Wet Gate Optical Printer, 16mm (clip 30)

Julia Nicoll demonstrates the wet gate optical printer at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland. This machine is used to copy damaged or shrunken film on to a new piece of film, by re-photographying it on to new film stock. The liquid in the wet gate is used to hide scratches on the old film.
www.colorlab.co...
The Colorlab Archives Division is a telecine facility servicing producers requiring film-to-tape transfers of the huge film archives holdings of the various government and private film archives in the Washington, DC area. It is also a full-service film preservation laboratory in all formats.
Colorlab
5708 Arundel Ave
Rockville, MD 20852
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]

[@tsegulin]

I used to print using wet gates like this on Oxberrys around 40 years ago.
We used perchloroethylene wet gate fluid under pressure in an "aquarium" gate in the projector. You had to be wary of bubbles and dirt on the prism "windows". All our documentaries or super-16 features had titles superimposed by printing original negative, blown up to a 35mm title negative then reduced back to 16mm 7249 Eastman Colour Reversal Intermediate (CRI) in an aerial image printer. It was noisy and the wet gate fluid stank despite efforts to get it out of the room and recover it, but this was the best way to copy and add titles to 16mm films back in the day. It could remove almost any scratch or blemish short of an emulsion gouge but the pilot pins were further from the shooting frame than a dry gate, meaning film float was a little worse in a wet gate. Consequently we avoided wet gates for VFX work.
The CRI stock was tricky to process and grade and years later we found its colour dyes were unstable. I wonder how many of these films have CRI A and B roll inserts that have faded into an unprintable state today? Sad but true.
Thanks for recording this lost art of cinema.

[@MichaelCarter]

I would like to do that

[@shipwreck911]

I've had an idea for something like this for converting single frames from a a DVD (or Blu Ray) to 16mm film making a theatrical print of modern movie such as frozen or the lego movie.

[@fancysnake1]

shipwreck911 I've been thinking about this as well for a couple years now. It is possible but you also have to think about sound recording which isn't as simple as recording pictures. I wanted to make my own film with inserted digital effects scenes like they used to do it. It would also be fun to make my own policy trailers on film to show before projecting my films :)

[@shipwreck911]

fancysnake1 ever heard of fullcoat? its 16mm magnetic sound tape. and also, if you wanted to project it you would have to use color reversal. the cheapest i could find is at Pro8mm's website. $85.75

[@wado1942]

It's very doable. I've done it to insert some abstract CG into a music video shot on film. You have to experiment a little to get the contrast right but it worked pretty well.

[@7071t6]

Why no white gloves, sure it might be old film, but still to do this type of work, its micro presion work ? This is the type of machine used to alter the Zapruder film and edit out that which was required to hide the real truth of jfk's head wounds?

[@uncled39]

Gloves would catch on broken or damaged perforations. You can feel them before you do damage. Gloves take away the feeling, much like a condom.

[@7071t6]

@@uncled39 yep sure ,but with older films there special gloves, like medical grade gloves which are very smooth and will not catch onto anything. 😎😎