What the heck is a 16mm negative film for?

[TV-collector]

Hi Folks!

Somebody who works for the bavarian TV gave me some stuff for my
collection!
There are two metal film cases showing the ownership with a nice logo.
One case is empty, signed with "Positiv Film".
The other one is signed "Negativ Film" and is covering a negative film.

As I remember right a film is always after bathing a positve film which can
be used for home cinema (8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm 35mm) or am I wrong?

For what reason a TV station used negative films?

May I can turn the video signal of this film after it comes out of the film
player (Fernseh GmbH) to watch this film?
Until now I am not clear about the sound of the film, magnetic line or
light sound.
I like to watch/restore that original television film!

Any ideas?
Many thanks in advance!
TV-collector

[ppppenguin]

The usual process of film making is to shoot negative film in a camera and then make a positive print for projection. For colour slides and 8mm cine, reversal film was common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_film This saved the cost and effort of printing from negative to positive.

Reversal processing was very rare (never done?) for 16mm and 35mm cine.

Before portable videotape equipment TV stations shot a lot of 16mm film. Mainly for news but also low budget production. For news, the time from camera to telecine was critical. So the film was routinely scanned as negative in the telecine. The reversal to positive was done by inverting the video. There are other problems to do with grading and gamma correction but these were solved.

[Electronic M]

If it was a film syndicated show logic would indicate the negative and positive prints were probably master and distribution copy respectively.

[TV-collector]

Hi ppppenguin!
Many thanks for this great write up about this unusual story.
Just for me unusual.
I have to go deeper in that story.


Hi Electronic M!
Please explain this, because I am not common with the american
syndicated shows.
Years ago I bought many old american police drama of the 50s/60s.
So we talk about "Perry Mason", "Superman", "The untouchables"
and some other low budget drama for my TV station.
Several times I did read something about "syndicated" when they
were offered on iebay.
The bavarian Television is part of the ARD, controled and managed by the government.
They had not made a lot of copies, as far only for themselves.

You have 4 time zones and TV stations which placed ads from local companies.
Thats why there are so many copies available.
American TV stations were able to interchange movies if the showed
runnung lines.
From the german television you will never get a copy of stuff they
produced to air.
On the other hand there were companies offering movies for rental reasons.
They were used in cinemas, schools or the Kindergarten.

But that police drama stuff was produced by the german television for
their own use and was never given away.

Regards,
TV-collector

[TV-collector]

Hi ppppenguin!
Many thanks for this great write up about this unusual story.
Just for me unusual.
I have to go deeper in that story.


Hi Electronic M!
Please explain this, because I am not common with the american
syndicated shows.
Years ago I bought many old american police drama of the 50s/60s.
So we talk about "Perry Mason", "Superman", "The untouchables"
and some other low budget drama for my TV station.
Several times I did read something about "syndicated" when they
were offered on iebay.
The bavarian Television is part of the ARD, controled and managed by the government.
They had not made a lot of copies, as far only for themselves.

You have 4 time zones and TV stations which placed ads from local companies.
Thats why there are so many copies available.
American TV stations were able to interchange movies if the showed
runnung lines.
From the german television you will never get a copy of stuff they
produced to air.
On the other hand there were companies offering movies for rental reasons.
They were used in cinemas, schools or the Kindergarten.

But that police drama stuff was produced by the german television for
their own use and was never given away.

Regards,
TV-collector

[Electronic M]

By master and distribution copy I mean the film equivalent of the stamping plate for an LP record and one of the copies of that record made from the stamp.

I'm far from an expert on film era television given betamax was dead and the cold war was ending as I came into the world...
But from what I've read in the beginning there was no network in place to link the video circuits of TV stations, or videotape. Stations here in the US were completely film and live local video. The coax/microwave network link system grew slower and narrower than the stations did. This created many straggler stations that couldn't get programs from the network they were affiliated with any other way than via films. Some stations (often the stragglers) also we're years behind in adopting VTRs so tape distribution was not the most practical method. Many programs that weren't shot on one stage as a variety show format were also filmed and edited and distributed on film rather than video. Many of the popular shows were also rerun and doing that with film proved more convenient...often there were several copies of each show at a variety of stations in simultaneous reruns. The copies would be quality checked regularly, scrapped when damaged, and replaced with new prints off the master.

