American Cinematographer - March 1989 - 83

President of

Super 8 Sound in Burbank, the
largest supplier of Super 8 equipment. Ac¬
cording to Vigeant, only one or two Super 8
feature films were made in any given year
before 1985. "This year," says Vigeant,
"we've already seen over 30 feature films
go into production." He expects the number
of Super 8 feature films to triple by 1990.
So far, the budgets for these
features continue to fall into the no-budget
category. Mark Swetland, producer and di¬

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of apertures from F/1.0to
F/90.9, plus a 3 to 8000 ISO range!
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such

a budget is considered astronomical. In
larger formats, such budgets would be de¬
scribed as unbelievably low.
Though Super 8 was long re¬
garded as a cheap amateur format unsuita¬
ble for professonal use, technological
breakthroughs in all areas now allow profes¬
sionals to present images on television that
often look as if they were recorded with a
fine 16mm camera. In fact, on seeing a tape
of a Super 8 feature, most distributors don't
ask what format the film was shot on; they

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it to be 16mm. TV watchers have

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Super 8 originated material without
knowing it. A flood of Super 8 origi¬

nated music videos for such artists

as

Bruce

Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and George Benson
have appeared recently, as have commer¬

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cials for Honda scooters, Nike shoes, and
Surf laundry detergent. Even such television
programs as The Gary Shandling
Americas Most Vented and The

Ullman Show have used

Fully operational with flash and

continuous light. Flash sync
speed from 1 sec to 1 /500th
sec in cord or cordless mode.
Still speeds from 30 minutes to
1 /8000 sec. Instantaneous com¬
binations of FPS and aperture
are accurate to a 1/10th of an

"runaway budget" eventually costing about

even

Cine speeds of 8 to 128 fps in¬
accurate measurements in
difficult lighting situations. Wide

*

range

$20,000 to finish. In the world of Super 8,

seen

digital and analog display for
fast, error-free readings. True
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sure

rector of Blood and Steel, a Gold Award
winner at this year's Houston International
Film Festival, confesses that his film had a

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Show,
Tracey

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Super 8 segments

PhD to see how much better film looks
when transferred on a Rank instead of a
traditional telecine. Thanks to the flying-spot

scanning method, transfers

are no

longer

major
companies including
ARRIFLEX, SPECTRA,
STEENBECK, and TIFFEN

recently.

Ironically, the technology most
responsible for Super 8's present appeal
was not developed with that in mind. Since
Rank Cintel introduced its flying spot scan¬
ner film-to-tape transfer system in the late
70s, it has been used primarily to transfer
Hollywood's finest 35mm films to tape. Few
people anticipated that such high-tech
transfer equipment would allow Super 8 to
compete successfully with 16mm in applica¬
tions where the end product is to be shown
on a television. Costing well over a quarter
of a million dollars apiece, today's Rank
Cintel flying-spot transfer systems are on
the cutting edge of telecine technology.
Though it may take a grey haired
broadcast engineer to fully explain how a
flying spot scanner works, it doesn't take a

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American Cinematographer - March 1989

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