Cine film, two images

There was a videotape system where you turned the tape over to record more stuff (Video 2000). You’re not confusing it with that are you?

Tim

The 8mm standard cine in my Specto wind up camera ran for 2 minutes, exposing hald of the 16mm film..then you took the reel out turned it over and ran it back onto its original spool exposing the other half. The developer slit the film down the middle glued it together and returned it with one setof sprocket holes down one side to play back 4 minuets of film.

Thank you!!

This is exactly (or very nearly) what I thought I had read, but I remembered incorrectly that it was done with 8mm film and then the image was enlarged during development / printing onto a new reel of 8mm film. Which would of course result in even poorer quality.

Was all standard 8 shot 16mm? or were there some standard eight cameras that used 8mm film stock?

I have a few feet of 3D film of me as a child, doing an advert for Pepsi Cola. My Dad was the cameraman.

Standard 8 used a reel of 16 mm film which was exposed on one side, then the film was turned over and the other side was exposed, with some means of minimising the amount of fogging at the changeover. The film was processed, slit lengthways and then the two halved were spliced one after the other.

One of the big advantages of Super 8 was that it was a single length of

As far as I know, there was never any 8 mm film made with Standard 8 perforations. Super 8 perforations are smaller and a different spacing (its larger frame uses a greater proportion of the film width) so a projector can only play one or the other. However you *can* project Standard 8 in a 16 mm projector (because the perforation pitch is the same) as long as you don't mind a picture that only occupies 1/4 of the

I recall there was something called "single 8":

I'd forgotten about that. However it turns out that this was *Super* 8 perforations rather than *Standard* 8 ones.

This is interesting: "At least one camera was made which accepted both Single-8 and Super 8: the Honeywell Elmo Tri-Filmatic Super 100, manufactured in Japan by Elmo and sold in different countries as the Elmo C300, which uses interchangeable magazines for Regular (Double) 8, Super 8, Single-8, and 100-ft reels of Double Super 8."

It must have been an intriguing mechanical design that it allowed either a double-decker Super 8 or a single-decker (side-by-side) cassette to be used, while still advancing the film onto the relevant take-up spool and still aligning the film with the gate and the frame-advance mechanism.

Did Fuji make Super 8-perforated film only in Single 8, I wonder, or did they also make it in Super 8 cartridges? Although most of the film that my Dad took of my sister and I when we were children was on Kodak stock, with a Nikon camera, there are also some reels of Fuji film - I remember those because the film base is different meaning that splices have to use clear tape rather than overlapping splice with cement that dissolves the film base - as I discovered when a film got snagged in the projector and I tried to join the Fuji film with the Kodak splicer, only to find that the join never "hardened". And I'm wondering where the Single 8 camera is that he must have used for those Fuji films if they only made Single 8.

My father had a Standard 8 camera back in the late 1950's, a Paillard Bolex IIRC, with a twin turret so that you could switch between standard and telephoto lenses 'on the run' as it were, like this

Unfortunately my father didn't seem to appreciate the absolute necessity of keeping out _all_ the light while the film was removed from the camera and turning over the film, and much of it ended up on the cutting-room floor!

I still have a reel of film he took that did eventually survive his ministrations.

Did the film have to be turned over in light-proof conditions? Not very practical if you are outdoors and need to turn the film over. I presumed it had a light-proof trailer at the end of the film that covered the exposed film while you turned over the reel and rethreaded it.

Standard 8 really was a cack-handed solution! Super 8 was a lot better - and the frame size was a bit larger so didn't need to be magnified quite as much (magnifying film grain) for a given size of screen.

A better solution would have been to supply it in two canisters with light traps like 35 mm still film so a short length was fogged and was sacrificial but the rest was guaranteed light proof because it was within one canister or the other.

There were a few feet of trailer so that a few wraps on the spool protected the film from light. Even so you learned to swap it quickly and often with a coat over your head.

He had some sort of light-proof bag IIRC, into which you put the camera and your arms, and fiddled about until you'd got the camera open, the spool of film removed, reversed and re-inserted, all by touch without being able to see what you were doing.

I was in my early teens and didn't really take much notice.

I hadn't realised that Standard 8 really needed to be turned over in darkroom conditions, as opposed to subdued lighting (in the shade out doors, or else indoors).

I've never used a light-proof bag for loading (still) film into a developing tank. I always used to do it up in the loft where there was minimal light getting in through the eaves, and then worked under a blanket. I suppose that was my "light-proof bag" ;-)

I remember when I bought my first darkroom chemicals from a proper photographic shop, they gave me a length of fogged and useless film and was advised to practice loading it in the light, so I knew the sort of things that could go wrong (film jumping out of the groove and escaping the ball-bearing) so I knew how to fix them. Then when that was second nature, do it with my eyes closed. Finally do it in complete darkness with no "escape clause" of being able to peep as I was sorting out problems.

I never had a fogged film, though I did go through a phase of finding a small oval area of emulsion rubbed away from one corner of the second frame from the start, on various films that I developed. I never did work out what was causing that, because it must have happened after the film was wet, since dry emulsion would not rub off the film base.

It is hard to remember back to the days when the only modifications that you could make to a print were exposure and a bit of dodging or burning in to hold back the light in one part or increase the exposure in a another bit. No perspective correction (unless you had an enlarger with a lens that tilted one way while you tilted the print frame the other way), no alteration of contrast or gamma (apart from using paper of a different hardness) to correct for over/under-exposure of the negative.

I never tried colour film because I couldn't afford the chemicals or the water bath to keep the film developer at blood heat, and my enlarger didn't have a colour filter head for making colour corrections. I did try a couple of rolls of the chromagenic B&W film (Ilford XP1 IIRC) which you developed in a simplified version of the C41 colour negative process. Results were very varied in terms of density of negatives (probably variation in temperature from one film to another) but the beauty was that this film had a very wide latitude and you could get good prints from under/over developed negatives.

The last time I was in a darkroom was in the mid 1990s when I used the darkroom at work that the publicity photographic department used. That was very impressive and even had a light-tight revolving door so you could go to the loo without letting light in when someone else was printing or loading a film into a spiral.