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Info: a Stack of 35/16mm film prints... for sale on eBay

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Just throwing this out there in case any of you might be interested. There’s quite an assortment and whilst it looks like most of the films have Russian audio tracks, that wouldn’t be too difficult to resolve.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/adapted35/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=

If my finances were in better shape, this would be extremely tempting because of the preservation value, seeing as the home video versions were slightly modified to avoid litigation:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/35mm-Feature-IRON-MAN-2008-/332168359322?hash=item4d56c6ed9a:g:u3oAAOSwa~BYYm5F

A search for 16mm prints produced the following:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=16mm+feature&_ipg=200&rt=nc

Amongst the above list of 16mm’s, I found…

http://www.ebay.com/itm/16mm-Feature-THE-BLACK-HOLE-1979-Walt-Disney-Sci-fi-/352023531151?hash=item51f63cce8f:g:9-8AAOSwVctY5Vht

The ROTJ print is still on there and will probably remain so for a long time to come.

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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I know others have their own opinions, but I would personally not bother with 16mm unless it’s something that you’re unlikely to find on 35mm. The Russian guy sells a lot of prints, and he’s a good seller. Bare in mind that all titles and credits will be in Russian on those prints, but some are certainly worth picking up if anyone’s interested in the titles.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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For the benefit of people such as myself who aren’t that clued up on film prints, can you please go into further detail about why 16mm is avoided unless you can’t obtain the film on 35mm?

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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Film prints don’t have a very high resolution. A 35mm fine grain negative might have a resolution of 3-3.5K, but prints have a resolution lower than 2K. 16mm has just 1/4 of that resolution, so less than 1K, and then add to that the duplication process is an unknown too. Who struck the print and why? Was it duplicated and then reduced from a 35mm print for example. A print duplicated from another print instead of struck from an interneg has an even lower resolution, poorer dynamic range, etc. Also, 16mm prints often look quite different to their 35mm counterparts, so you can’t know that your print is representative of the colour timing, brightness and contrast of the theatrical experience. And after all that, unless you’re paying for some substandard conversion done with a camcorder and a dvd-recorder, scanning costs the same as scanning a 35mm print anyway.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Understood. Thanks for the thorough explanation. 😃

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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Ah and the part I left out was quality control. When prints are struck and sent to cinemas they obviously have to adhere to a strict quality control so that all the customers that see the show have a consistent experience. This isn’t a universal truth through, for instance patrons in the UK saw Star Wars on IB Technicolor, while those in the US saw it on Kodak Eastman prints. But within the UK or the US the distributor would want all patrons to have as consistent a show as possible. There’s no guarantee of quality control with 16mm unless it was made for broadcast or another specific purpose where it would be important.

I hope that made sense. 😃

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Perfect sense. 😃

If you can answer another question related to this topic, why would TV companies use 16mmm over 35mm for their telecasts? Was it because of technical reasons or were the 16mm prints just cheaper to obtain?

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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JayArgonaut said:

Perfect sense. 😃

If you can answer another question related to this topic, why would TV companies use 16mmm over 35mm for their telecasts? Was it because of technical reasons or were the 16mm prints just cheaper to obtain?

Cheaper to obtain, cheaper for distributors to distribute, and most of these broadcasts were for old CRT TVs anyway, so it didn’t matter much. In addition, 16mm prints are way smaller.

“You don’t really mean you’ll kill me, do you?” - Juror 8
“Silence, Earthling! My name is Darth Vader. I am an extra-terrestrial from the planet Vulcan!” - Calvin “Marty” Klein

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16mm theatrical prints were also made for smaller venues like colleges. A guy I used to know worked at a campus theater. They were also sent to military bases around the world.

$500 bucks for a pan and scan print of The Black Hole is crazy though. 😉

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Ah, I failed to spot, “This is not a SCOPE print.” Yes, crazy.

Out of curiosity, were 16mm sources very likely used for the 80s TV broadcasts of the Star Wars films?

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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To my knowledge, all American TV airings used one of the home video masters. However, if I’m not mistaken, I believe that the ITV broadcasts in the UK came from a cropped 16mm source; they have un-stretched circular cue marks, and several scenes that were panned on home video instead just show one side and then a hard cut to the other side; cropped prints often made less use of panning, I presume because it was more expensive and time-consuming to do pan and scan with an optical printer than on flying-spot telecine machines?

(Random anecdote: I once saw a 16mm-sourced cropped TV version of Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster where they did this kind of cut while someone was walking across frame from right to left, making them appear to warp back to the right!)

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Ok and would those early home video masters have been sourced from 35mm or 16mm? The reason I’m asking is because I’m intrigued as to which would’ve been superior, the telecast or the home video copies.

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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Home video copies came from low-contrast 35mm interpositives, I think they were sometimes intended for video. The technology got better over time, and the transfers and mastering did too. Early transfers looked awful, some may have come from 16mm, but by the time Star Wars hit video 35mm was definitely in full use for most home video transfers.

Telecasts of 16mm would look inferior. Could be grainy, dirty, washed out, blown out, fuzzy, smearing/frame blending, even if the print was fresh there were still limitations to it being 16mm, and to the often inferior equipment used by TV broadcasters. Star Wars definitely looked inferior on ITV, I only have an AVI encode but I can still tell that the image problems are down to the actual broadcast and not the recording or capture. It may not have been overly brightened like the home video versions, but it had color casts in some scenes due to poor balance in the transfer, it could look too bright or too dark, it had that film chain look to it. (I am not sure if ITV ran their prints live every time a movie was sent out over the network, or transferred them to tape once. And I do know that when a network like ABC in America showed a unique transfer that wasn’t the home video version, like for an extended cut, even if it came from 35mm the transfer looked worse than the home video releases. There was an attempt here to IVTC the Star Trek II extended cut but the individual video fields still had blending between adjacent frames of film.)

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Thanks for the insights. I wish I still had my VHS recording of the TESB ITV premiere because I would’ve loved to see what you made of that. 😃

“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk
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One thing to add. At least in the USA well into the 1980’s some local stations did air movies (and TV show reruns) from 16mm copies in some cases. If a station wanted to show say “I Love Lucy” or “Andy Griffith” they would call Viacom (at the time) up and they would ship them a 16mm copy of every episode. They then either transferred those to videotape themselves and aired from that, or broadcast using the 16mm equipment utilized before videotape. I actually have several video recordings from the 1970’s time period of “Andy Griffith” show episodes aired in this manner. I know of at least one local station that continued to air Andy Griffith from 16mm copies (transferred to beta sp in their station) up until the time close captioning rules made them switch in the early 2000’s

It would be rare for a network broadcast to have been from 16mm in that era though.