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Movie rentals back in the day

Typically the 8MM films that were shown at home were homemade vacation or holiday movies, no sound. The other typical 8MM were shown at stag parties.

Never saw 16 in a home setting but one neighbor who worked for CBS used to show 16, with sound, on a sheet outdoors in the summer. Typically old movies from the 50’s. Of course this was only in the 1960’s anyway. It was quite the event with all the neighbors and kids on folding chairs in his driveway. Then off to A&B Snowflake for ice cream.

We still grab blu ray and DVD from library. Often times older TV series that don’t stream and foreign films.
 
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Never saw 16 in a home setting but one neighbor who worked for CBS used to show 16, with sound, on a sheet outdoors in the summer. Typically old movies from the 50’s. Of course this was only in the 1960’s anyway. It was quite the event with all the neighbors and kids on folding chairs in his driveway. Then off to A&B Snowflake for ice cream.

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Back before cable discovered there was real money in carrying old films, films were syndicated to TV stations on 16 mm acetate "safety" film, as only the networks and some very-well furnished independent stations had the required fire-proof projection facilities for 35mm nitrate film. Each station on the distribution circuit would physically edit the print to their liking for commercial insertions and then hopefully splice it back together correctly for the next station to receive it.
 
There was an infamous case in Chicago where a local station edited "The Egg and I" so badly that you couldn't follow the plot. The public protest prompted them to apologize and later schedule an uncut broadcast.
 
There was an infamous case in Chicago where a local station edited "The Egg and I" so badly that you couldn't follow the plot. The public protest prompted them to apologize and later schedule an uncut broadcast.
I remember dialogue being edited as well. Mostly NYC local stations had movies at night.
One I have always remembered was the (excellent) movie Joe with Peter Boyle. There is a scene where something bad happens and the real dialogue was “it’s your ass now Compton” changed to “it’s yours now Compton”. Not sure why I remember that so well. I did see Joe in the movies and it was a pretty pivotal scene.
 
Back before cable discovered there was real money in carrying old films, films were syndicated to TV stations on 16 mm acetate "safety" film, as only the networks and some very-well furnished independent stations had the required fire-proof projection facilities for 35mm nitrate film. Each station on the distribution circuit would physically edit the print to their liking for commercial insertions and then hopefully splice it back together correctly for the next station to receive it.

Dindn't the old films where copyed onto 35 m.m. saftey film in the '60's and '70's? 70 m.m. I think was uselles for telecine because back in the day tv sets didn't had a very good image, especially on 525i.
 
Dindn't the old films where copyed onto 35 m.m. saftey film in the '60's and '70's? 70 m.m. I think was uselles for telecine because back in the day tv sets didn't had a very good image, especially on 525i.
I honestly don't know.

In terms of image quality, a 16mm image is somewhat the same amount of degradation from 35mm as standard definition TV is, so when you show a 16mm copy on standard def TV, the total visual quality decrease compared to 35mm is about 3 dB worse than with either alone.
 
Why this degradation?
in the case of copying 35mm to 16mm, it means lower resolution and coarser grain; the film and optics frequency response is a gradual roll-off.
In the case of video, the degradation of resolution is more of a sharp cutoff at the limiting bandwidth of the system, and with the older equipment using pickup tubes instead of solid state sensors, electronic noise and limited dynamic range.

Otto Schade, at RCA , developed a calculation for apparent sharpness that involved comparing the square of the area under the frequency response of film and video (also callled Modulation Transfer Function, or MTF). When you put two systems in series with approximately the same sharpness, the overall result is approximately a 30% (3 dB) reduction in apparent sharpness. It happens to be the case that both a 16 mm copy of 35 mm and a standard definition video of 35 mm film have about the same degradation of the original 35 mm, so televising a 16 mm copy is noticeably worse than either process alone.


This work was so important that an SID award was named for him and he also received the first SMPTE David Sarnoff Gold Medal for Meritorious Achievement in Television Engineering.

Some later research indicates that squaring the area may be too strong a function, and lower power ratios, down to 1:1 have been suggested as better estimators of comparitive ratings.
 
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Thank you sir! I still have to learn some terms... I just like old electronics, I don't understeand much about them like I do with mechcanics.
Yes, 16 m.m. haves a lower defition then 35 m.m., but it was still way better the electronic video up untill the '80's-'90's. In terms of image qualty.
I've seen in the link that they tested a 1800 lines camera. I din't know they tried something like that. The image was super, but the bandwith was too large... Anyway, nice image. I'm curios to see a image of the French H.D. sistems - 819i.
 
Making 16mm home movies was expensive, and only your better-off relatives might have a projector. 8mm was less expensive, but still not cheap. A souvenir 8mm film of a Disney park was one of the more expensive things you could buy there.

Since schools and churches had 16mm projectors, corporations circulated their industrial films to them for free to get their names in front of the public.
Jam Handy produced a lot of these films, many of them for General Motors.

Yes, it was expensive, but more affordable then in Romania. Probably if you dind't really need a car for everyday use, you could invest in such thing. Oh, I dream of a "Moviola" editor... but still expensive, trough all probably 3 times less the cost of when it was new.
In Romania we had some educational films of 16 m.m., but still less compared to other countries, including other that where in the communist side.
In Europe there was, but no so popular the 9.5 m.m. film format. I wonder if they ever rented such films. "Bolex" H was made as H8, H9, H16.
 
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