Transfer of negative 16mm film from Spitfire camera
It’s not often we get to work on something as historically significant as this – 16mm film circa 1940’s shot from the wing of a Spitfire MK V during air-to-air training.
This job was a bit of a challenge as all the film clips were not wound on reels and in some cases the film strips were very short, only a few seconds worth of images.
We added new acetate leaders between the short lengths and spliced the various short pieces together to form a single length of film. To prevent unnecessary handling of the film we scanned as is, in a single pass through our scanner. Once scanned we used our AVID Media Composer software to get the film back to the way it should be. In some cases we had to invert the image (L to R and top to bottom), reverse the direction and invert from negative to positive.
Below is the information provided by our customer.
This film was shot using a ‘G45’ 16mm film camera shooting B&W film at 20 frames/sec mounted in a Spitfire Mk V. The Spitfire was taking part in in an air-to-air gunnery course, Course 66, at the Central Gunnery School, RAF Catfoss, East Yorkshire, UK, in June 1945, prior to the pilot being sent to fight in the aerial war against Japan.
Air-to-air targets during the course included ‘drogues’ (large windsocks towed behind an aircraft), bombers e.g. Wellingtons and other Spitfire Mk V aircraft.
Customer feedback.
Thanks. Very well done indeed managing to get all those scraps copied. I have just gone through and watched them all, and the quality of the conversion, especially with 80 yr-old film, is much better than I anticipated. Really good. Before I found you at, I rang around a number of organisations big and small who said they couldn’t convert the film, offering various excuses like not having double sprocket film handling. Maybe they didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with old film?
The images are taken from the 16mm film.
A challenging and rewarding job, history preserved and above all – a very happy customer!
Film transfer
DVD Conversions Specialize in film transfer to digital files. We can scan 8mm film, Super 8 film, 9.5mm film and 16mm film at 2k resolution of full HD.
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