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Author
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Topic: 16mm endless loop equipment
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 05-01-2006 03:56 AM
I have seen two designs of 16mm loop equipment; unfortunately your requirements would seem to rule out both of them.
The first consists of attachments which clamp onto the spool arms of the projector; these hold a long bar, maybe a 1.5 metres or so long. Mounted on this bar are two short vertical bars, which can be moved along the long bar to adjust the spacing between them. The short vertical bars each have several rollers mounted on them, and the film is laced back and forth around these rollers. The commercially produced one which we had where I used to work had six rollers at each end I think, giving 12 x 1.5m, plus another metre or two through the projector and back up again, giving a maximum film length of about 20 metres. This is a long way short of the length you require. It would be quite easy to make one of these devices, and you could make it larger, but it would have to be very large to handle 800 feet of film. The device was quite reliable while running, but was quite difficult to lace up without the film slipping off some of the rollers, and thus getting dirty and scratched. These problems would be worse on a very large unit.
The other type I have seen was made by Elf, the name under which Eiki projectors were imported and sold in the UK. This consisted of a sort of table consruction, with a horizontal turntable on top. This would handle the length of film you require, but there is a problem. The film unwound from the centre and took up on the outside, or vica versa, I can't remember which, rather like the old 50 foot Technicolor 8mm loop cartridges. The film was a simple circular coil, not the star-shaped system used on 35mm endless loop platters, and so the film had to rub against itself to accommadate the different daimeters at different points in the coil. This caused serious wear and scratching of the film, and the thing was also prone to frequent jamming, and so would fail your requirement for high reliability. Depending on how long you were going to use this for you would need to replace the print quite frequently. These things were made for triacetate prints; old diacetate ones seemed to be even worse. I don't know how they would behave with modern polyester stock. Polyester does seem to scratch quite easily; you would not have frequent film breakage, as was common with triacetate, but that cause other problems if the thing jammed. You would probably have to install extra fail-safe devices if you were running it unattended.
It might be possible to adapt a 35mm endless-loop platter to run 16mm film, but these take a lot of space, and also have reliability and film wear issues, read what Leo has said about them in the past, though these are probably not as bad as those on the Elf 16mm unit.
You say 'Don't do it' is not an option, but I think you should consider at least two alternatives:
Have a high quality digital transfer made from the best available film elements, and run this from either a DVD or a hard disk. If you play in on a computer you are not limited to the normal PAL or NTSC resolutions, but can use something better. This is expensive; are you workig n a low, or zero, budget?
Have a number of 16mm prints made, splice several together on each of two spools. Run these on a conventional 16mm projector, and rewind one spool while the other is running. This is also expensive, as you have to have several prints made, though they should last a long time, and you need an operator to change reels, and rewind film. Is this for a short-term event, like an exhibition, or something permanent, like a museum? What size picture do you need? Is there some reason why the show has to be run on film?
Finally, what is the film you will be running? If it's some rare or irreplacable element, like a Kodachrome camera original, don't let it anywhere near any sort of endless loop device.
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Phillip Grace
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 164
From: ACMI. Melbourne. Australia.
Registered: Mar 2004
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posted 05-08-2006 11:29 PM
Thanks all for your response, especially the information about polyester film base.
The loop projection is part of an art work, and the projector and film image are actually part of the aesthetic. I think the whole thing is to run continuously. The screen is to be quite small, so the whole thing would be well within the capability of a looped DVD and LCD screen or plasma display, but this is not to be.
I would prefer to go with a looping cabinet because of the undoubted low film wear and high reliability. There was an installation at an exhibition here which ran a 12 minute 35mm program under fully automatic control for months on end, using a powered loop cabinet. It was quiet too. I think the projector was a Kinoton. If the artist will agree, or if space allows we would prefer to go this way, and have been working out the most compact roller and rack arrangements for the cabinet. Loops inside loops etc. (It would be lovely if the thing could be installed inside a bell tower). The construction of a cabinet would be pretty elaborate, and I suspect that the budget wont go too far - which is usually the case. Dual rewinding projectors under automatic control would be in the same realm, unfortuately.
The solution we are working on at the moment involves running two small capacity endless loop devices in cascade. We've come across a very reliable home-built unit sourced from Amsterdam, which will take about 400' of 16mm. I'm pretty confident that if each of them is set up inside an isolated loop of film, they will both run properly. This could be done using driven sprockets on the projector, and/or some creative threading, or an idler sprocket on the looper itself, which feeds film into the loop on one side, being driven by the film being pulled out of the loop on the other side. A similar set-up to the old magnetic penthouse. This should also result in a very compact arrangement. It sounds a bit like double-jeopardy, and trying to work out the difference in film friction of one large unit versus two small ones made my brain hurt.
I'll report back if it works. Otherwise it will never be heard of again.
Cheers. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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