Good to hear about your research on super 8 in the 60,s. I was involved then. Film was always sent off both standard and super 8 to the processing labs. There were ample around at the time and the service was around 10 days turn around. Processing quality was excellent and both Agfa and Kodak were in the market. The equipment of the day was very well made and of good quality. The projectors were also good value. Kodak, Bell @Howell, Bolex and Eumig were all very positive manufactures.People went all over the world so to speak to places like China and India and even the Antarctic to make movies in their travels.
All splicing was cement with a bevel edge splicer. Carbon Tetrachloride was an excellent film cleaner and if you had some experience you always cleaned your film with carbon tet before ever putting it through the projector. Sad to say the greenies got rid of this product. Kodak had a wonderful film cleaner and wax coating in one bottle called "Tough coat" It was indeed a sad day when it went off the market. Tough coat if you used it several times through an edit you could drop the film in a plastic garbage bag over and over again loose and it would never scratch. I believe its vital to have a campaign to bring that liquid back again as one can really edit and clean a movie as you go along and never get a scratch.
A great many cameras of the time were true cine cameras with a 3 turret lens system. Wide shot medium shot and close up shot. You just rotated the lens drum. Depth of field was magic. The Jap cameras were not good to start with. The Japs are not film makers and still aren't and the result was camera were designs with gimmick not good sound optics and stable motors. Film gate registration was poor in the gate with a lot of float until Nikon came along with a double claw system. If you can find a double claw Nikon to buy for super 8 buy it. Minolta made the best sharpest fastest lens. Super 8 gatherings were common in those days and were well received. There were several world class magazines out at the time and probably the best ones came out of the UK. The Japs in the end like Canon got to do something about optics as Canon always does. But the real problem was we never really had access to the professional cameras till much later on. Beaulieu, Nizo and Leica had German optics and the lens were twice as good as what the japs could back. Beaulieu cameras were fragile to say the least. Nitzo were rugged but not as rugged as the Nikon. To-day the Beaulieu and Nizo camera tooling has been sold to the Germans were it will be in good hands and I do hope they get the cameras back in production. Hope this helps
Ophir
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