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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Your Super 8 Projector Setup thread
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-19-2006 06:55 PM
A couple of points there fella...
Super-8 has a projection aperture of .156 x .209 for an area of .0326 sq. inches.
Regular 16mm has a projection aperture of .286 x.380 for an area of .109 sq. inches. Thus 16mm has over 3.33 more information on the film than Super-8. To say they have nearly the same image quality, all else being equal, and it isn't, is flat out wrong.
As for stereo sound. Yes, the ELMO and I believe even some Kodak projectors provided the ability to record on the "balance" track (the projector we had, the Kodak 245BZ allowed for partial erasing and recording so one could do a voice over of a "live" recording. The balance track is the ultra-thin strip that is run between the perforation and the edge of the film. It gets its name because it balances the film so when it is rolled up, the side with the magnetic stripe for audio doesn't cause the film to stack higher on one side. The balance track has the thickness of the edges of the film uniform.
Now take into consideration the speed of the film...super-8 runs MUCH slower than 16mm...speed in analog comes off of high frequency so a 16mm film will have better high-frequency reproduction, again all things else being equal.
Guess what, Elmo also made a STEREO 16mm projector, the LX-2200. However, the primary purpose tended to be for dual languages rather than stereo sound...but stereo tracks could be recorded and the LX-2200 will play them back and it even has a noise reduction loop circuit for an outboard noise reduction device (e.g. Dolby).
So, in terms of picture AND sound, 16mm beats Super-8 every day, all else being equal.
Now Super-8 is a lot smaller to store and in most homes can do an adequate job but given 16mm as an option, I would go with 16mm.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-19-2006 07:45 PM
quote: Brad Miller
Derann films in the UK makes full length Super 8mm prints, among other labs.
Brad, Derann films does not make any prints. The printing was done for them by Rank Labs until a few years ago, when Rank stopped printing anything smaller than 35mm. They then used a small lab, I believe in the North of England somewhere.
Derann is mainly an Audio-Visual business; they are based at a shop in Dudley in the West Midlands. The film department occupies a small section at the back of the shop.
The prints are made two-up on 16mm stock, in 1-3 format, and are supplied by the lab in this format, in 2000 foot rolls, wound on standard 16mm cores, and packed two rolls in a 35mm can. In a room alongside the shop Derann stripe the prints using the paste process. I don't know what they've done about the solvent fumes; I haven't been there for several years, but it used to be pretty unpleasant when they were striping. They used to have another machine for striping customers' film in single Super-8 format, but they dropped this service, and disposed of the machine, some years ago, when the volume handled became too small.
The sound is recorded using Maga-Tech machies, the master being on 16mm fullcoat, using both edge and centre tracks for stereo films, the right, or Rt for matrixed tracks, channel being recorded on the balance stripe on the print. Obviously, the recording machines are fitted with special heads for the dual Super-8 1-3 format. They also have a machine which can record on a single Super-8 print, to enable them to re-record a print with a faulty track. The prints are then slit and spooled. The quality of the prints varies; some are very good, it depends on the quality of the source elements made available for producing the double 8mm printing negative.
quote: Steve Guttag
So, in terms of picture AND sound, 16mm beats Super-8 every day, all else being equal.
All else being equal, yes, but that is not always the case. In the heyday of 16mm not all prints were of good quality. The sme goes for 8mm of course, but many of the 8mm prints, at least of feature films, where good source elements are available, are of very high quality, I would say better than typical 16mm or 35mm ones. I am not saying that 8mm is better than 35mm, as some have claimed, but that the quality of the print is sometimes better. Of course, the much greater frame area on the larger formats means that you will normally get a better result by projecting a larger film, but in the case of a good Super-8 print, the higher print quality can sometimes outweigh the greater frome area of a typical, lower quality 16mm print. In other words, the 'quality per square milimetre', if there can be such a thing, is often higher on 8mm prints than on 16mm ones. I have seen Super-8 prints looking better than 16mm ones projected at the same size, though a 16mm machine can produce a greater light output, of course.
