Btw, they are hiring people in Canada that will help work and market a Super 8mm camera. So yeah, they haven’t abandoned it yet. That information is still accurate as of October 2022.
I know! They've been doing that for a while tho. Been 7 years since they announced it so either going to be completely different camera or I guess it could be the same thing 😂 if it is can't wait to make an un abandoned episode 😂
@@FrameVoyager Kodak capturing Christmas feels nostalgic they need a new punchy marketing campaign. let me introduce “don’t miss your zapruder moment now in accurate 8mm”
As someone who still shoots super8 on old cameras every now and then if this launched for like 350 or less tomorrow I would buy it instantly. I really wish Kodak would get there act together with this and also film development. Motion Picture film did a lot to save the company during the collapse and is probably the reason we still have any film stocks, still or video left. Kodak owes us lol.
Totally agree! But cinema cameras are bit more complex than stills even without a digital sensor or screen. And Kodak isn't really a Canon or Sony. $400 is far to unrealistic. Sadly if there's gonna be new film stuff it's going to be pricey like the new Leica M6... Btw I know it's stills but maybe the story of the Leica M6 would make an interesting video. It's the first newly produced film camera from a major company in a loooong time!
@@lewiya7439 It's a consumer grade super 8 camera, there isn't some big magic. Also you don't have to be Canon or Sony to have a digital part that can output your stuff on a screen. A $50 action cam offers a sensor and image processor that is good enough for that.
@@KiinaSu No it's not magic but to produce a camera that "cheap" you need the infrastructure and numbers. Thats what I mean with Canon and Sony. If Sony would need to start building cameras from scratch you bet they would cost even more. And Kodak isn't even able to expand their film production to meet demand or bring back/make a new film stock. I truly believe in the future of film! But its going to be expensive premium low volume stuff first. And a consumer grade camera doesn't make sense when it cost you $100 to shoot under 10 minutes. A few days ago I was in a film store and a camera assistant brought a ton of super 8 cartridges for a professional production. Those guys can afford to shoot super 8 and they don't care how much the camera costs.
Hey Frame Voyager, got some good news for you. Spoke with a rep from Kodak at B&H's BILD expo today, and she told me the project actually isn't dead! They had some issues bringing the product to market, made worse by the pandemic, but she said they are still actively pursuing its release. I told her there were many people excited about the product, she said she was too - fingers crossed it gets released soon!
I remember I found out about this camera when I was thinking about shooting short films on film and not even realizing it was abandoned until later. It really is a shame, the updated price point seems a little crazy even with all the features and tech when I can go to an antique store and get an original Super 8 camera for like twenty bucks.
I feel like a super16 version of this(with maybe a new super16 cartirdge system) would have been groundbreaking at that price, and would have made much more sense on a prosumer level and would have renewed interest in s16mm
Funny enough Kodak actually had made a super 16mm camera. It was the Kodak Reflex Special, of the 1960's. However, it was really trying to compete with the Bolex rex, Mitchell 16 reflex II, Arriflex 16, and Cinemaproducts CP16. However, because of the crowded market, and the lack of interest in theatrical projection of 16mm outside of education (and the death of 16mm for news gatherings which was the primary growth of the 16mm business in the 50's), ultimately it wound up dying off. Previously Kodak also had the Cine Kodak special, I & II, which were non reflex models, and were very popular due to offering a range of features found on professional cameras of the era, while being a good bargain compared to the Mitchell Pro 16, or Maurer Pro 16. They also offered a "Bolex killer" in the form of the K-100, a more budget oriented portable model with c-mount turret and was intended to offer a competitive model to the bolex 16, Bell howell 70, 75, Keystone A-12, A-15, Revere 16mm, and other handheld amateur daylight loading 16mm cameras of the early to mid 50's. The K-100 had a good longevity, produced until almost the 70's, long after it's competitors had exited the market, and 16mm had lost interest with the average consumer.
@@AlucardaPapere The pro option would definitely go well with an Ef mount but for the standard edition 16mm Cmount lenses have an amazing legacy and look. There are some truly beautiful cmount lenses and they aren't very expensive because these's so little demand. Many of the finest lens houses made cmount lenses in the days of 16mm cine..
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I said this in another video about this but it would be so cool if a company like Arri made a 35mm and 16mm camera with these features. A analog camera with cleaner monitor capabilities with a built in digital sound recorder, all while still recording on a analog format would be awesome!
