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16-mm sound motion pictures, a manual for the professional and the amateur (1949-55)

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412 XII. PROCESSING AND RELEASE PRINTING can be manufactured, and may be used as a guide in the choice of available equipment despite the fact that few commercial products can be expected to meet all the requirements. The print should be inspected at the standard sound speed of 36 ft. per minute and should be viewed and heard with the same equipment and from the same observation position at all times. The equipment used should be kept in good condition at all times and should not be altered nor controls re-set unless improvement is very important. Such changes should only be made after the inspectors have had the opportunity to make a large number of "A-B" tests on the ''before" and "after" conditions. Since the performance of commercial 16-mm sound projectors varies over a very wide range from one make to another and from one model of a particular maker to another, it is desirable that all machines for routine inspection be of the same make and model, of current manufacture, and tone controls set in the same manner. For such service Bell and Howell projectors seem to be as well suited as any. Such machines should always be operated with the same tone control setting on all machines at all times ; the proper setting is best determined by running an SMPE multi-frequency test reel. Data concerning performance variation of different commercial machines may be obtained from Bureau of Standards Circulars C437 and C439. Although the data found in these bulletins are several years old, they show quite clearly the range of variability, which does not appear to have been materially reduced in the intervening years (see Chapter XIII). On the average it requires 15 minutes to run one reel of film. With present wages of inspectors at over $1.50 per hour, 40^ per reel is needed to pay for the inspector alone. If to this cost is added the overhead (which includes the cost of inspection space, projection equipment, electric current, lamps, and general overhead), the cost of inspecting a single 400-ft. reel can easily reach $1.00 or more. If the print is one of a very large number of mass-produced 16-mm black-and-white prints that sell for about 1.5^ per foot, an inspection cost of $1.00 would represent 16% of the print cost. If, however, the film to be inspected is a Kodachrome dupe print which costs about 10^ per foot, an inspection cost of $1.00 represents but 2.5% of the print cost. In the former case, a customer could hardly expect a laboratory to perform a complete projection inspection of every print; in all likelihood the laboratory would inspect one print in every 10 or 20. In the latter case (as for Kodachrome), however, a customer should expect a laboratory to perform a