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Author
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Topic: New member questions
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted July 30, 2008 08:52 AM
Well,
The math gets a little more involved with Standard 8mm. The film you shoot is 16mm wide by 25 feet long. You expose one side of it, flip it over and expose the other. Then after processing the lab slits it into two strips each 8mm by 25 feet. Then they splice them and you wind up with one film 8mm by 50 feet.
I still have my doubts about these films containing any images at all, but if you have a chance to do maybe one or a couple of rolls as a test you could try that without committing yourself too deeply.
Are you pretty certain that the person that owned these films exposed them at all? It seems unusual that someone would shoot such a large amount of film and never get it processed. There are a lot of unprocessed half rolls and single full rolls out there because somebody lost the film bug and never got around to going to the lab, but this is as much as I shoot in one or maybe two years.
13 cents per foot is not a lot. Shooting film is not cheap, that’s why not as many people do it as once did. However, if the images you get back are really special to you, the price will be tiny.
The video option depends a lot on what you want to do with the end result. I'm partial to projecting my films, but not everybody wants to do that.
By the way, what kind(s) of film (Brand, film name, ASA) is/are these?
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted July 30, 2008 12:26 PM
Actually, film itself is the more permanent medium than any video format. The reason is obsolescence just as much as the material itself.
I have this bizarre Aunt up in the Bronx who was a big Regular-8 shooter back in the day. A few years ago she presented me a whole shopping bag full of empty reels and cans. It seems she'd gotten all her films transferred to video and spooled every last inch of the film into the garbage. (!)
The problem is that she chose the state of the art at the time: VHS, which is now a dying format. In a decade it will be much harder to find a player for VHS than a working movie projector (just not built as well) and video tape has a much shorter shelf life than film. This goes double for Kodachrome, which can go a century if kept under kind storage conditions.
If she decides to retransfer she will lose a little more quality each time. If she’d kept the film, it would only be one generation of transfer each go round.
What I'm saying is video transfer is fine for convenience, but to play it safe keep the original film somewhere you'd be comfortable being (not too hot, not too damp, not too dirty...) and maybe you will be able to transfer again when the mega-ultra-super video format of the month goes under without winding up with a screenfull of blurriness.
The thing of film crumbling to dust is a favorite bring-in-the-bucks strategy of the video transfer folks. It's much like the Life Insurance people wanting us to think we're all 40 minutes from a Heart Attack! Sure, some of us are, but more commonly it's simply not true.
I have another much less bizarre aunt in Brooklyn who comes out to visit every so often with her family movies from the 1960s, and I project them for her. She really enjoys that!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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