The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

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Jan. -Feb., 1953 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN crew, but there are bound to be times when the lily is more brightly lit than the lab technicians would prefer. Sometimes the two side faces of the lily are a help since it is usual to find a rather lower lighting level on one side or the other, but with scenes shot out of doors care has to be taken since the side faces of the lily are probably lit with a high proportion of blue sky light. The best solution we found was the use of a piece of a medium neutral grey card fixed to the lily as a supplementary reference. There is today an increasing use of coloured effect lighting in motion picture work which can make life rather difficult for the grader. And yet in the normal way it is perfectly possible, with experience, to grade all but a few unusual shots so that they are satisfactory on first printing. Of course, when finally the scenes are cut together, some re-grading will be needed to bring the scenes into line, but the more nearly the initial grading is correct the smaller will be the errors to be corrected at the later stage and the fewer will be the attempts needed to obtain a first good print of the cut reels. Stripping Monopacks The stripping monopack film can be considered as a sort of compromise method of cinematography between the direct separation negatives on three separate strips and the monopacks which are developed in a colour developer and produce a colour negative. Stripping monopacks have the advantages of all monopacks in that they can be exposed in a normal black and white camera but they do not have the disadvantages of a colour-developed monopack which we will discuss in the final part of this paper. The only stripping monopack which is at the present time in anything like commercial production is that of Eastman in the United States, although a fair number of such systems have been patented, including some in this country by Coote and Hornsby of British Tricolour. The Eastman film is rather unusual in that it is designed to be stripped into three separate films before it is processed, which means that the rather delicate operation of stripping has to be done in total darkness. There are a number The lily which provides the standard white object for grading. The two side faces are placed at an angle to the main face. A useful addition is a grey patch and it is a convenience for the lily to also carry a record of the scene numbers to which it refers of other difficulties in the laboratory handling of such a film and these are concerned with the need for the maintenance of good registration between the individual films in stripping and the thinness of the top, blue sensitive emulsion layer. To keep the three emulsions in register even after they have been stripped, Eastman use a rather complex machine in which the exposed film with its three layers is wetted to loosen the bond between the top layer and the second, and then on a registering sprocket and a mating roller it is brought into contact with a blank film to which it will adhere. After passing through several other sets of registering and pressure rollers the two films are peeled apart, when the top layer will, if all is well, adhere to the new base and the original film will be treated similarly once again to separate the next layer. Technicolor also have a number of patents for this type of procedure and in their case the transfer procedure is accomplished on a pin-belt, of a similar type to that used for making their imbibition prints. It is interesting to realise that three negatives made this way have, like the three negatives made in a three-strip camera, the red record laterally inverted with respect to the other two records. Here, however, the red record is the normal way round, since it is the layer which remains on its original base and the other two records are the wrong way round. This means that the blue and green records will have to be printed either through the base or duplicated in an optical printer. The thickness, or rather the thinness, of the top layer in any monopack, largely determines how good the definition of the lower two layers will be, so naturally this blue sensitive emulsion is always made as thin as it is possible to make it, without lowering the maximum density which the emulsion can give below a practical value. In a monopack which has to be colour developed this is helped by the fact that quite a low density and contrast silver image will give quite a high density and contrast of dye image under suitable conditions. When, however, a thin emulsion layer such as is necessary is only developed to silver, as it is in the Eastman stripping film, the contrast is apt to be low by conventional standards. The first materials of this type, which were described by John Capstaff of Eastman in the Journal. of the S.M.P.T.E. in April 1950, gave a blue record gamma of 0.19, whilst the other two layers gave 0.52. The gamma of the blue record was increased by intensification. It would clearly be possible to correct this lower gamma at the same time as duplicating the negative to restore it to the correct orientation, if this were the procedure adopted. All the control devices which we have described for use with the three-strip camera would obviously be usable with a stripping monopack, and once the three films had been brought to equal contrast by one method or another they could be handled in just the same way as regular three-strip negatives. Two printer gates would have to be used in making master positives, of course, by virtue of the reversal of the big register pin position in the stripped and transferred blue and green record negatives. In addition to the control devices described for use with the three-strip cameras an extra control is highly desirable in the case of any monopack; that control is the camera gamma strip. Such a device as this, which is actually photographed on the film stock which is used for the work, enables the gammas of the individual layers to be plotted when they have been separated by stripping, and moreover these gammas will be as representative of the work itself as is possible.