Re 8mm Cine Formats

[Len Thomas]

Hello All,

Can anyone please help me with a quick link, information etc, on how to fully
identify the different 8mm formats, and any oter useful info on 8mm as I
undertake cine to VHS/DVD and still find identifing the formats difficult...

Look forward to hearing from you on any help, advice, you can offer.

Cheers,
Len.

[Dave Watterson]

Can anyone please help me with a quick link, information etc, on how to fully
identify the different 8mm formats.

Hi Len,

I'm not certain what you mean. So far as I know there were only two 8mm
formats:

standard-8mm (known in the USA as regular-8)
and
super-8mm (Fuji sold the same format in different cassettes and called it
single-8)

The most obvious difference at a quick glance is that the sprocket holes
on standard-8mm are larger than those on super-8mm.

The single-8mm stuff was made using a different plastic base which did not
soften with the "film cement" normally used to join two strips of film. You
had to use tape joints.

Both could be used at a range of speeds, but standard-8mm was most often
shot at 16 frames per second and occasionally at 24 frames per second. Super-8mm
was usually shot at 18 frames per second and sometimes at 24 or 25 frames
per second. For video transfer purposes you have to try various speeds to
see what looks right ... then sometimes cheat by raising or lowering the
speed a bit to make the video scan look better.

Both 8mm formats could have sound as a stripe of recording tape stuck on
one - or both - sides of the film. The separation between sound and picture
was fixed so if the film runs on a projector it should be in synch. There
were also various ways of synching separate tape-recordings with standard-8mm
but that's a big field and if faced with anything like that transfer picture
and sound separately then do your best to marry them up in video editing.

There were occasional oddities like normal 8mm formats shot through anamorphic
lenses (for a wide screen effect) which make people seem tall and thin unless
they are projected through similar anamorphic lenses. There was a format
which used half-frame pull-down on super-8mm but this was very rare and specialised.

In any transfer to video the ONLY question which matters is "Does it look
and sound right?"


I hope this is of some help.

There are all sorts of websites devoted to cine - start with Bury Cine Society
on http://members.aol.com/burycine and their offshoot http://www.cinealive.freeserve.co.uk/
Their links lead to all sorts of interesting places.

Dave