Despite the lower film speed, I would say tha Super-8 magnetic sound can out-perform 16mm optical, and while 2-channel, and even 4-channel matrixed, stereo tracks are quite common on Super-8, they are almost unknown on 16mm. Optical sound on Super-8 is no longer used, it was introduced quite late to the format, around the mid'70s, I think, and was little used; the airlines used it for a while. It was inferior to 16mm, but the difference was not as great as might have been expected. It was always mono, of course. The biggest problem with the optical tracks was that they were so narrow, about the same width as the DTS track on 35mm, that the allignment was very critical, and the slightest speck of dust in the soundhead could almost wipe out the sound. I have a few of these, and there is consideable variation in the
printing of the tracks. It is oten necessary to adjust the soundhead print to print, reel to reel, and even scene to scene.
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Brad Miller
Administrator
Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99
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posted 07-20-2006 05:24 AM
quote: Steve Guttag
So, if you are saying good Super-8 beats bad 16mm....I'll buy that. For I've seen good 16mm beat bad or even "typical" 35mm but by and large, I'll take the 16mm I've seen over the 8mm I've seen.
I think it's fair to say that you've never seen Super 8 done right. Bear in mind there are only a couple of projectors that show off the format properly, and they DO require modifications. Also, unless you order up one of those magnificent lenses made for Elmo by Schneider, your projected images will always pretty much suck. Regardless, the Beaulieu is THE projector to have if you are serious about souping it up with a real xenon lamp behind it. (I think I'm the only one who has ever done it though.) The Elmo GS-1200 could be ordered with a built in xenon, although friends who have compared the factory xenon vs. the Gemini 300 retrofit xenon report it is not as impressive as the Gemini. I have put the Gemini in an Elmo ST-600 with quite impressive results and a friend put the Gemini in a Eumig S926 also with good results (but not as good due to the typical plastic lens Eumig used).
I can guarantee you that the Elmo GS-1200 and the Beaulieu 708EL Pro machines are right out of the box better sound than any 16mm I've ever heard. When FG is used, dbx type 2 noise reduction can be utilized on the tracks for damned impressive sound since there is no issues of dirt causing dropouts. If some pink noise tests are performed prior to the re-recording and 1/3 octave equalizers used on the signal to be recorded onto the tracks, the end playback can be amazingly flat.
Or to put it in terms Steve may understand better, the Beaulieu 708EL Pro projector is the Kinoton of Super 8. It is noticeably better than everything else.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-20-2006 05:39 AM
quote: Peter Berrett
Hmm,m
Super 8 is better than 16mm
16mm better than 35mm
If this is the case I can't wait to buy a 4mm projector. That would be outstanding!
Regards Peter
Good 8mm can be better than bad 16mm.
Good 16mm can be better than bad 35mm.
Some of the 8mm prints being made today are of very high quality, and are better than some of the rather poor 16mm prints which were being turned out in the '70s and '80s. If you were to buy a print of, say, a Disney film today, and you had the choice of a new, high quality, 8mm one, or a secondhand '70s Ex. library 16mm one, which was of rather poor quality even when made, then the 8mm one would probably be better. Those are the choices that you are likely to have if you want to buy a print today.
quote: Steve Guttag
While I've definately seen my share of crap 16mm prints...I've also seen and shown some that had people swearing they were 35mm.
Agree totally; 16mm does not deserve the poor reputation that it has.
quote: Steve Guttag
As for sound...16mm mostly suffers from poor quality preamps and soundheads rather than any inherent flaw in the soundtrack itself. A print will sound very different as one plays it on various machines. In the lower-end of things, I've found ELMO to have had the best preamps and had decent sound. In the high-end, the current Kinoton FP38E slams all others. The soundhead is an isolated loop design with excellent film stabilization...the preamps they use didn't come out until the early '90s and they are vastly superior to earlier offerings by Kinoton. The quality of sound from them is excellent (and magnetic is even better, as expected).