This is how I understand it...I may be wrong on some points.

[old_tv_nut]

Actually, networks grew rather quickly. First run prime-time programs on film could be televised multiple times a night at the network head and sent over the network to the different time zones. Live shows, however, could not be played multiple times until video tape became available. Once tape was available for first run, the tape was played multiple times at the network source and sent via the network to different time zones, just like film.

Before video tape was available to the networks, first-run live programs were recorded and delayed by kinescope recording (a film camera imaging a picture tube), at first in black and white, and then, for a period of about a year and a half, NBC used color kinescope recordings; that was replaced by video tape. All of these techniques were used to record and playback at a central network location, except for a few special cases like Alaska, who had no network connection.

Time zone delay was usually set up so that the first presentation was simultaneous in the Eastern and Central zones, then the delayed transmissions were made to Mountain and Pacific zones. Hence the typical announcement "Watch {x} at ten o'clock, nine Central."
People who haven't lived in the Central time zone may not realize that many businesses (not all) in the Central zone shift their hours to match typical starting times in the Eastern zone. The prime-time TV schedule being shifted also meant that local news typically at 11pm in New York would go on at 10pm in Chicago.

After the first run of a program, the networks would license them to syndicators for reruns, who in turn would license use to local stations, often as 16mm film. The local station could run 16mm locally at the time it chose, whereas the original network run would likely have been 35mm and would have been in lock step with the network schedule.

Local stations also had access to syndicated old movies (generally as 16mm copies, although some large stations had 35mm capability), until Ted Turner and others realized that much more money could be made by putting old movies on cable pay TV.

By the way, as has been discussed in other threads, the 16mm film was acetate "safety" film and did not require special fireproof facilities that were needed to handle the 35mm nitrate movie film.

[old_tv_nut]

By the way, simultaneous transmission to Eastern and Central zones, followed by delay for Mountain and Pacific, gave an hour buffer time for the development of the kinescope recordings before playback.

[kf4rca]

For Hawaii, tapes were shipped in until satellite distribution became the norm.
All the years I worked at TV stations I never saw a negative film print. But the TK27 film chain had a switch for it, but it was never used.

[ppppenguin]

I suspect the UK/Europe usage of 16mm film was different to the USA. In the US it seems like the driving force behind 16mm film was syndication to multiple stations. UK/Europe never worked like that.

In the UK, as I understand it, 16mm film was a lower cost alternative to 35mm. It was shot for news, inserts for drama and other programmes. Plus telerecording (or kinescoping) which was pointing a film camera at a monitor to record the programme. Continued for longer than you might expect as 2" video tape and recorders were expensive.

In the UK, a lot of work was done to scan 16mm negative. To save money on making the print and for speed in news.

[ppppenguin]

Adding to my last post, 16mm film was also used for sending copies of UK programmes to other countries. Notably in the anglophone commonwealth. Some programmes, believed lost, have turned up on 16mm film in places like Nigeria.

In a very few cases, where a colour programme has been telerecorded from a monochrome monitor, the subcarrier dot crawl pattern has been sufficiently well resolved to convert the film back to colour.

There was also a heroic attempt to reconstruct a film that had fused into a solid mass. Not sure if it was 16mm or 35mm. ISTR the solid lump of film was sliced into sections small enough to fit in a high resolution industrial CT scanner. The silver in the emulsion shows up well. Then a massive computing job to piece everything back together. This seems like Dead Sea Scrolls territory. Scroll down to "the Salvation of British Comedy":
https://hackaday.com/2018/09/20/the-...f-ct-scanners/

[Telecolor 3007]

But there was any direct filming on 16 m.m. negative?

[ppppenguin]

As far as I know, all 16m film in the camera was negative. I don't think any was 16mm reversal film that gave a direct positive from the camera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_film

[old_tv_nut]

https://emulsive.org/articles/a-brie...ktachrome-film

16mm Ektachrome was introduced at least as early as 1965 (looking for more references) and was used for newsgathering in color until electronic newsgathering became possible.

16mm Anscochrome was introduced in 1957:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7265710

[old_tv_nut]

In 1960 Kodak introduced special versions of Ektachrome with a companion reversal print film in both 35mm and 16mm:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7267476