, but when we have it's been small jobs, approved as stable by a trained archivist, and the transfer is supervised and the film removed same day. But man, it looks beautiful.

 

What do you like about the look? Does nitrate have deeper blacks or better range?

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Yes, the acetate goes to acetic acid. But Perry doesn't say if the 20s film is 16 or 35, so we don't know whether or not it could be nitrate.

IM (very limited) E magnetic film is more likely to be adversely affected. I've had differential shrinkage that causes it to waver through the Steenbeck so badly that it has to be held to the mag head with the thumb. If you pull it taut, only one edge is straight.This is 80s material. Quite smelly picture film runs fine. It shrinks, even in 20 years, but linearly.

If you have nitrate film, you arguably have greater problems, like working out how not to burn down your premises.

 

Yes, shrinkage and warping are the early stages along with smell or film gets brittle and breaks easy.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vinegar_Syndrome_D.D._Teoli_Jr_(2).jpg

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vinegar_Syndrome_D.D._Teoli_Jr_(1).jpg

 

Later stages is salad dressing. (But I've never seen any liquefied VS film.)

 

http://www.mdepot.com/vinegar-syndrome/

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Does nitrate have deeper blacks or better range?

 

Cellulose nitrate designates the base plastic. Has nothing to do with the photographic coating. We can still produce equally dense and rich black-and-white images on modern stocks. Generally, camera originating films had thicker layers and more silver in them until after WWII. But that doesn’t mean automatically negatives were denser or had a wider contrast range. Development and printing parameters play their roles here also. What the public sees on a cinema screen is a positive image from a dedicated printing stock. Only few changes occured to print films since the beginnings. Maximum density more or less always lay around log 3. From 1929 on special sound recording films came into use with which density can reach log 4. Log 4.0 means some twelve f stops depictable on a matte white screen of gain 1. Log 3.0 would offer a nine f stops range. Of course powerful enough lamps are necessary for prints with deeper shadows.

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Cellulose nitrate designates the base plastic. Has nothing to do with the photographic coating. We can still produce equally dense and rich black-and-white images on modern stocks. Generally, camera originating films had thicker layers and more silver in them until after WWII. But that doesn’t mean automatically negatives were denser or had a wider contrast range. Development and printing parameters play their roles here also. What the public sees on a cinema screen is a positive image from a dedicated printing stock. Only few changes occured to print films since the beginnings. Maximum density more or less always lay around log 3. From 1929 on special sound recording films came into use with which density can reach log 4. Log 4.0 means some twelve f stops depictable on a matte white screen of gain 1. Log 3.0 would offer a nine f stops range. Of course powerful enough lamps are necessary for prints with deeper shadows.

 

OK, thanks. So from what you say, the nitrate films had a better range. They used to use carbon arc lamps for projectors back in the day. Maybe that was what is needed for dense images.

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No. We can take the same image contrast to screens with Xenon discharge lamps.

 

The high-intensity carbon arc is a hard light source, if I may use an older term. Its light contains a lot of ultraviolet and violet rays, comparable to the sunlight in the mountains. From that black and white films can appear with a faint glowing effect on a whitewashed surface. It’s related to limelight.

 

Speaking of nitrate-base films and carbon arcs we must include a thought of what silent cinema basically was. There was no need for sound pores in a spanned screen, very often projection went on the plastering of a wall.

Edited by Simon Wyss
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