History of 8mm (Pt. 2 of 2)

[Danny Grizzle]

<<Continued from Part 1>>

Now... 8mm film formats. 35mm was the expensive professional film format. At
some point, maybe early as  the 1930's, Kodak (who business was mainly based
on consumer still photography) tried to develop a consumer movie format. To
do this, they took 35mm film (little retooling manufacturing) and slit it
down to 16mm wide film. This proved too expensive for the general public, so
in the 1950s, they split 16mm in half, resulting in 8mm film. 16mm went on
and has had a long life in documentary, newsreel, early TV, education,
business, & independent feature production.

8mm was really just a short roll of 16mm film. The camera was setup so that
it only exposed small pictures on one side, half the film. The consumer
loaded the 16mm film in their 8mm camera, shot for a minute or two, then
flipped the film over and shot the second side, returning the film to the
original reel, which was then returned for processing. Or, if the consumer
was like my parents, they flipped the roll again, and shot the first side
twice, resulting in horrendous double exposures in most of the family home
movies.

The 16mm movie was returned to the lab, where it was processed on
conventional 16mm film lines, then afterwards split in half into two pieces,
then spliced together to form an 8mm home movie.

Kodak still didn't have home movies right. Besides the problems consumers
were having double exposing their home movies, it was also apparent that,
once split in half, the picture area on film was tiny, while the sprocket
holes remained full size 16mm, huge by comparison.

Kodak went back to the drawing board, and did two things:

  1) Invented a more-of-less foolproof cartridge loading film
     design. No more open reels of film. Each cartridge held
     50' of Super 8 film. (Trivia: did you know that Kodak also
     offered a giant 200' cartridge, which required specially
     designed cameras? A trap door at the top allowed the larger
     cartridge to have a single coaxial film reel to protrude
     above the camera, not too different than a film magazine
     on a Mitchell or Panavision camera. Wow -- 10 minute film
     loads -- 3.5 minutes was max with 50' Super 8 cartridge.)

  2) Kodak reengineered the sprockets. Big 16mm sprockets were
     not necessary, and 16mm frame lines were not necessary, either.
     Bottom line: no increase in film size -- still 8mm -- but
     the image area was super-sized.

Super 8 resulted in better image quality (larger image area) plus ease of
use (cartridge loading). Amateur filmmaking exploded. Consumer brands were
Kodak, many others. There were also some extremely nice cameras made by
Nikon, Canon, Nizo, Beaulieu, Sankyo, Elmo, and many, many others. Some
brands, like Canon and Elmo, had extensive product lines, 5 or more models.

Running speed of Super 8 was 18fps for silent film, 24fps for sound. Sound
film can be identified by presence of a magnetic strip on the film edge.
There is also a miniscule magnetic strip on opposite film edge, so that film
would stack evenly on the reel. High end Super 8 film projectors used both
to record sound, effectively making the format capable of stereo sound, or
multi-track recording, with sync sound on one track, background music, etc.
on the other. Super 8 post production got extremely ambitious, though this
was not something 99% of the consumer public or advanced amateurs ever saw.
That's another story.

About film-to-video transfers: I am finding that the plastic film base of my
parents old 8mm movies is having sever dimensional stability problems. With
age, the film base is shrinking at an uneven rate, causing the film to twist
in crazy ways. I'm afraid to ever try projecting it again, and concerned
that it may already be too late to have it transferred to video. If you are
holding precious films, sooner is better than later when it comes to
preservation efforts.

What else? Safety Stock. Did you ever look at your film negatives and notice
the words along the edge, "Kodak Safety Film." The reason for this is that
film was not safe, in the beginning. George Eastman's early flexible films
were before the age of plastics, and relied on organic materials for
flexibility. A main ingredient was nitrogen, the same stuff used by Timothy
McVeigh to bomb Oklahoma City. If by chance you have some true historic
film, you need to get professional help ASAP. Old nitrate stocks are unsafe
to store, and have been known to spontaneously combust. Not only do they
burn with explosive force, but the gasses are deadly poisonous. Don't try to
handle or preserve these materials without expert assistance -- nitrate,
nitro... Unlikely you would have this unless your family owned a theater or
something. I don't know that any "consumer" format such as 16mm or 8mm ever
used nitrate, but old 35mm is a distinct possibility. If you know of any
stock such as this, be sure to check with various film preservation
societies before disposal. There are many, many old movies which have
disappeared forever, or which have missing scenes that have been lost to
film historians.

Hope all this drivel is not common knowledge to all, may be some interest to
this list. I guess for those who have known nothing but VHS & iMovie, this
may be a start.

Danny Grizzle