The most recent 16mm and 35mm cameras that you can sometimes find on eBay or for rental come equipped with video assist or were modified for video assist. Most productions with the budget to shoot 16/35 film wouldn't rely on in-camera audio. The reason it's attractive for Super-8 is because the market for these is mostly hobbyists, kids, or very small productions, but I think a better idea would be designing a video assist module adaptable for any Super-8 camera. To come out with one camera that's better than all the others will tank the market immediately.
It’s funny how the guy demoing the camera at the trade show uses the menu to set the film type manually. In fact the old Super 8 cartridges came with notches that interacted with pins in the camera to set the film type. This would adjust the exposure and engage the tungsten/daylight filter automatically. So the new camera doesn’t do this at $75 per cartridge?
There are good reasons to set the film speed manually. Often a photographer or cinematographer will want to shoot the film at something other than the rated speed. Cameras that set the film speed automatically usually don't have the ability to override the default sensitivity setting. (Of course, they could, but they usually don't, probably because having a way to automatically detect the film speed and then override it is more expensive than auto or manual settings.)
Well for starters, the film speed communication notches were designed before film speeds exceeded 100 iso for motion picture use, (and in 8mm speed and grain size are much more important than pretty much anything else); so those notches really only communicate like, iso 25, 50, 64, 100 ish, since that was what kodachrome, and Ektachrome were, and Plus-X reversal. But Kodak offers 200T and 500T as well as 7266 Tri-x reversal which is 200 or 160 iso. So these exceed the orginal code notch definition; anyone using older cameras with it have run into this issue on cameras of a certain vintage not supporting the progressively higher notch code number in later films. And of course film technology advances have enabled higher film speeds with less of a grain consequence but it's still there. But as for why they'd want to control that in electronic settings are probably manifold. Since the camera was going to generate sync and exif on an SD card for use with digital post production, being able to manually set the ISO (even if it would be set automatically), is useful if you push or pull the film in processing for certain effects, and have a record of what you did. Additionally if you're pushing in camera, to be able to have the camera do exposure compensation and overide the film speed the cartridge would communicate is very useful of a feature to have. And neither of these things rule out it having communication pins. Plenty of super-8 cameras had a full auto mode that would register these data pins, but could be manually overidden for whatever purpose you had in mind. The high end like the braun nizo, canon super-8's etc. had this as well as manual aperture and shutter speed/frame rate functions to essentially do this.
I am fascinated by this camera. I was truly impressed when they originally announced it and followed its development eagerly. And then it seemed to become obvious that it was never going to happen. And that just made me sad. But it is, what it is.
I was a defender of film for a long time until I realized, with the advent of RAW footage and advances in color grading, how far film emulation have come. The money spent on Kodak's super 8 can now be spent on a digital camera with raw recording and a couple hundred $ more for a film conversion plugin, (or might even learn how to do it yourself). However, using vintage lenses in emulating the film look does most of the work, to be honest, I'd go as far to say as 70-80 percent of filmic look depends on using non-digital lenses AKA not your Sigma 18-35.
There’s a reason why business and organization management teachers in high school assign students to do their first CASE STUDY on Kodak. That’s probably one of the 4 lowest low points a business can have. Ending partnerships Bankrupt Loosing identity Being known for failing
Actually strange they didn't release this. Marketing/media production companies would kill for a film camera that allowed you to view the footage as you were recording it. This aesthetic is very popular, especially in fashion adverts and the like so it seems like a nobrainer
With the suggested retail price of $2,500, it would have been in direct competition with digital cameras. And while purists might say that you actually need to shoot on film for film look, particularly in the advertising industry, people are a lot more pragmatic and open to applying any sort of filters in post.
Marketing companies would see the costs of shooting with real film and immediately decide to go with digital and a post-production work that gets 80% of the way there with a fraction of the cost.
It was not abandoned and Kodak is still working on it. Just last week, Kodak put out job listings for engineers to help them with this camera. It will come out and this video will not age well.
I hope they release it so I can make a Un-ABANDONED episode lol... but I mean it's been like 7-8 years since they announced it. So either they are going a different direction or they have had a lot of internal issues with the product.
I was really hyped when this was first announced... totally forgot that this was even a thing... 10 years ago I was really into shooting on Super 8... but then I began to study Film and got into 16mm... Almost same price, better image quality... of course it's a different look, but when you want to "shoot film on a budget" you should really lean towards 16mm
I love Abandoned Cameras. I was playing with Panavision and Arri film cameras, when in New Orleans there was a rollout of the Arri Alexa. New vocabulary: rec 709, LUT, etc. And Arri rolled out the D20 & D21, and I never saw one in person. I saw the "Far & Away" Panavision Camera (65mm) at Panavision Tarzana, and Bob Richarson used it on "Hateful 8" and burnt out motors because a 2000 foot mag needs two motors, which the Arri 765 has.
