Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Edge codes on Orwo stock.

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Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 08-27-2015, 05:22 AM:

Just received L'Atalante. Have looked at the first couple of minutes on the bench, and it looks very good. At first I thought there were no edge markings at all, but on closer inspection there are. Orwo S 665. J9 is what it says.

It feels like triacetate, it's certainly not polyester. I think there was a very slight vinegar smell in the only can I've opened so far, but so slight that it's difficult to be sure.

It's extremely unlikely that any normal distributor would have, let alone send us, a nitrate print, but I have to be certain. Does the 'S' signify safety stock on Orwo.

The track is duo-bilateral, is this original, or has it been re-recorded during a restoration?

I'm busy setting up for two special events today, so I won't look at it again until Saturday.

Posted by Phillip Grace (Member # 2262) on 08-27-2015, 06:37 AM:

Hi Stephen.

I had the same query some years ago, and advice from the National Film and Sound Archive (Australia) went as follows. "The trade mark ORWO was established in 1964. All ORWO products were/are manufactured on Safety Base". So far I've never had any reason to doubt it. It doesn't strike me as a particularly high quality base. Most of the ORWO prints we see here are curled, buckled and shrunk, and in some stage of decomposition. (Vinegar syndrome). Even relatively recent prints, particularly b/w, can be quite brittle.
Cheers.
Phillip.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 08-27-2015, 07:56 AM:

Thank you Phillip. Yes, it is safety stock, in fact most of the first reel is polyester, but there' are captions spliced on the beginning which are triacetate. I haven't looked at the rest of the print yet, but the first reel looks nice.

I always liked the look of Orwo black and white stock, but their colour film was a different matter.

I've never seen a nitrate print from a proper distributor, only from film collectors and other 'odd' places, but I'd rather be sure. I have projected nitrate, but certainly not in this place.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 08-27-2015, 05:36 PM:

My experience with B&W ORWO filmstock was similar to Phillip's- the stuff
I handled was usually somewhat curled & buckled. But, obviously it all depends
on how the original film was processed and then then stored over the years.

Back in the days when we had awholebuncha chemicals available in the
projection room to play with, I seem to recall that one way to test for
nitrate was to drop or dip a small piece of film into some methel
alcohol or maybe it was MEK. Nitrate would dissolve almost immediately.
Safety film kinda slowly congealed into a small blob; but it was easy to
tell the difference.

I seem to recall there was a 'specific gravity'test too, where you'd drop
a small piece of film into some trichlorethelyne, which was not uncommon
to find in booths back then, and nitrate would float, and acetate would sink.

(Or mabye it was the other way around- - I forget & would have to lookitup!)

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-27-2015, 07:02 PM:

quote: Jim Cassedy
I seem to recall there was a 'specific gravity'test too, where you'd drop a small piece of film into some trichlorethelyne, which was not uncommon to find in booths back then, and nitrate would float, and acetate would sink.

Nitrate in good condition will float. Nitrate that has hit the autocatalytic point will also sink (albeit much more slowly than CTA), signifying that it will start to go brittle and then sticky within a few weeks if it isn't moved to cold and dry storage, and within a couple of years if it is. That's why archives used to use the float test to determine priorities for nitrate preservation duplication, and why, in archival prints made from nitrate preservation elements, you'll see small circular punch marks printed through, usually on the head and tail sections, or on the black frames of a fade-out in the middle of a reel.

This was before the IPI invented indicator strips that work by reacting to the off-gases to do this sort of thing - obviously, the non-invasive/destructive method is considered better now.

Stephen: if your film smells of vinegar, even faintly, it isn't nitrate. Nitrate has a unique and instantly recognizable camphor/mothbells/musty-sweet sort of smell. The next time you come across a reel, have a good sniff at it - you'll never forget that smell.

I had a b/w OrWo print of Odds Against Tomorrow in the booth recently, and it looked really nice. The midtones had a shimmery look from the exteriors that were shot on ultraviolet-sensitized stock that I've never seen on an Eastman print. I don't know if the choice of OrWo print stock was a conscious one made on artistic grounds, but it was certainly one of the most memorable b/w 35mm prints I've seen in a long time.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 08-31-2015, 02:53 PM:

Leo,

Most of the print is polyester, but spliced onto the head of the first reel is a short length containing, amongst other things a caption about it being a restoration, which when I later read it was of course a pretty strong indication that it was safety stock. This spliced on section was what I had been looking at, and it was triacetate. It was extremely unlikely that this could have been a nitrate print, but any print of a film which is old enough that it could possibly be nitrate which gets delivered to a cinema where I'm working gets checked, so I checked it.

I can normally satisfy myself that it's not, but in this case being a stock that I'm not very familiar with, with what at first I thought was no edge markings, and then when I looked closer some small and feint unfamiliar ones, this was enough for me to want to check further. I seldom see nitrate film, so I do actually keep a short length in a can which I can compare with unknown stock for feel, thickness, look, smell etc. Something about nitrate film makes me associate it with the word 'cold', I don't know why, and this film didn't give me that feeling, but the lack of the words 'Safety film' was enough to make me want to be sure.

I have never known a nitrate print to come from a proper distributor, it's usually either from a film collector, or it comes with a story along the lines of 'My dad was a freelance newsrweel cameraman and I've got some film that he shot of Amy Johnson at Croydon Airport; would you be interested in showing it?' Those are the sort of circumstances where it's quite likely that the material will be nitrate.

Anyway, it is safety, it's a good print; should be a good show.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-31-2015, 07:44 PM:

When I worked for a little archive in the north east, that was how nitrate would typically arrive, too. The one that really sticks in my mind was some reels of local topicals from 1909 and 1910 - about 2,500 feet in total. My counterpart at an archive down south had received them from a donor nearby, and wanted to transfer them to us. She said that she'd bring them up the next time she was visiting relatives near us. I thought that, being an archivist, she knew what she was dealing with, would take sensible precautions, etc.

So when she arrived at our office, about her first words were, "I'm so glad to get rid of these heavy things ... it was a devil of a job to lift them into the overhead locker on the plane!" The fumes given off by three reels of burning nitrate in the packed cabin of an A320 hardly bears thinking about. Very thankfully, she got away with it.

There were a few mix 'n match prints that circulated in the 1950s (some reels acetate, others nitrate) as remaining stockpiles of nitrate were used up by the labs, and they do occasionally surface. One gotcha is Hollywood films which had a slightly different British release version (e.g. scenes cut by the censor), meaning that the affected reels were printed at a different time and by a different lab from the one that did the unaffected ones. If one lab had converted to acetate but the other not, you ended up with mixed nitrate/acetate print.