Checkerboard assembly

The checkerboard assembly is the joining of a film original into two strips or "ribbons". Strip A usually contains the odd settings and strip B the even settings.

As long as setting 1 is in volume A, light-tight Amorce , "black film", is mounted in volume B. Amorce is running parallel to setting 2 in volume B, etc. When duplicating or duplicating the original, no light falls through the black film, for this, the settings close after two copying runs or after running on a copying machine with two heads, 1-2-3-4-5-etc.

With an original in checkerboard assembly, various technical possibilities are opened up in the copy factory. First of all, you can selectively fade out, fade in and fade out during copying without these having to appear in every copy and in the same way. Then the ugly splices can be made invisible for some film and image formats . For this purpose, asymmetrical glued areas are prepared with a special device, which come to lie completely on the black Amorce. So the settings always have an adhesive bar at both ends. The dividing line runs exactly between the individual images.

Checkerboard assembly also enables other recordings to be faded in, for example texts in different languages. For this purpose, only the tape with the text recordings is exchanged, the basic recording (s) remains. One speaks of multi-band assembly when three, four, maybe even five or six strips are involved, although mostly only over shorter stretches of combining effects.

The checkerboard assembly was invented for the 16 mm narrow film format , where the narrow image line can not accommodate a glue point. For normal film , cover assembly is common, only for a well-kept CinemaScope is it occasionally worked in two volumes.