Dusty wrote:the fumes released when it burns are deadly
iirc from my high school chemistry classes some of the fumes would be nitrogen monoxide which is a fun drug that will make you horny and relaxed as well as ease your pain while you're giving birth or having tooth surgery. :-) most of it will probably be nitrogen dioxide though, which of course is deadly.
Dusty wrote:the fumes released when it burns are deadly
iirc from my high school chemistry classes some of the fumes would be nitrogen monoxide which is a fun drug that will make you horny and relaxed as well as ease your pain while you're giving birth or having tooth surgery. most of it will probably be nitrogen dioxide though, which of course is deadly.
reflex wrote:Film has a much wider brightness range than most low/mid-end digital setups.
and who on earth would suggest using a low end/diy digital intermediate for such a task? that's almost even more stupid than suggesting an 8 mm optical would produce better results than a d.i.
Holy cow, you're grumpier than usual. :roll:
Obviously, he doesn't have a large budget for this work, which must be why he's considering 8mm for the optical copy. He certainly won't be giving Lowry a call to get some top-notch work done.
Given a choice between some crap pseudo-camcorder digital copy and optical, I think the optical would win. I still don't understand why he wants a teeny-tiny 8mm copy of 35mm film, but that's his business.
Hey Dusty, the exagerated dangers of Nitrate became all to clear about 80 years ago when a reel of said stock started to smoulder in it's can at the Glen Cinema, Scotland. The manager and projectionist got the film and can out of the cinema but not before the building flooded with smoke to which someone shouted 'Fire!' causing the audience (almost entirely children) to flee. In the ensuing panic over 70 children died. The cause of the combustion of the film is not known but it is known that it was a new reel of film at that time.
The risks of Nitrate must never be under-estimated. A 'good' print can be egnited by a static charge from clothing or friction from opening the tin. A good many projectionists lost fingers from can ignitions.
Obviously it must have some level of stability otherwise it wouldn't have been used.
The choice is not down to budget but just simply because we have the means to do it and that it will give us the results we are looking for as well as provided a safe master to work from. My preference would be to keep all film but reality must have the last word. Oh and K40 emulsion matches the resolution of the 35mm master so there was the thought that Kodaks bw films might be up to that as well and I just wanted to know which one would be nearest to the print grade. I think I have the answer to that now.
reflex wrote:Holy cow, you're grumpier than usual.
nah, i was just making a point. it wasn't directed at you but those who might believe that digital would somehow not produce good results simply because their own attempts with a workprinter or flatbed haven't worked very well.
Isolated incidents don't make something inherently dangerous, they're just sensational and a point for people to latch onto. 80 years ago, there were tens of thousands of cinemas, and all of them showed nothing but nitrate. The projectionist were usually inexperienced then as they are now, the film was handled poorly, and the conditions were awful with high heat and little ventilation. The film was transported in uncooled trucks sealed in metal canisters where it literally baked in the sun. Despite all this, there were very few fires and fewer deaths still. Fear of nitrate is like fear of gasoline: both are flammable, both have taken lives, but neither need be thought of as an uncontrollable menace.
This is off-topic, but you brought it up: Why people hold up the accident at Glen Cinema as the defining reason why nitrate film equals death I'll never know as the single reel of film that caught fire had almost nothing to do with what happened.
1) The problem started with the theatre's inception: it wasn't built to be a cinema, it was a modified meeting hall. The projection booth was insufficiently isolated from the screening room. The seats were bench style with no divisions. 1,082 people were crammed in a room 64' long. There was little thought put into the emergency exits, which both used the same staircase down to the ground floor. This is 1929, not the early days of cinema--people knew better than this. This venue should never have been permitted to publicly operate.
2) It was New Years Eve and children were mostly unattended by their parents. There were few adults present to keep order.
3) In the backroom, the projection assistant (James McVey--who was only 15 years old) rewound the reel that had been shown already. I don't like faulting McVey, he's one of the few level-headed people in the whole incident, but he did start it all with one fairly large mistake: he placed the last reel onto the top of the battery for the projector and returned to rewinding, at which point he heard a hiss. At the sound of this, he got up and left the room to see if the radiator needing adjusting. Valuable time was lost in this mistake. The hiss was the sound of the fire right as it started. Sitting the can containing the reel on the battery had caused a dead short, which heated it red hot within seconds.
4) On returning, McVey did what he should have done: he picked up the can with the burning reel and took it to the emergency exit. However, the door was locked.
