WTB: Electronic Film Calculator

[Frank Wylie]

It's crazy, but no one has written an app like the old electronic film calculators you could find from Birns & Sawyer. 

You know, the ones you could add and subtract film footages without having first to convert everything to frames and then back to feet/frames?

Anyone have one laying about they would part with for a reasonable sum?

Barring that, anyone know of an app for an iPhone that would do the same?

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by Frank Wylie

[Evan Walsh]

I don't know any apps that do the adding/subtracting bit but if you just need to figure out run times and lengths check out the free Kodak Cinema Tools app. 

pCam Pro (IOS only I believe) also has this function in addition to dozens of other useful tools, I believe its $30.00 

[Satsuki Murashige]

Agree with Evan, PCAM is great and worth the money. The Kodak app is good too. 

[Frank Wylie]

Yes, I found those, but I inspect and evaluate tons of original nitrate negatives, dupe negatives, lavenders/finegrains and prints that have domestic and foreign versions, along with censor-cut prints so trying to make heads or tails of missing footage by gang synchronizer can get pretty challenging at times.

It would be nice to be able to do offset footage subtractions when I find that dupe negative that has 5 or 6 sound sync marks punched in the leaders;  it happens more often than you would imagine.  Seems every lab just HAD to make their own sync mark, or edge notches or timing cue tabs...  Some of these elements look like they went through a lawnmower sometimes...

Here's a fun one (pix attached):  how about a negative with metal staples in the perfs to trigger light valve changes?  Want to run that one through your Scanity? 

I was hoping for a lazy solution, but looks like I'll have to keep doing it the old fashioned way...

 

Edited April 14, 2021 by Frank Wylie
added image

[Evan Walsh]

Ah that's over my head but this sounds like something you might be able to create in an excel or google sheet through the math functions. 

You might need a spreadsheet pro to cook that up for you but I have seen some pretty comprehensive spreadsheets that help automate things like timecards/billing and data collection. 

[Frank Wylie]

That's a possibility, Evan. 

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Simon Wyss]

I have thousands of hours of editing work in my bones, you can believe me, and have always found the most reliable and at the same time simplest method is to deal with numbers of frames. You collect them easily from the counter on your synch roller. Just stick to these numbers, you have 000000 to 999999. The max. would be 277 minutes at 60 fps (Showscan, 1978) or 1388 minutes at 12 fps (Eidoloscope, 1895).

When I had my own cinema I published the frame numbers in the newspaper, unremarkable small figures, measured from the actual print. I believe absolute frame numbers should be published with each movie by the producers already, so that future mutilation and carnage can be spotted. Frame numbers are universal, the base to all calculations.

https://www.scenesavers.com/content/show/film-footage-calculator

https://reto.ch/cgi-bin/film_calculator.pl

http://www.brianpritchard.com/Here_is_a_Film_Length_Calculator.htm