hey it's sean from tested um continuing our look at my uh 16 millimeter movie uh camera collection
uh we had looked at the 16 millimeter bolex in the soviet k3 uh previous to this today we're going to
be looking at the aeroflex s or st and it's one of my favorite cameras this is the camera that
i still rebuild and service there's still a lot of people buying these and using them including
schools like i fix cameras for cal arts still um and at nyu when i when i worked there for 12 years
we had a fleet of 100 of these that i kept running in house so there they're a really
cool little camera and uh let's let's dive in and talk a little bit about them um so if you want
to get a little more idea on how uh exactly the motion picture cameras work and the differences
between like 16 8 millimeter etc check out our first video because i kind of went into it there
and i'm not going to repeat it on this one this is going to be more about this camera in particular
uh if you're not familiar with arie or ari depending on how you want to say it
uh they're german company it's been around for decades they are uh pretty much the they
were the gold standard and and film cameras for many many years and this is a model that they
built um starting in i believe 1952. and they made it clean through the the mid to late 80s
virtually unchanged for to give you an idea um this is my uh model that was probably made
in the late 50s this one is my other one from probably the mid 70s so 20-year difference and
you can see they're they're not that different um there's some additional ribbing on the body here
you can see that the viewfinder setup is a little bit different but they're virtually identical form
factor and once they got to kind of this guy and i think the 60s they they didn't change that much
um so we're gonna we're gonna take a look at the newer guy so we'll set our 50s model over here
and we'll take a look at this so a 16 millimeter camera so it's using 16
millimeter wide film as we discussed before this is uh often considered the first professional
16 millimeter camera um 16 millimeter for a long time was uh kind of considered consumer or amateur
camera so like home movies stuff like that um and this was built to professional standards uh
with the the airy name behind it um aries still around they are still making digital cameras now
you can get limited repair parts for the old stuff still and they do service some of the
particularly 35 millimeter film cameras um uh but this guy's long out of production and
and no longer serviced by them but um despite it being the professional it has a lot of uh
similarities and things in common with say the bolex so it's using 16 millimeter film it's
using the 100 foot daylight spools which are the smaller loads that give you about a little
over two and a half minutes of footage but they did some other features which are nice such as
you can take this saddle off on top and add a 400 foot magazine to get the more like standard uh 11
minute long rolls of film for 16. so that was a nice feature for this but if you didn't want to do
that you just use the 100 foot spools and it's a really nice got this really nice hand grip molded
out of it if you pick this up it's it's well over it's probably like 15 pounds and so you're like in
this day and age it's like oh my god but this was considered light and portable uh back in the day
um similar to the bolex it's using a turret system so you would have three prime lenses a normal wide
and telephoto that you could switch between this is the taking lens um something different from the
bolex is uh we did i don't think we talked about it in the bollocks video but the bolex you'd have
to be careful because you would definitely have to place the telephoto lens which stuck out a lot
opposite of the wide or otherwise you would see the telephoto in the wide-angle shot so
this has what they call a divergent turret which means that they stick out at a little bit of
an angle from each other so in general you won't accidentally catch one of the other lenses in the
taking lens so that was a nice uh thing they did unlike the bolex which was a wind-up camera this
is a battery-powered camera so you would typically run this off of uh an 8 volt battery belt um
or 12 volts depending what motor that you got for it um but uh it was still a a relatively compact
portable uh camera that had a lot of options um so on the camera itself it has this uh this
adjustable motor where you can adjust how fast or slow it's going uh you could go from about two to
fifty frames per second on this so i gave you a nice range 24 would be the the normal filming rate
this is a little bit different motor than the typical area motor usually it looked more like
this guy which is what most people uh would recognize from the airy motors but this is
a little bit different 12-volt motor that they did um you can go forward in reverse with it has
a switch like the bolex it's it's a wild or mos camera meaning it's very loud which you'll hear
in a minute so it's not particularly good for doing dialogue and most of the motors including
the variable speed were not crystal controlled meaning they weren't precise enough to get
uh a an exact uh film rate going through the camera to sync up with sound having said that
