Ewa Backwinder

[oldasdirt]

Someone gave me one of these and yesterday I was playing around with it with
an old cartridge of K-40 that I knew I wasn't going to bother processing, so I wanted to see how this thing worked mechanically.

Now I had no camera with frame counter, so I ran off about 5 feet in my Canon 814 AZ. I then pulled out the cart and marked the first frame of where I was starting my multi exposed shot,that is, if I were actually shooting something. I put a piece of tape over the core, like your'e supposed to, and ran off 120 frames. I'll add that I tried this experiment in various parts of the cart until I had "shot" the whole thing. Anyway, I had mentally done a count of sprocket teeth on the inner wheel of the backwinder and figured 18 frames per turn. So I rewound what I figured was my 120 frames ( I tried this both shooting 120 frames singly and counting clicks and shooting at 24 and using a digital stop watch) but I was never able to hit the original marked frame.

Does anyone have any great tips on how to successfully make these things work? Is there any way to be frame accurate?

[Alex]

I don't think one has to hit it exactly. What matters more is the amount of f-stop shift one is incorporating within the approximate frames.

If you are fading out from F-16 you really aren't going to get much of a fade. However if you have an F-stop of 2.8 or 4.0 and do a fade, you get a nice fade affect, then when fading in, hopefully one is fading in a similar amount as when fading out, that is the secret to getting this effect to work in camera.

[oldasdirt]

That's fine if all I'm doing is dissolves, but what if I want a supered scene or supered title? I will need to be somewhat frame accurate to hit the right places.

[Alex]

In theory, having a wider latitude of f-stop movement during the transition fade may matter more than hitting your dissolve mark exactly on the frame and having very minimal shifting of the f-stop.