NFL Films will no longer purchase Kodak 16mm film stock.

[Nicholas Kovats]

Regrettably, NFL fims has decided to switch completely to digital production and have purchased 30 new digital Arriflex Amira cameras. Up until recently they were Kodak's largest customer of 16mm stock for the last 50 years. They have their own immense state of the art archive, and lab. Up until recently they were also processing film for students. They have over 100 million feet of 16mm film in their archives predominately shot with the legendary Photo-Sonics Actionmaster 500 camera (24-500fps). I have yet to test mine, http://www.highspeedfilm.de/16_am500.html

Here is the article in the New York Times, i.e. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/sport ... .html?_r=1

"Within the headquarters of NFL Films in Mount Laurel, N.J., resides more than 100 million feet of film stored in tens of thousands of metal canisters."

[woods01]

This is indeed bad news. I imagine that NFL Films alone was a large enough customer to warrant continued Kodak support for 16mm. I would speculate that we will get another notice from Kodak that they are dropping further stocks in 16mm and that the NFL film lab will shut down.

While I'm no football fan, I have to admit those films are just beautifully shot. Its impressive they kept using 16mm despite network demands for faster turnaround.

[Nicholas Kovats]

50 years! Core mandate for a long time. Best camera operators in the business.