robert rodriguez famously shot el mariachi on an airy s and a tape deck and he would just keep the
camera far away from the sound as possible and he would do really short takes because
uh you could get the sound kind of in sync for a little bit and the longer the scene went the
longer the more the dialogue will go out of sync so uh you would either do really short takes or
you would loop it afterwards meaning you just re-record the dialogue in the studio but he shot
his whole uh first feature film on an aries so they are great little cameras um and their tanks
they're very reliable they just keep going and going and going uh so it's a cast aluminum body
they typically have this this cool wrinkle paint uh on it kind of like an engine and
uh we'll take the door off here it has this cool latching mechanism and when you take this notice
the door is pretty heavy because in here in the viewfinding system there is a whole tube
of glass elements probably like at six to eight if i recall um and you can see the the front one here
so it adds a lot of weight to the door and one of my tests whenever i'm fixing these is i will
shake the door to listen to here if i can hear any loose glass elements because that happens a lot
and if that happens then what you're seeing in the viewfinder will not be accurate to what you're
actually uh recording onto the film um another common problem is people drop the doors a lot
and then ship them so i would have little metal epoxy repairs on those often to fix those up and
then the inside of the camera not not completely different from the bolex it has the sprockets with
the teeth on it to drive the film through this guy is called the pressure roller which is basically
keeping the film pressed up against those sprockets you can disengage it in order to load it
then it has the spindles which are taking up the film and feeding it
these guys have little uh push button release mechanisms to pop it off the spindles and and if
you remember uh you have to have loops in the film for it to breathe as it's moving uh on the bolt
lex you had an automatic loop former this um which is pretty typical of a lot of cameras has these
little white guides inscribed in the case which shows you where to set up the film loop so that's
always very important and we'll talk about that like the bollocks you have a pressure plate a
little door swings open and this has both the pull-down claw and it has a registration pin
which is an addition so what happens is the pull-down closet working to move the frame down
then the registration pin locks it in place to take the picture um i've pulled out so you can
see what it looks like because i do fix these i can easily take them apart so you can see the guts
but we looked at uh this mechanism in depth on the bolex video uh but just a quick review like
i said the the pressure plate your spinning mirror shutter which is actually made of glass which is
crazy and mirrored so that it reflects light into the viewfinding system so that lines up with that
uh and then it alternates between reflecting light into the viewfinder so you can see you're shooting
and then being open so that uh light goes to the film um an interesting thing to note
about the airy is the way the motor engages with the mechanism so motor when you slide in
it goes into this rubber coupler and the whole camera is driven by the friction of going into
this rubber coupler which is kind of a crazy system but it totally works um one common thing
that will happen with these and one of the things i fix is over the years the rubber coupler will
will stretch out and start to get hard and i will have to replace those so that they they grip onto
the motor again um if you have one of these and it is slipping one thing you can do is put some
heat shrink on the ball mechanism and sometimes that will get you enough friction to reengage with
the uh the motor again um it actually it also has the transmission here which are these kind of um
uh composite plastic wooden gears kind of they have like a a fiber that is bound together with
resin um that runs the whole camera that engages with these and these are cool they are actually
spring belts so these are the belts that engage with the uh take up pull uh spindles and the feed
spindles to run it and forward and reverse so they just kind of uh friction fit over that and
and pull it along which is kind of cool um so it's it's relatively a simple mechanism
um and are are pretty easy to take apart um film the frame feet and frame counters here and your
tachometer to show you how fast you're going um so uh my camera has been modified to take a modern
4-pin power input kind of like a mic cable xlr so we're gonna hook it up there um it has uh uh
you can actually control the the speed and the or the power switch from inside here so you can
hear it's pretty loud so this is why it would be problematic to shoot uh sound with this guy
um but let's load it up real quick and show you how it goes so we swing open the pressure plate
all right and
the film kind of goes like this and when you're when you're thinking about how to load it
often people put them in backwards which is bad so we're going to put it on the feed side i'm
going to stretch out maybe a foot or so we're going to release the pressure roller right here
