8mm Forum: Single 8 Sound System; could we revive?

This is topic Single 8 Sound System; could we revive? in forum 8mm Forum at 8mm Forum.

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Posted by Simon McConway (Member # 219) on May 15, 2008, 02:20 PM:

I now have my P300 Single 8 sound camera. Lightweight, small & compact with fitted microphone; overall HIGHLY convenient! Seems a great shame that we can no longer record sound, as sound films were ceased in 1999. Couldn't someone pre-stripe film for us, so that we can continue to use these simple yet effective sound systems?

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on May 15, 2008, 02:50 PM:

The problem you'd run into is the film would need to be striped in the dark and then cartridged. Certainly possible, but not easy. Striping works best when the operator can observe the stripe being laid down and stop it when things go wrong, in this case that would be pretty hard.

I have kind of a minority view on recording sound on film. Based on my experience with the camcorder, I don't really regret the end of sound film. It's hard enough worrying about what is going on screen without worrying about what's coming out of the speakers too. I find too much of the video sound track is also filled with "camcorder discussion"

Some favorites:

1) "Did you charge the battery?"
2) "How much time is left on this tape?"
3) "Why can't I see anything?" (Black screen, followed by a sudden image after my wife remembers the lens cap.)

I'd really hate to commit film to this kind of stuff. I also have a thing about wanting the camera to be an invisible observer, and this kind of audio really blows that out of the water.

Pretty much anytime you just sit and listen; you realize that we are surrounded by extraneous sound. Keeping it off the track is pretty hard. That's why the studios have sound stages and also do a lot of their sound tracks in post production.

I'd love to shoot some lip-sync footage, but I think the closest I'll ever come is narration. If nothing else that would require regular people to rise to the level of "actors", and let's face it: most of us aren't!

Posted by Wade Epler (Member # 1158) on May 20, 2008, 03:07 AM:

Hello everyone, this is my first post here so I'll try and make it a good one.

I got into filming my own super 8 around 1999 or so, and being that sound film was just discontinued, I was determined to find some workaround to shooting my own. I started out by trying to modify a silent cartridge by cutting slots in the bottom for the film to feed out and over the sound head and back up into the cart again. After adding a custom film guide over the head to keep the stripe right on target, I was able to record quality sound and did not have any problems with scratches on the film. However, I dropped this method when I found that fifty feet of striped film will not fit into a silent cartridge. The added stripe adds just too much bulk to the reel, which meant I had to cut about six feet off of the reel before it would work. As you want to try this with single 8, much the same thing will have to happen, although for reasons I won't get into here, you'll probably only be able to fit thirty feet of film into a cart.

Still determined, I went on to buy some old sound carts and recharging them with my home striped stock. I striped some cheapo expired russian stock that I was able to buy from the widesreen centre in bulk for very cheap and loaded it up. As I recall, the whole thing ran great, I developed it as a negative (albeit a very dense one, as the filmstock is reversal only) and I was able to watch my own synced film within a few hours of striping! While very rewarding, the hours and hours of work required to create a dinky roll of film that you will have to hand process (I just can't see any lab accepting a roll of this stuff) just renders the whole thing a great impossible possibilty.

To anyone who dares to try this, I salute you. I know of a couple of folks who tried to do this striping in the dark stuff as a business venture, but I believe those efforts have fallen through.

Posted by Simon McConway (Member # 219) on May 20, 2008, 03:27 AM:

How did Kodak stripe their sound carts?

Posted by Jim Carlile (Member # 812) on May 20, 2008, 03:59 AM:

Check this out, the middle of the page:

http://members.aol.com/Super8mm/Super8mm.html

Posted by Joerg Polzfusz (Member # 602) on May 20, 2008, 04:46 AM:

Hi,

Kodak and Fuji stopped producing sound-carts at nearly the same time. Both companies listed "environmental issues" as the cause - it looked like they weren't allowed to use some of the chemicals/glues any more. Of course there might have been some alternative chemicals/glues. But they didn't want to invest any money to find them. So they simply throw away their pre-striping machines and the machines to produce those sound-carts.
In fact they would have stopped the sound-carts anyway as there are more silent-cams out there and most film-stock is now used by professionals (for ads, music-videos, ...). And the pros shoot at 24fps (all single8-mag-sound-cameras are 18fps-only!) and are using DAT- or other external sound-recording devices. Not to mention that this allows them to record the sound in stereo or better, while the super8/single8-sound-cam records only in mono. Even many amateurs switched to external sound-recording devices as the recorded sound is 18 frames ahead of the image. So there's no real way to edit the processed film as you'll either have to remove the beginning of the sound or to leave frames that don't belong to the scene (or show the clapper board, ...).

Nevertheless there's one way left to get sound-carts: Produce your own [Wink]

E.g. the Agfa-Super8-Moviechrome-sound-carts and the Fujichrome-Single8-sound-carts are relatively easy to open and to refill. Just send your raw stock to http://www.fipra.de , get it stripped in their dark-room (1,05 EUR per metre when using Agfa-sound-tape - that's the normal prst-striping-price! The price for doing this in a dark room could be higher!), then refill the carts in your own dark-room. Of course you're limited to acetate-based film-stocks and you'll have to process the films yourself (as an external lab normally breaks the carts open and throws them away)...

Jörg

[ May 20, 2008, 08:47 AM: Message edited by: Joerg Polzfusz ]

Posted by Wade Epler (Member # 1158) on May 20, 2008, 05:32 AM:

Hey, glad to see Fipra is doing the impossible! In the US, we had a guy who had bought these massive custom Weberling stripers to do this, and just could never get past the initial cost of paying thousands of dollars for these things.

Wittner in Germany also had a deal where they were prestriping film in a test program, but that fell through due to extreme cost: they were striping 16mm film down the middle and slitting and perfing a single piece of super 8 from that. I think they did try to get unperfed 16mm from kodak in order to get two pieces of film from one, but it never came through.

Personally, I now shoot sound on film with my auricon newsreel camera. The auricon allows you to shoot optical sound on 16mm reversal stocks.

Posted by Joerg Polzfusz (Member # 602) on May 20, 2008, 09:18 AM:

Hi Wade,

Wittner also offered pre-striped film for the Beaulieu SuperDrive SD8/60. But they stopped this in 2004:
http://www.wittner-cinetec.de/neu/news2004.php
scroll down to "01.03.2004 - Aktuelle Information"
Short summary: The price for pre-striping has risen to 1,20 EUR per metre back then. Hence the price for 60m-sound-film was 72EUR higher than for the silent film. Therefore Wittner thought that they weren't able to sell it for the new price. Hence they stopped the sound-film.
They wrote that they were looking for another, cheaper company and even offered free night-vision-googles ...
... but AFAIK noone was able to offer this for a cheaper price since then.

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