8mm Forum: Dating film from serial numbers

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Topic: Dating film from serial numbers

Les Waters
Junior
Posts: 1
From: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Registered: Jul 2012

posted July 29, 2012 12:44 PM

Hi, I wonder if anyone can help me please - I couldn't find any earlier references to this topic.

I’m in the UK and am trying to date some old 8mm films. These are on Kodak stock.

There is a number perforated at the start of each film. The numbers have been done with a perforation machine and each digit is depicted by tiny dots in a 5 x 4 matrix

Examples from four films are:
8 9999 11
3 7895 1
0 120 1
58 1500 6

I wonder if anyone has any idea please whether these are perforations applied to the film by Kodak at manufacture, or whether they have been applied on processing, and in either case whether there is a published schema to work out a date from these numbers.

I did discover this reference http://www.amianet.org/resources/guides/date_code.pdf
to film cut marks but it doesn't seem to cover these numbers on 8mm film. Also I found reference to Kodak KeyKode here: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Education/Publications/Essential_reference_guide/index.htm?CID=go&idhbx=referenceguide but this doesn't apply to 8mm either.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

Les Waters

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Les Waters
Cambridge
UK

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Bryan Chernick
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 654
From: Bothell, WA, USA
Registered: Mar 2010

posted July 29, 2012 03:53 PM

If you read the edge of the film where it says Kodak Safety Film there will be some squares, circles, triangles etc, right after the word film. These are the date codes. Since they repeated the codes every 20 years you will have to use other clues for the date like car models and clothing styles. I have found that these codes work quite well with 8mm film most of the time.

Kodak Edge Codes

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