and we're going to go through the first sprockets making sure it's on the teeth i'm going to rotate
my motor so that the registration pins open so that i can slide the film under
i roughly eyeball lining it up with that top
film loop and close the gate or close the pressure plate up the other side
we will roughly match it up with our loop and close our pressure roller and that looks pretty
good that's lined up pretty good so usually what i'll do at this point is i'll i'll run it off a
little bit just to make sure everything's going and i can see my bottom loop is a little too big
so i'm going to slide it up a sprocket hole or two
there you go this is way more film than i would typically run off but for our demo purposes
today i'm pretty more very important just like the uh bolex that you get the film in the slot
inside that spool and you take up a few turns of this and before you put it in the camera give it
a little tug and make sure that the film's not spinning on here because if it is that
means that it's not taking up and you're going to open the camera to spaghetti which is bad
all right there we go so the cool thing about the aries is you can easily run it backwards so you
can do trick shots stuff like that so we're going the opposite way now you can run it both forward
and reverse at different speeds which is nice and it has some safety features in it as well such as
this little guy which is the buckle trip switch and what that will do is is it just two things
if the film if the camera jams uh it will trigger that buckle trip and it will stop the camera so
you don't destroy your film so if for some reason you lose your loop it'll pull tight hit that or
or hopefully if the film starts recording on you it'll hit that and stop it it'll also tend to uh
when you reach the end of the roll it will the end will usually flick that and make it stop as well
um so you know the rule is done if you were watching your footage counter all right so
make sure that's closed engage lock it so if your camera's in pretty good shape you're going to get
a good seal here but if you want to be extra careful you can do black tape around the door
make sure you don't have any light leaks you could tape the saddle if you wanted to but at
this point you're ready to go and you it has kind of you can push it halfway to run it a little bit
without it actually engaging or you can go ahead and hit it and let it just do its thing
but nice little handheld camera you don't have to worry about crank length so you can shoot as
much as you want on a take as long as it fits in your two and a half minutes of film and camera or
11 minutes if you're gonna do the uh magazine and the nice thing about the area is it came
with tons and tons of options and accessories so you can get like uh periscope viewfinders
that will let you get real funky uh angles if you need to get this in a weird position
um it had different motors that you could put in such as a animation motor so it's this giant
thing with a counter on it that you could do frame by frame you could hit it hook that up to
an intervalometer which would allow you to do really nice time lapses um they you could fit
it with a zoom lens or just about any other lens from the airy stable as long it was as it was um
uh cleared to work with the mirror clearance that's on this particular one uh the turret
has a little locking mechanism on it that if you don't want it to turn by accident you can engage
um and it typically would have a nice little accordion matte box that you could put in it
and use glass or gelatin filters which are just like kind of the plastic filters for um different
effects or color correction but areas camera great little workhorse one of my favorite cameras that
i still fix and i'm happy to see that people are still out there using them if you're looking to
get one of these there's lots on ebay and you're going to often see some really really good prices
the problem that i warn you of is that they will be beautifully they'll be beautiful cosmetically
but often these have sat in somebody's basement or attic for decades unused and all of the lube
is turned to glue it may be rusty and so it may be pretty on the outside but you're going to end
up having to do a lot of work to get them running so sometimes that it's it's a toss-up you might
get lucky in in in strike gold but sometimes it's worth going to like a camera dealer that
you know that it's been serviced and is running well still so one last thing i'd warn you about
is if the camera is still using the two pin power which is back here in the original hookup
and it doesn't come with the power cable be very cautious of buying that because those
power cables are impossible to find and very expensive which is often why we do this four pin
xlr upgrade which lets you use standard power cables but other than that these are great little
cameras you can still get 16 millimeter film uh both in negative and reversal from kodak so
not only schools sending these to me for repairs but individuals are too so fun little camera nice
display piece the aeroflex s st's are also pretty much the same item with a little bit of different
lens mounts set up but uh one of my favorite cameras out there so hope you enjoyed this show
and tell that wraps up our movie camera collection and i hope to see you next time with something fun