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Showing posts from April, 2023

Film Markings

There is abundant information about film manufacturing markings. Another marking sometimes unknown or overlooked, are the processing markings. Kodak, at processing time of Kodachrome film, stamped 8mm film with the year and month of processing. The markings vary in visibility, some are quite small and easily missed, others (like the one below) are easy to spot. As part of capturing all the relevant information about 8mm film, this is a very useful time reference which should not be overlooked.
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Develocorder Notes

One of the design aspirations of this project is be the ability to handle Develocorder films, and it is appropriate to elaborate on the particulars of it. The DEVELOCORDER trademark was first assigned, in 1961, to GEOTECHNICAL CORPORATION. The Develocorder was a recording device used by the network seismology from the 1960s into the 1980s.  The USGS, among others, has tens of thousands of films reels (maybe even more), for records of that period, most of which remain in good condition.  The recording media was 16mm wide sprocketless black&white film. Typically each reel is 100 feet, and it stored up to 20 seismic stations and time codes in strip chart mode, for 1 day of continuous data. The USGS paper, "The evolution of seismic monitoring systems at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory", Okubo et al., provides additional insight into the Develocorder system:  "One of the key pieces in the early Menlo Park micro- earthquake monitoring program was the Develocorder...
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One frame at the time... DIY film scanner journey

 Like many, a family batch of 8mm , Super 8mm, and 16mm reels, and the poor quality of consumer scanners and services, triggered the journey to digitally capture these. The first scanner used the harvested gate from a Cannon S400 projector, and other components to assemble the first DIY scanner. This is a short video of the project and components. And of the results It worked well for 8mm and Super 8 film. It was a bit bulky to store and reuse, and I still had those two reels of 16mm film. And I also came across information on seismic data presently locked in 16mm Develocorder reels. Develocorder films have the peculiarity that there are no perforations, which raised the challenge bar on building a first DIY film transport for both 8 and 16 mm film. That's the trigger for the next DIY scanner, which I will document in this blog. In the process of introducing each component, there will be references to design choices and lessons learned in the previous build. As with anything, somet...
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