I remember when this was announced! Sounded like such a cool idea and I was happy Kodak were trying something new. If they ever got mark 1 out of production, I'm sure digital video capture could have eventually been integrated.. but shoving too much in already seems to be the reason for the price jump and... abandonment. Great vid as always!
Thanks for the update. Somebody was not thinking realistic about this. Another company who went from first to last. Though they still offer Kodak super 8 film carts though. But even 15+ years ago I got rid of my super 8 collection I picked up from thrift stores due to the price of film / developing for 3 minutes. As for the sound that makes sense. I can't remember but cameras that supported encoding sound to a external source was going for $$$. Something about timing the film with the audio recording so when you played the film / recording back to say digitize it. It would sync it back together. Anyway at that cost. Might as well just make a new / cheap 16mm camera.
I was a bit disappointed that you didn't include the Logmar aspect of the story since it seems they were developing this camera, and as i happens also recently abandoned two of their own analog cameras. Love this series tho and looking forward to the new god series:)
That one was hard because we plan on talking about them in another video. So it was kind of hard to introduce them here but we will talk about the connection with this camera in that video
Thank you for confirming what I had guessed when I first saw this camera being introduced. There are plenty of used motion picture cameras out there. It’s the stupidly expensive film that has always been the problem.
It could be great all you want, but it's a hard sell when 3 minutes of footage cost you 80$ and the format is famous for its low-quality feel. Had it been 16mm or super16, the cost of film could have been easier to justify with a superior image quality, unique look and a vast selection of lenses from low budget to Hollywood-grade.
A Canadian filmmaking friend of mine was in LA a few years back and saw a camera in person with some Kodak employees. He literally offered to buy it RIGHT THERE but they refused.
The size of the Super 8 film was so-ooo small, the slightest dust or scratch was visible. I remember in the mid 90s, a guy where I worked went on holiday to South America and filmed it all on Super 8 - and where I worked had Rank Cintel Mrk 3 telecinie machine so I could transfer it onto video for him ! And I told him *not* to even *think* about looking at the film - bring it to straight to me still in the envelope from Kodak and I'll transfer it for you. And it looked really good with just one pass through the machine - but 16mm - or even better 35mm - was so much easier !
I saw a foreigner who came to Thailand 50 years ago, saw him holding an 8 mm leather battery camera at Phra Kaew Temple. I'm interested but I'm running out of opportunities to buy. Because I was too young, when I grew up, I went to buy second-hand goods that foreigners had to sell before going back to the country. For less than two thousand baht, I'm very happy, but the film is hard to find in Thailand. Just keep the 8 mm movie camera to watch and play. Unfortunately, it's gone now. If I'm going to devise a new model that uses film to record, it's great. I'll definitely buy it for myself.
Unfortunately, Kodak's brand is mostly attached to tat these days. The Kodak of the 20th century is long gone. Same for Polaroid. On another note, the first thing I think about when someone says Kodak is the fact they used to record drivers making mistakes on the Magic Roundabout by their British HQ in Hemel Hempstead, England.
Polaroid has sort of gotten a bit of a small resurgence honestly! I feel like polaroid could knock it out of the park if their cameras had the ability to take the photo on polaroid paper and save it digitally with a memory card in it!
I started getting into Super 8 filming around 2011 and I didn’t get an actual working camera (a Canon 518AZ) a year later. Upon hearing the new release of Kodaks new camera when I was a sophomore in high school I was very excited to see a revival of a format not commonly used. At that time all my film and development had to be shipped to CA to Pro8mm so it’d be longer than I wanted. I guess now I’ll just have to use my now trusty Canon 512XL til then
I remembered hearing about this NEW super8 camera and was hoping it would happen. I live in a smallish town with a Super8 film festival that ran for more than 10 years before covid shut it down. It won't be coming back anytime soon sadly. We keep hoping.
the camera didn't have me excited, as there are plenty of fantastic Super8mm out there. what had me excited was the back end. buying a cartridge with a set fee of developing and transferring to digital files after. would make everything so easy.
@@FrameVoyager I got a higher end power zoom Canon one off eBay that lets me change frame rates from 1 to slow motion speeds. I just wish Kodak would finish the ecosystem for like all films.. they could seriously do it for theirp still, medium format, 16mm super 8 if they want to embrace students and indie creatives. they could make boat loads of money. even just simple 1080 clean transfers would be awesome for short form content, IG videos, wedding and travel videography.
