16mm film
16 mm and Super 16 mm are narrow film formats that have been and are used worldwide for television productions , documentaries and low-budget films . For commercial marketing, films shot on 16 mm material are usually enlarged to 35 mm film ( blow-up ) so that they can be shown with the projectors commonly used in cinemas .
Historical development
The 16mm format was introduced in 1923 for amateur, documentary, educational and advertising films, but soon found widespread use as an alternative to the 35mm cinema standard. Poor resolution and coarser grain are accepted in favor of the far lower production costs and the mostly more compact and lighter technology. With analog television ( PAL / SECAM / NTSC ), the resolution of 16 mm films with medium light sensitivity was slightly better than that of television broadcasting, so that the film material was optimally used during production.
Many small picture cameras used or use the same material, such as B. the Rollei 16 .
Since the turn of the millennium , 16 mm film has been increasingly replaced by electronic digital recording processes.
The footage
The developed 16 mm film has an image field size of 10.3 mm × 7.5 mm (w / h), the image diagonal is 1/2 inch (inch), corresponding to 12.7 mm. For each image ( frame ) there is a perforation hole on the side exactly at the height of the image line , analogous to the normal 8 film.
The material is produced with one-sided perforation (single edge, always seen to the left from the layer) or double-sided perforation (double edge). Perforated on one side, it is mainly used as raw film in film cameras and for optical copies ( old norm , layer facing the picture window, blank away from the picture window). With double perforation, it is used (less often) as raw film, then mostly for high-speed film cameras and animation cameras , but above all for contact copies ( clap copies ), a process in which layer upon layer is pressed during exposure. Since the copy after this process is reversed and the film has to be turned over in order to show it the right way round ( new standard , blank towards the picture window, layer away from the picture window), double perforation is necessary.
The film format Super 16 is 16 mm film perforated on one side and, by utilizing the remaining width of the film material, achieves an image field size of 12.35 mm × 7.42 mm (w / h). The aspect ratio is 1: 1.66 and thus almost corresponds to the production requirements for the 16: 9 television format, and is therefore mostly used as the starting material for electronic processing ( post-production ). It is also possible to produce 35 mm projection copies in the blow-up process from Super 16 negatives.
One foot (304.8 mm) 16 mm film contains 40 frames. 100 foot spools therefore result in a running time of 2:46 min at 24 frames / s .
watch TV
Since the beginning of television in the early 1950s, 16 mm film cameras have been used almost exclusively for current reporting all over the world - compared to 35 mm equipment, which is much more compact and lighter . In most cases, reversal film was used because one copy of a film was usually sufficient for television broadcasting and for television purposes. For this purpose, many television broadcasters had their own copy plants , which made it possible to make film material of current events available on the same day, ready for broadcast. This made it possible to send film recordings to the transmitter only one or two hours after the recording team returned. At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, electronic reporting replaced film recording in the area of “daily news ”.
Since the resolution of a television picture in SDTV is lower than in 16 mm film, this was also used in numerous other areas of television. In addition to the current reporting, reports, documentaries, cartoons and breaks, commercials and even television films and series were shot on 16 mm film. Reversal film was usually used for reports and initially also for documentaries , but negative film was used for the much more complex television series .
Until the introduction of magnetic recording ( MAZ and Ampex ; 1959) on what were then professional video recorders, film was the only way to archive television broadcasts. The method used was the so-called film recording . Usually 16mm film was used.
Nowadays, hardly any television film or series is shot on Super 16 . Digital cameras have almost completely displaced the classic film cameras in this segment since around 2010/2011.
The right tone
Film perforated on one side can have a light tone on one side - or alternatively a (glued, laminated or sprayed on) magnetic sound track ( edge track ). Since both soundtrack methods offer only a limited sound quality in the professional field of sound on magnetic film dubbed (mixed) and synchronously carried to the image film. A so-called two-band projector is then required for the demonstration.
The 16 mm optical sound (or in exceptional cases the edge track magnetic sound) plays or played a role primarily in educational films and documentaries for demonstrations in schools and seminars. Here it turned out to be advantageous to only deliver one roll of film on which the image and sound were together. Anyone with a demonstration license (mostly a teacher or caretaker) could insert this into the projector. Since the 1980s, this technology has gradually been replaced by the use of television sets or electronic image projectors (video projectors ), mostly VHS cassettes, and DVDs as well since the 2000s . However, there were new productions of 16 mm educational films until the end of the 1990s. Because of the relatively long lifespan of these media, thousands of documentaries and educational films are still available today. Real film screenings are therefore used by individual teachers as a special experience. The Institute for Film and Image in Science and Education was very well known in Germany for its 16 mm films for teaching purposes .
Remarkable
In miniature photography, 16 mm film, perforated on one side, was mostly used and exposed lengthways, which, however, had to be assembled by the camera manufacturer or the photographer himself. For Edixa 16 and Rollei 16, the image size was 12 mm × 17 mm, for the Minolta 16 10 mm × 10 mm. The miniature camera Minox, on the other hand, exposes (e) special 9.5 mm wide imperforate film in order to achieve similar results.
Remarks
- ↑ http://www.movie-college.de/filmschule/kamera/filmformate.htm Movie College
- ^ Nils Borstnar, Eckhard Pabst, Hans Jürgen Wulff: Introduction to film and television studies. UTB, Stuttgart 2008, p. 129.
- ^ Dominic Case: Film Technology in Post Production. Focal Press, Oxford 2001 (no page number).
- ↑ http://www.submin.com/16mm/collection/rollei/index.htm Rollei
- ↑ With reversal film (slide film) the original must be cut; it cannot be perfectly reconstructed afterwards. The much more expensive process is preferred for feature films and the like: a positive copy of the original negative is cut; only after 'approval' by those ultimately responsible will the original negative be cut and thus become the mother negative for the screening copies.
