Part 2 - How 9.5 prints were made

Quite a bit of information on the trials and tribulations of this process are given in Part 1 above, but this seems a good place to go into more detail, adding pictures of some of the actual equipment used, much of it surviving from the Pathescope days.

A good starting point is this piece from Pathescope Monthly.

I am speculating a bit here, butI think Pathescope, given their high level of usage, must have been able to acquire bulk supplies of 35mm raw stock ready-perforated with just the outer two rows of guide or "pilot" perforations. In this way, prints could be produced and processed before the 9.5 perforations and notches if required were made. The advantage of this was that some of the problems that could appear around sprocket holes during processing, developing and printing could be avoided. Such issues, including "halation", were discussed from time to time in the amateur film magazines. For whatever reason, perforation of the 9.5 sprocket holes occurs at a late stage in the process described in Pathescope Monthly. This option was not, of course, open to Novascope who were producing films on a much smaller scale, and had to make all their own perforations, doing the whole lot in a single pass right at the beginning - finding unperforated stock was difficult enough as it was. Whichever approach is used, there is still the issue of ensuring at some point that the pictures and the perforations align, not by any means something Pathescope always got precisely accurate. 

Both the accounts quoted above make clear how much of the work of the process was involved in preparing the production negative. Thereafter, it was just(!) a matter of running the negative through the contact printer in direct contact with fresh stock and then onto the slitter and Voila! (!), three 9.5 prints for sale. As Patrick says, if only it had been quite so easy as it sounds.

I wondered for years about a quirk of 9.5 notched films that left very sharp indentations in the side of the film opposite the notches themselves. They look and feel positively dangerous but don't seem to give any problems in projection or appear on the screen, although they certainly make cleaning hazardous. Patrick finally sussed it out, and I can best illustrate it with this enlarged view of the final image from the Pathescope Monthly article.

If you look carefully, you can just see the indentations I am referring to, but only on the right hand and centre strips of 9.5. Their absence on the left hand strip tells the tale - they are the result of a mis-alignment of the notch. The implication is that part of the notch is "left behind" in the form of these indentations and so the notch itself is less deep than it would otherwise be. I can't claim ever to have noticed, but I wonder if this didn't sometimes cause a problem of notches getting missed during projections. I don't know how Pathescope formed the notches, whether it was done at the same time and with the same machine as the 9.5 sprocket holes, but I have to say it seems to me bloody typical of Pathescope (I don't off the top recall if French Pathé prints are the same). The thing is wrong, could have been corrected and was not corrected, which can only be deliberate. The same lack of proper attention was no doubt responsible for many other faults such as inaccurate placement of sprocket holes between frames, soundtracks variable in quality and wandering in location and the loss of that wonderful clarity of image and focus that characterised the earliest 9.5 prints and which helps explain the continued fascination notched prints exercise. In short, it is slapdash and careless. It wasn't as though they were incapable of thinking accuracy, as these two pix show, but they failed properly to control their processes. The first pic I laboriously copied from an original faded French technical drawing (not a blueprint as such but that sort of thing); the second is from Pathescope Monthly.

OK, I will now go and take my medication.

Anyway, after that little digression, I return to the equipment actually used by Novascope to produce their prints, much of it cannily preserved by 9.5 enthusiasts from the Pathescope days.

Possibly the most inportant machine was the perforator.

All sorts of adjectives like solid, robust, heavily-constructed etc spring to mind when looking at this Pathescope original. In short, it is built like a tank and needed to be. Right in the centre of the machine, above the drive pulley, is the frame carrying the puches. This has to be driven up and down for each row of perforations. In sync with this, an intermittent mechanism (in this case a claw mechanism operating on the 9.5 sprocket holes) has to pull the film thru for the next row of holes. This makes a solid foundation essential for the operation, which at the least has to operate at the same speed as a silent projector, while doing a much heavier job, if the hours sat watching it, under a dim red light, are not to be too tediously prolonged.

At the other end of the process was the slitter.

Another stoutly-constructed Pathescope survivor, I remember this as a fearsome monster, capable of ripping 300' of triple- print into three strips of 9.5 (and two sets of pilot perforations) in the space of about a minute, accompanied by ferocious levels of noise. As I recall, this is a back view, the triple print being on the right here and the 9.5 prints on the left. Will try to acquire better pictures one day.

I have been working on one of the original Pathé peforators, capable in principle of punching three rows of 9.5 perfs plus 2 rows of pilot holes in 35mm. Or at least it could if only it had not been cannibalised/mucked about with and is so missing vital parts like the claw array that moves the film thru after punching and, indeed, if there was such a thing as UNperforated ACETATE 35mm available, which so far as I know there is not . Anyway, it's really only for historical value as I cannot imagine any commercial use. Incidentally, I had long assumed that all the perfs were made at once - this is what Novascope did. However, I suspect now that Pathé either made the pilot perfs first or even bought in or made themselves film with just the pilot perfs, making processing less tricky, and adding the perfs only at the last minute prior to slitting. This may help to explain the positioning of the perfs out of register with the frame line that one sometimes sees.

What I can't show you at present is the contact printer. Here, however, is the apparatus used to prepare the triple negatives, from a16mm duplicating print.



Because of deficiencies in the triple lens intended to do the job in a single pass, Novascope were forced to do it three times with a single lens. Under a dim red light of course.

Finally, there were others who produced 9.5 films for enthusiasts, such as Walton Films. Here a a couple of pix of a 16mm to 9.5 perforator and slitter they used; note again the rugged construction. Pix courtesy of Graham Newnham.