That goes for stills and video. I want to see a digital to film transfer that is high resolution and affordable That would be the best of both worlds. Start with digital for imaging, pp and editing then transfer to film easily and affordably. Use a 16mm film projector for movies and a film enlarger to print from negatives on traditional paper.
Weeeeelll... Kodak DID keep up with the digital development and were even at the forefront for a while. My first digital camera, I bought off a newspaper photographer It was the Kodak DCS 520 (Canon EOS1 body) from about 1998 or 99. I bought it around 2002, and for me, back then, it was a fantastic camera, though the resolution was so-so with only about 2mpx. Actually, I think the biggest drawback was the huge NiCad batteries. Oh, and the PCMCIA "memory card". I think I had to transfer files using firewire or something... :D
There was no reluctance for Kodak to go down the digital path... that is a myth. In the early to mid 2000s, Kodak had plenty of digital cameras, from budget up to expensive units that attracted photographers. They were simply out competed in the market by other digital camera makers. Phones wiped out the entry level market in any case, and Kodak didn't have credibility in the DSLR market.
They aught to make it simpler and cheaper to produce. Old cameras used to be so simple and that’s why they lasted so long. A cheaper simple version would be an amazing consumer product
Their film side is still very much alive... And their technology in manufacturing is near unmatched. Check out the series by smarter everyday - he got a very in-depth tour of the whole process.
Yes. The Logmar S8 that came out in 2015. You can find film footage from the camera on TH-cam. They have a new version called the Gentoo Gs8 that will be released next year.
Skip Super-8, and give us a new Double Super-8 camera. I only recently learned about this short-lived format. Imagine the 16mm stock that regular 8mm movie film used, but given the smaller sprocket size of super-8. So it was a 16mm format, born out of Super-8. Canon made some of these cameras back around 50 years ago.
Whew, the camera's admission fee is a bit steep, but $20 per minute for film and processing - i dunno, too rich for my blood. And I am a BIG Super8 fan!
But Kodak made the first digital Canon and Nikon DSLR models. First under their own brand and later under Nikon and Canon branding. I don't remember how Nikon got into their own DSLRs but Canon made D30 after Canon branded D6000 (Kodak DCS) and terminated the contract with Kodak. This almost completely killed the digital back business for Kodak. Kodak was also the first manufacturer allowing reporters to transfer photos over a phone line. IIRC this technology was used for several Olympics games and likely elsewhere. Again IIRC New York Times went (mostly) digital with EOS D2000 and the Nikon counterpart.
I feel like this camera has all the right things going for it, but like the A-Cam digital is more of a miss in terms of timing and development. If they announced a new Super 8 or Super 16 today at prices within used semi-pro cameras they'd be selling like hotcakes.
I got to hold one of these at a pop-up in London that was promoting both this and Kodak's ill-fated mobile phone. While the phone wasn't that impressive, I was really hyped to try this in a real world setting & its sad we never got to see the dream realized.
Given that the last logmar max8 camera this was based on sold on eBay for over 6 grand, I actually think there would have been (and still is) a surprising market for this thing - rental houses and owner / operators. People were paying pro8mm 3 grand already for thier rebuilt cameras anyway (IIRC that one had crystal sync for sound too), and some LA rental houses legit carry them for music video clients. Hopefully with the increased demand for film right now they’ll reconsider, but I think it’s really a pro / prosumer camera and not a consumer camera
The Logmar has a far superior movement inside, something more like a Mitchell, this allows for a far steadier picture than the traditional Super 8 gate. Looking at the footage samples in this clip, you can still see how unsteady the film is, and despite being able to stabilise in post, you’re still not going to achieve getting the maximum detail from the film stock. Looking at Kodak’s Reelz scanner, I’d imagine their camera wouldn’t be as good as it potentially could be. Here’s hoping with newer manufacturing methods, building bespoke film cameras will finally be not just a dream.
@@computationalcinematographer well the logmar had you actually thread the camera and had a proper pressure plate. The only other alternative would have been to have a removable pressure plate that fits into the film cartridge behind the exposed area of the film like the Leicina Special and the seemingly now cancelled Logmar Gentoo. I think Kodak didnt want to have a part that could be so easily lost or sent to the lab be part of an otherwise turnkey new camera.
