Oh, hi there I'm Gavin.
Welcome to "The Slow Mo Guys".
Today we'll be using slow motion
to learn how a film camera works.
A film camera for movies, not for stills.
This is a 16 millimeter film camera.
It's Russian.
It's called a Krasnogorsk-3, which I definitely just read.
And didn't have to Google how to pronounce it.
We'll be loading up with some 16 millimeter film
and using the Phantom to show all its magic.
Imagery is usually captured onto film through a lens
with a photo sensitive chemical reaction.
You can see that the light hitting
this film has darkened it.
It's a color negative film.
So areas of very bright light will burn in a dark image
and that'll then be flipped in the development process.
And you can see here, the area I left behind
it's slowly darkening as light from the room,
exposes it and I can speed that up here.
If you were then to develop that,
you'd end up with something that looks like this.
First thing, I'm gonna do is load
this bad boy with some films.
I'm gonna turn the frame rate down to very low,
eight frames a second.
Put a little bit of tension in the old spring.
It's a windup camera.
It's pressure plate comes out.
This camera has single perf reels.
So that's the type of film we're gonna put in it.
It basically just means the sprocket holes down
only one side of the film, and you can fit either sound
or use a format called super 16 and shoot a wider image
if your camera has a wider gate.
So that's the type of film you've got here.
Just a single perf 16 millimeter film.
Even though the image size is different
between these two formats,
the width of the film itself is indeed 16 millimeters.
Okay, this is now loaded, the films on this one.
It's gonna be taken up by this one.
So it'll end up here and it's looped through,
going through here, this pressure plate
is keeping the film flat against the focal plane.
And when running it looks something like this.
You would never wanna usually load
a film camera in such a bright room.
Next thing to do, is to pop this back on.
A lot of people would also tape around
to prevent light leakage.
Now that we're loaded up with film
we can set the frame rates, so we'll do 24,
which is the standard recording frame rate of film.
This camera will actually go all the way up to 48.
Okay.
Lenses off.
I will now use a camera, to film me using a camera,
to film a camera.
Here's a selfie I took on a camera
of me using a camera to film me using...
All right.
I've just realized I can actually take
more of this off to show more.
There we go.
As we learned with our Slow Mo DSLR video
a 45 degree mirror, we'll let you look through the lens.
The mirror we'll then move out of the way
revealing the shutter doors, which also move out of the way.
And the image will be exposed on the sensor.
Then the shutter closes, then the mirror comes back down.
with this film camera it's a very similar principle.
When you look through the viewfinder
you get the correct perspective
because you're looking through the actual lens.
This is done by bouncing the image off these
beam splitting mirrors and off this mirror disc
placed at 45 degrees, very similar to the stills camera.
What you're seeing here, isn't the film plane.
It's actually a path back to the viewfinder on the back.
This system differs slightly from the DSLR in that
this mirror doesn't move out of the way to reveal a shutter
that then opens to reveal the film plane.
This mirror is the shutter itself.
This is a rotary disc shutter, and this is how it works.
This camera is rolling at 24 frames a second.
And the gap in the shutter disk
determines the shutter speed.
For every half rotation of this disk, which is one frame,
the film is exposed for one 60th of a second
and that is determined by the size of the gap
in the shutter there.
This is what you would see if you were looking
through the viewfinder, at me pouring water on the ground.
If you could also see in slow motion
this is what it would look like.
You can see here side by side, that the areas of darkness
in the viewfinder are actually the exposures on the film.
You cannot see through the viewfinder
when light is hitting the film itself.
So you're basically seeing the opposite cycles.
This is what it looks like from the inside
as film is being dragged through the gate.
You may remember that any movement in your subject
while the shutter is open will cause motion blur
but a DSLR sensor is stationary.
If films constantly moving, how do you avoid
every single frame being a complete blur
as the film is pulled through the camera?
To show you how this clever part works,
I'm gonna write numbers on each frame.
This is one second a film at 24 frames a second.
And we're gonna run this through the camera
so we can see what's actually happening with the film.
All the slow-mo in this video is being captured
a thousand frames, a second in 4K
which is approximately 40 times slower.
Here we go, one second through the camera.
This is some absolutely amazing engineering here.
Every single exposure on every frame of film
the film is perfectly stationary.
And by the time the shutter comes around for a new exposure
the film has moved without us even seeing to the next frame.
In order to see how this works
I'm gonna take the disc off entirely.
So you can now see the film at all times.
Without the shutter, you can see when the film moves.
The whole mechanism is timed so perfectly
that as the shutter covers the film
the film is moved down, which prevents any streaking
or motion blur from the film itself.
If I superimpose the shutter back on
you can see it only moves when it's under the mirror.
This is so fascinating to me.
And because the shutter and the film pull-down speed
are linked no matter what frame rate you shoot
this will always be the case.
So now I want to see the mechanism
that is pulling the film down every time.
And in order to get a better view of that,
I'm gonna take off this piece,
which should reveal the pull-down claw.
This lens makes everything look ginormous.
So you can see, as I press record here,
this mechanism in the middle is leaning forward
at the top of its cycle.
And as it leans forward, this claw
goes perfectly into the Sprocket holes with the film
pulling it down into the perfect position for each exposure.
I'm very impressed this camera's still works honestly.
They started production in 1971.
So that's a lot of moving parts that you're asking
to last half a century at this point.
Just for the heck of it now I'm going to write
frame numbers on again, but this time for a second's
worth of film at 48 frames a second.
So everything in the camera will be working
at double the speed now.
If you projected this back at 24 frames a second
you would get half speed slow motion.
Or if you projected it back at 48 frames a second
you get some very Hobbity looking footage.
And there we have it, a wonderful slow-mo look
at some old school analog tech.
I love it.
Did you know that there were film cameras made
that could shoot thousands of frames a second?
Maybe we should take a look at one of those
one of these days.
If you found that video interesting,
make sure you subscribe.
I hope you did.
I enjoyed making it.
Give it a like if you want
and I'll see you in the next video.
Thank you very much for watching.