The Rank Bubble.

[Rob Young]

Talking about digest versions of films on another thread had me thinking about my favorite edited versions, one of which is "Genevieve". The 30 minute Derann edited is actually much more enjoyable than the full film, and tells the whole story with all the best scenes.

But it is one of a few digests from the mid - 1980's that suffer from "The Rank Bubble"!

My understanding is that when Rank Labs were making the 16mm negatives for Derann from edited 35mm prints, they were using wet gate printing and often, due a printer glitch, an air bubble would form in the printer gate. The result was a built-in little bubble shape at the top of the image. Not enough of a distraction to spoil a print, but a slight annoyance non the less, several masters had this little pest present.

It bobs away merrily, albeit faintly, in the top center of affected prints.

I think it was the great Keith Wilton who dubbed it "The Rank Bubble" in his reviews of prints which had this..."the rank bubble appears again...", etc.

Obviously not considered a reject issue (the labs obviously didn't re-make these negatives) several prints of this era would have this, "The Fog" 600 footer being another one.

Anyone else noticed it on prints from that era?

[Brian Fretwell]

Yes and not only from making the negative. I have a short "White box special" documentary labelled wet gate marks which consist of many lines of small bubbles down the picture for most of the film. It seems they, at one time, used a wet gate in the Peterson 16mm - Super 8 printer too.

[Mark Mander]

Who Dares Wins 600ft can suffer with this,I've seen it on a couple of copies I've had,Mark

[Rob Young]

Yes, there was a problem when the lab stopped printing wet gate 16mm negative to 8mm (1992 ish??) as the negatives often had dried fluid left on them which resulted in white circles and marks on the dry gate run prints.

I had a later print of Predator which was like this. It was originally printed in the early 90's wet gate, but my copy was a later 1995 print which would have used the same negative but dry gate. It didn't ruin it, and it was super sharp, but it was a little annoying.

Dry gate prints such as the Disney's were certainly a lot sharper and negative dirt wasn't too much of an issue if you got an early print run.

Wet gate could certainly disguised a multitude of sins on the negative (compare early wet gate Star Wars prints to later dry gate prints...) I think the fluid became banned or too difficult to dispose of?? Not sure why they would stop using it otherwise. Could be wrong on that though.

I do remember Derek Simmonds commenting on it at the time, saying that prints would be sharper but may display more negative marks.

But that Rank Bubble was obviously deemed acceptable!

[Brian Fretwell]

I think the wet gate fluid ban was due to it being a chlorofluorocarbon, similar to the liquids used in dry cleaning. They were banned due to their effect on the ozone layer.
The only other way of hiding base scratches was to use a diffuse light source in the printer.