@@robingphillips The altered pressure plate has been done before too. Probably two schools of thought out there, good enough, and as good as possible. Super 8 neg scanned at 4k when shot well can look incredible, but I’m not sure that’s what they are going for.
@@computationalcinematographer I bet it was definitely "good enough." Still, I'd have bought one even at the $3k price range for a variety of reasons if it was at all comparable to the pro8mm conversions. alas
I wish they had chosen to go with Super 16mm. If they could make 16 more accessible (design large idiot-proof cartridges for instance) and add a traditional viewfinder along the LCD screen, it'd be a dream for someone who wants to shoot 16 but is clumsy like myself. You can make a feature on 16mm. It looks cinematic right out of the box. I could see an explosion in great short films and indies if they consider a 16mm camera down the road. The ability to quickly change out cartridges would be a god send to small crews. Multi Camera set ups etc. Anyways, that's a dream. I think a lot of people want an onramp to film, but Super 8 isn't quite it.
The neat thing is these are never really dead, every project can be revived. Its actually very easy. Most of what you pay for in buying things like that is the connivence of not having to do it yourself
Years ago I went to a presentation for professional photographers by Kodak. They introduced us to a professional digital slr. Their first foray into the field. It was terrible. It was akward to use and produced slightly blurry images with pretty bad colour fringing. It looked like a finished product but I don't think it ever made it to the shelves of camera stores. Most of the chit chat at the end was about my wristwatch that had a built-in usb cable and some storage. No one there had ever seen anything like it. The Kodak guys dumped my test shots into the wristwatch. I think it had a huge 256mb lol.
*Ive got a scoop on this camera!* Kodak did not actually make this themselves. They hired a company called Logmar. Logmar has since discontinued this project, opting for making a super 65mm motion picture camera. The company has said that they may return to developing a super 8 camera after the s65mm project is completed.
They seem to have dumped just about all of their other projects to pursue the 65mm camera. They had several other things on tap, including a couple Super-16mm cameras, a 35mm cam, and a second Super-9 model.
Super “number” mm is not a format. It’s always Super 8, Super 16, Super 35, which are larger gates the on 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm formats. Super 8mm is not a thing.
@@FrameVoyager Or maybe y’all digital guys don’t know your way around film. It’s only a third of all Oscar movies last year and nine of the billion dollar plus movies of the last ten years were shot on film.
Well Super 8 film is in fact 8mm wide… it was originally just 16mm film split in half, which was used in the old 8 mm home movie cameras. But then Kodak changed the sprocket hole spacing and made the gate a little wider, yielding a slightly larger frame image, and packaged the film in cartridge making it easy to load, and thus Super 8 was born.
Curious as to why you chose to say it's abandoned but didn't mention the Kodak job listing in Toronto for a Production Systems Engineer relating to the manufacture of the super 8 camera they say they will be "rapidly launching this year"
I think it will be a completely different camera design than this one. And they've been saying that for years since they announced it. But hey! If they actually release it, can't wait to make an un abandoned video 😅
Consumer use of Film in my household died when cell phones could shoot HD or 4K footage. A wonderful concept but horrifically expensive to use if it ever succeeded.
Everybody nowadays likes to beat Kodak up over not jumping whole hog into digital photography when they invented it in 1975. As one who was just getting into serious photography around that time, I would remind those asking why Kodak would make such a "boneheaded" decision that in 1975: 1. Personal computers as we know them today didn't exist, and their predecessors were barely in their infancy. So, no "digital darkroom" yet. 2. Memory chips were nowhere nearly as dense as they are now, and cost a fortune relative to today, so unless you were prepared to spend as much as it would've cost to buy four or five luxury cars at the time (and you'd probably have needed those as well just to hold the memory card, which would've been more like a memory billboard), the best you'd get with a digital camera would be low-res, grainy images that looked passable only on a TV set, which, in 1975, was, at best, a 20" CRT incapable of showing anything near HD. And Kodak's prototype digital camera *couldn't* display images on a standard TV set, anyway. According to a C|Net article I found, Kodak actually had to invent a custom display to show the images. 3. Digital color printers did not exist, so all you'd be able to do with your digital images is look at them on the display. 4. While hard drives, diskettes and digital tape existed, Grandma didn't have access to them or any means to read them unless she was a computer scientist employed by a university or maybe DARPA. Speaking of DARPA, the Internet was also in its infancy, and almost nobody outside of DARPA, universities and telecom companies had access to it. So, there was no way to share your 1975 Kodak digital images. 5. An 8-pound camera the size of a medium-size (modern day) printer? That would've sounded ridiculous to anyone except (maybe) studio photographers in 1975. The bottom line is that digital photography in 1975 would have been low-quality, expensive and impractical, so it's really no wonder that Kodak's executives back then didn't see a future for it. That said, Kodak does deserve some brickbats for failing to dust off their digicam and develop it in earnest 20 years later, after most of the aforementioned obstacles were far less problematic.
