Is it possible to use Kodak edgecodes on print film as a poor man's substitute for a frame counter? Somehow I got it into my head that edgecodes contained footage/frame information, but that certainly does not seem to be the case for 2383 print film, at least not in a non-cryptic way.I hunt around on the Kodak web site and find: H-1 Film Identification, which documents the first 13 digits, though miscounts it as 12 digits. This counting error seems to be in a number of places...
H-1 Sizes Available gives some more info about (3rd field of the 13-digit).
What makes me wonder is that the edgecode seems to be printed with minor spacing variations throughout the print. Ocassionally a few characters change also. For instance, the reel I was looking at tonight had:
2383 521 102 1 20 KOD.AK 22 2001 M
2383 5 21 102 1 20 KOD. AK 22 20 01 N
2383 521 102 1 06 KOD.AK 22 2001 M
23 83 521 102 1 0 2 KOD. AK 22 2001 Q
23 83 521 102 1 20 KOD.AK 22 20 01 N
23 83 521 1 02 1 22 KOD.AK 2 2 2001 N
2383 5 21 102 1 22 KOD.AK 22 2001 N
2383 521 102 1 22 KOD.AK 200 1 N
What's with the spacing games? The unique identification codes seem to be:
2383-521-102120
2383-521-102106
2383-521-102102
2383-521-102122
(Yes, there were three lab splices on this one reel, for which 4 different film stocks is consistent. This is clearly my punishment for saying, over in the I got a film-tech print thread: "they could start a new 6000' run into the printer and take off the first two reels as splice-free, and then collect all the short ends together and give the rest of us prints with 6 lab splices to a reel.")
2383 is clearly KODAK VISION Color Print Film 2383. 521 is the emulsion batch number. 102{102,106,122,122} are evidently strip numbers.
Anyhow, what's the rest? Do the position of the "extra" spaces, or the fact of the varying last letter represent a bizarre way to encode footage (in a backward-compatible way, perhaps?).
--jhawk
(who is quite curious at this point)