5) After failing to get the door open, he sensibly put the reel on the concrete floor where it could do no damage and went to Alexander Rosie, the projectionist, for help. But the law stated that the projectionist could not leave the booth while film was in the projector and Rosie (20 years old) could not see that this situation was more important than that law. Rosie continued the show. The fire kept burning.
6) McVey went to Alex Dorward, the manager. Before he could get there, however, he had to push through the auditorium and then up to the second floor, where children sitting on the steps blocked the way. Eventually, he reached Dorward and they both wormed their way back to the rewind area. Much time was lost while the fire kept burning.
7) After some time, Dorward managed to kick open the exit door. He picked up the film, now fully ablaze, took it outside, and flung it into an adjacent vacant lot where it safely burned out (apart from the locked door, this was the plan in place for fire). After disposing of the film, he then told McVey to get out of the room, as it was by now filled with smoke. He left by the same exit. The story of the fire is now over. It was bungled from the start, but there were no casualties.
8) The smoke found its way into the screening room (likely from the opening and closing of the projection booth's door). Panic ensued. Dorward tried to calm the children and tell them the fire had been taken care of and there was nothing more to fear, but the panic had begun. Rosie continued the show until he was overcome by smoke, at which point he left the booth and the movie stopped.
9) Despite the assurances of Dorward that the fire was both minimal and now extinguished, shouts of "Fire!" rang out in the audience. General pandemonium: everyone rushed to the two exits, crushing others underfoot as they leapt through the undivided seats. Both exits led to the same staircase, which quickly bottlenecked. Those that did reach the bottom and opened the door met a steal grate that had been shut over it. The throngs kept pouring down the stairs, and those at the grate were crushed against it, making it immovable. Everyone was now trapped, and many were being suffocated under the weight of those piled on top of them. The gates had been closed to prevent people from sneaking in.
10) Eventually, the stairwell was filled, and those still in the auditorium searched frantically for another way out. Considering their age and that by this point the panic was at full height, they looked in places that in hind sight are ludicrously foolish. Some tried scaling the wires to light fixtures, which broke and electrocuted. Some tried climbing up the screen itself, where many fell and became injured--unable to move out of the way of the scrambling masses. Some went up to the balcony, where they found no exit and proceeded to jump down onto the heads of those below. The benches were ripped from the floor and overturned, crushing others beneath them. People began to lash out and attack others, believing them to blocking their escape. Eventually, a toilet with a window was found. The window was smashed, causing injury both by the act of smashing it and the shards of glass left, and people jumped from it. All the while, there was no fire.
11) Bystanders saw the smoke coming from the projection booth and tried to get in to see what was the matter. The combination of people from the street trying to get in and the children trying to get out only exacerbated matters. Eventually the police arrived, who broke the windows to release the fumes. As the door was impassibly blocked, the fire department put ladders up to the rear windows and entered that way, retrieving the children.
59 were killed in the panic, another 37 injured, 11 of which would die. 70 died, not by the fire or its smoke, but by the panic. Panic can kill all on its own, without the need of fire. It still kills today.
For a spark from opening an can to ignite the film, it would have to be at least at stage 2 decomposition. The fumes released by decomposing film are more flammable than the film itself and act as an agent to further break it down, for which reason nitrate should never be stored in an air-tight can. This has always been known, but it hasn't stopped people from acting stupid and doing it anyway.
Film in good condition takes an awful lot to catch fire. I highly doubt a static spark would do it. The fumes, definitely, but the film itself is more stable than that. For every piece I've tested, it takes holding a match to it for at least a couple seconds before it ignites. I can't see a near instantaneous and insignificantly small spark doing it.
But again, if you don't feel safe holding onto it, then by all means keep it in a vault or give it to someone who will. But don't destroy it after making a copy, it's irreplaceable, especially since this is the negative.
Ehm. Nitrate film is flamable and deterioates over time. Much of this comes from not being stored correctly in the first years of films life time.
Another thing with nitrate film is that when it is caught in the projector it easily breaks and consequently the little bit that is stuck catches fire from the heat of the projector. Safetyfilm doesn't do that, it stretches and is therefore more durable.
Enough on film history for now...Thurso, why does it have to be B/W? If the original film is black and white, then it can *easily* be transfered to a colour film and kept B/W.
Does it have to be super8? I remember some time ago that people where talking about some reg8 film that was used for titles and could be exposed down to 1ASA giving crystal clear images. That might be worth a try.
most of it will probably be nitrogen dioxide though, which of course is deadly.