Again agree, but this is not most peoples experience of 16mm. That experience was typically at school, with terrible prints shown on yellowed screens with tungsten lamps (often mis-aligned), dirty lenses, poor blackout in the room, and a small speaker contained in the lid of the projector case. Is it any wonder that 16mm has a poor reputation?
At the time when 16mm was being seriously considered for smaller cinemas I saw a demonstration of anamorphic 1.85 widescreen shown on a Fumeo machine with 2k xenon lamp and high quality optics. The sound was optical stereo, Dolby A type presumably, but I don't remember for sure. The quality wasn't at all bad, not as good as 35mm, but vastly better than typically heard from 16mm. At that time, when there were a lot of small cinema screens, and 16mm prints were cheap, it was certainly a viable option for this sort of installation, for screens of about 6 metres or so in width.
quote: Steve Guttag
I don't doubt that there are some excellent Super-8 machines out there...The ELMO machines seemed to be among the best I've laid my hands on. I don't know if SMPTE still has the Regular or Super-8 test films in stock (and I would be surprised if they are still being made) but the image steadiness of the machines I've threaded them in hasn't been too favorable.
So, if you are saying good Super-8 beats bad 16mm....I'll buy that. For I've seen good 16mm beat bad or even "typical" 35mm but by and large, I'll take the 16mm I've seen over the 8mm I've seen.
I can't say I've worked with any 16mm stereo...just know of their existance...I want to say that the US Navy had 16mm stereo prints, hence the LX-2200s from Elmo were used on many Navy ships.
As for sound quality...what are the theoretical and published specs of the frequency response, S/N of a Super-8 balance track? It can't be very good. The regular track is not that phenominal.
I don't know. there's not a great difference between the two stripes; they obviously run at the same speed, the balance stripe is slightly narrower, but not much, it does run alongside the perforations, which can cause stability problems, but much depends on the design of the projector sound head. The quality of the stripe itself also varies greatly; that on Fuji pre-striped stock being about the best I have seen. In the '70s I had some 16mm striping done by a major company that did a lot of this work, including 70mm, and the quality was terrible. Years later I met somebody who used to work there, and he told me that they had major problems in very hot or humid conditions; the building was not air conditioned. applying the very narrow stripes to 8mm, and for that matter 9.5mm and 35mm, prints is not easy; the recorded track obviously comes very close to the edge of the stripe, where any uneveness is most likely to be. The much wider stripe on 16mm and 70mm prints is obviously far better, but I've seen some pretty bad striping on 70mm prints.
I don't think optical was really an option for high quality sound on 8mm, though it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. It certainly wasn't 'HI-FI', and it would have been very dificult to do stereo. This wasn't the case with 16mm, where much better optical tracks were possible, due to the greater film speed and track width available. Dolby SR tracks could certainly have been produced, and no doubt would have been if development of 16mm as an exhibition format hadn't been largely halted by the growth of video for this purpose. By the time DTS was introduced 16mm was in rapid decline as an exhibition format, so it has never been widely used. The loss of the normal analogue track on a 16mm DTS print is, of course, an additional problem.
What we are seeing, and hearing, from many of the 8mm prints being made today is about the best that the format is capable of. Few 16mm prints are being made today; and those that are being screened, and the equipment used for screening them are often far short of the best obtainable from that format.
If the people who are doing the 8mm printing for Derann Film Services were making 16mm prints, using negatives made from the same source elements, and with Dolby SR stereo tracks, then I'm sure that we would have some very good 16mm prints, certainly far exceeding the quality of the 8mm ones, and probably at a similar price, given the costs involved in striping, recording and slitting the 8mm prints. To be honest, it would probably be almost as cheap to produce 35mm prints for home use, though this is not done, of course. 8mm magnetic sound prints are very expensive per unit of film area.
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