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Topic: Super 8mm is back

Ian Parfrey
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1049
From: Imbil Australia 26 deg 27' 42.66" S 152 deg 42' 23.40" E
Registered: Feb 2009

posted 04-27-2010 03:37 AM

quote:
There are still people using 9.5mm,

And isn't that a beautiful format?

I have some 9.5 optical sound film here somewhere.
Just love it.

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Phil Blake
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 558
From: esperance western australia
Registered: Nov 2003

posted 04-27-2010 05:58 AM

well i have all the good video stuff but i still use super 8mm now and then , guess i just like the look of it and i dont like giving up the old ways

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 04-27-2010 06:31 AM

quote: Ian Parfrey
And isn't that a beautiful format?

Nice large frame size, but it does have the problem that the picture goes very close to the edge of the film, and so tends to get scratched, as with the NT edge of Super-8. Pathé seem to have been keen on the idea of large frame sizes; on their Rural 17.5mm format they used curved corners to the frames, and fitted a very small perforation, not much larger than a Super-8 one, into the space this freed up.

quote: Ian Parfrey
I have some 9.5 optical sound film here somewhere.
Just love it.

Do you know how 9.5mm prints were made? Most of them were printed 3 up on specially perforated 35mm stock. However, Walton Films in the UK had another method that they used in the '60s for making 9.5mm colour prints. For the small numbers of prints required by that time it wasn't worth making them by conventional means, but they found another method of making a few prints of silent films. What they did was to convert a few 16mm prints. The perforation pitch of 9.5mm film is almost the same as on 16mm; I can't remember the figure for 9.5mm now, but I think it has one more frame per metre than 16mm. This is close enough that a 9.5mm print, perforated at 16mm pitch, will run through a projector. They built a machine which punched new 9.5mm perfs in the centre of the strip, with registration pins which picked up the original 16mm perfs on each edge. It then slit off 3.25 mm from each edge, leaving a 9.5 mm print. No, I'm not joking.

If you ever see a 9.5 mm silent colour print it was probably made in this way. You can easily tell them as the frame covers just about the full area of the film, and there is no frame bar as is normal on 9.5mm; the perforation intrudes into the top and bottom of each frame.

Of course, when projected some of the original 16mm frame was cropped on all four edges, but people didn't seem to notice; maybe they were just jetting used to seeing pan and scan on TV, and it did enable Walton to offer silent colour titles when it would have been uneconomic by conventional means.

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