A good quality 16mm amateur film from Holland
This is the first 16mm amateur film that I’ve published on Everything Vintage and it’s quite a short clip taken from a 3 inch reel of film I bought quite some time ago.
The scanned 16mm amateur film
The scanned film is embedded below and the description of the film follows.
Description of the 16mm amateur film.
As I mentioned above, I actually acquired this film quite a long time ago, but it’s only recently that I’ve had the ability to scan it in order to include it on Everything Vintage. It’s one of the first films I’ve run through a new 16mm / 9.5mm telecine I’ve built to complement the Super 8 / Standard 8 telecine I made for the more common amateur film formats.
The most noticeable thing I saw when I first watched the film is how much better quality the resultant scan is when compared to Standard 8 film, and even Super 8 which has a larger film area than standard 8. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise because a 16mm frame is 10.26mm x 7.49mm which is huge compared to a Standard 8 frame of 4.8mm x 3.5mm. That larger image size means that the camera on the telecine doesn’t need to use as much magnification to fill the frame, but more importantly, the film grain size is so much smaller compared to the size of the image.
Even so, I was very impressed when I watched the film and saw the colour rendition and brightness of the film. The film stock used was Kodachrome which is known for it’s fabulous colour rendition, and the larger format film has certainly enhanced the image quality.
I don’t actually know anything of the content of the film, but I’ve assumed from the costumes being worn that it was filmed in Holland or some other region of the Netherlands, and the car designs suggests to me the early to mid 1950s. If anyone can recognise any of the buildings or scenes please let me know in the comments form below.
The post processing of the film was carried out in Davinci Resolve, but the only correction I made was to correct some exposure level issues, remove a couple of frames where the film jumped in the camera, add some sharpness and add a soundtrack of a projector to make it closer to the original experience of the family who first watched this some 70 odd years ago.
