Philippe

Philippe: Is there any chance that you work for a certain Belgian film manufacturing company? Information like that is proprietary, of course. It's like asking Coca-Cola for their formula, or Brad for the secret ingredients in Film-Guard.

Health, Safety and Environment information about Kodak products (including Material Safety Data Sheets MSDS) can be found on Kodak's web site:
http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/about/environment/index.shtml

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

By the way, I have a question for you JP; When the sprocket holes are punched in release stock, what happens to the waste (the little square?) Are they thrown back in to the "vat" of base stock "goop" and recycled or anything?

I know this is a silly question, but I was showing a kid the booth equipment, and told him that something like 3000-4000 prints are made. He asked what happened to all the punched out pieces. After training people for 20 years or so, I usually have an answer to every question, but here I had to laugh and admit I had no idea. I thought they were just thrown away, but now I'm wondering....!

The perforation punchouts are collected from the perforators by a vacuum system. The silver is chemically recovered from the emulsion, and the polyester support is broken down into it's basic chemicals and recycled into new polyester support. BTW, Kodak's subsidiary FPC recycles billions of feet of worn prints scrapped by the distributors:
http://www.fpcfilm.com/US/en/motion/FPC/fsc/fsc_main.html

To impress your "newbies", show them the math for the number of perforations in 3000 prints of a 2 hour movie:

2x60x90 = 10,800 feet per print
10,800x3,000 = 32,400,000 feet of film for 3,000 prints
32,400,000x128 = 4,147,200,000 perforations
That's over 4 BILLION perforations, not including the leaders!

(Apologies to our friends who measure things the right way, in metres.)

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

("BTW, Kodak's subsidiary FPC recycles billions of feet of worn prints scrapped by the distributors").

How Sad indeed!
Mark

How many perfs are punched in one operation? How many operations per minute, and how many perforators are in operation at one time? Oh, and one final question, if I may:

How long before we get perforations in the shape of a Dolby logo?

Just curious.

Looks like you and Philippe are thinking of manufacturing film. Sorry, that kind of information is proprietary.

 |  IP: Logged

 |  IP: Logged

But the problem is twofold; the studios are worried about piracy, meaning they don't want to let anyone have prints and;

no one wants to pay for the storage costs, meaning the studios dont want the prints themselves.

quote:

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Looks like you and Philippe are thinking of manufacturing film.

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Only curious.

The silver (mostly from the analog soundtrack area) is recovered when color prints are recycled properly. Of course, if they are put into landfills or incinerated without proper precipitation of the fly ash, the silver goes into the environment.

The film laboratories are very efficient in recovering most of the silver in the film, mostly from the fixer solution of the process. Very little goes down the drain.