Can you please do an abandoned episode on the Thomson GrassValley Viper FilmStream camera used to film the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ✌🏼
One of the problems is that the middle manager compensation has a base pay with approximately 15 % of their pay determined by FINANCIAL METRICS. This skews the middle managers focus toward their own greed rather then customer satisfaction or embracing new tech. The end result is that the company is highly resistant to any meaningful change or taking any real risk. This is personified by the companies focus on Commercial Print, an industry that has been shrinking over the past decade due to disruptive technologies such as the Internet. I would suggest that Kodak needs to make a change by following the example of Xerox. Pick up the company and move at least one state over. This will shake out most of the "dead wood" and give the company a chance to revitalize itself. Good Luck with that.
THE LOGMAR S-8 (CHATHAM) camera is the way to go. It is not abandoned, just the camera production has ended. But Chatham performs so well! It produces amazing stable 2K scans with sync sound. If only Kodak would make longer S8 magazines...
One of the few cameras where no one needs to be sad that it got abandoned. At $400 it was already a bit of a gamble. But at $2,500, you could get a somewhat decent 4K digital camera, either new or used, not pay a butt load of money on film, and have Super 8 effects applied in post. Also, the Kodak advertising got really dark in the end, "it could be one Christmas too late" - excuse me what? Buy a camera because grandpops might be already dead next Christmas!?
@@FrameVoyager I only saw at the end that you too suggested to use film emulation, and I don't feel like that is sacrilegious, as long as you start out with a good enough camera. I feel it's similar to game emulation. When you do it on a sufficiently fast computer, there won't be any difference to the real hardware, as every aspect of it can be emulated, including hardware glitches. A modern, raw-recording 4K, 6K etc camera should give enough pixels and dynamic range to make the emulation perfect. Beyond that it becomes just a philosophical question, but the elephant in the room will always be 3 minutes of recording time.
Perhaps, but rather than jump through all those hoops with film simulation, why not just use the real thing? To me the idea of Kodak doing something like that would be sacrilegious. And the cost would be fairly close to the digital cam, not to mention that shooting film can make you a more disciplined filmmaker (unless you're possessed by the ghost of Michael Cimino). $2500 is steep to be sure, but it still undercuts Pro8mm's Classic by at least a grand, not to mention that the stock of Beaulieu 4008s that Pro8mm rebuilds to make the Classic is surely drying up. For a grand less, you get a built-in video tap, onboard digital crystal sync sound and a rock-steady transport. Hopefully the camera's quiet enough or they'd have released it with a good barney...
@@cubdukatBecause film also has a lot of drawbacks, particularly this rather small film. Bad quality, no real color-grading, only 3 minutes of recording time, and you have to wait for development. You're also pretty limited if you want/need to do any sort of CGI afterwards. And there aren't any hoops with emulation. You get a plug-in, apply some presets, tweak it to your liking, and you're done.
@@graealex but.......at the end of the day it's still pretend digital shite. An interpretation, not the real thing. Emulation is what your Tinder date really looks like without the lame filters. Film rules and it makes you a better photographer/filmmaker overall.
😅😅😅 You did! More of a "Which video are you most excited for" poll. The Digital IMAX script is coming along! Just taking a bit to make that one and getting some technical interviews for it done. You can expect to see that one in the next couple of weeks
The one thing about this camera is that it caters to celluloid fans. Of course, you can buy off the shelf professional digital motion picture cameras that can film for hours and don't have processing costs. But the market for this camera is for those who want to use film as a tool. A different market from father and son convenience of the 60s and 70s in those adverts. The digital hybrid and still using film (rather than having an actual digital camera in there as well) is the whole selling point. Analogue tech with digital assistance
Damn I thought this was gonna be like the digital bolex, but I guess that wouldn’t make sense as they’d wanna sell you their film. Pretty pointless, you can get an 8mm camera for like £10. The added features certainly aren’t worth the silly asking price.
I rescued my Dad’s old Super 8 camera in the mid 90s when I was in Art School. It was so much fun, yet expensive to use. This was a time before digital cameras were widely available. My first digital camera was actually quite similar with its 480p video and lack of image stability, yet much more compact. $70 per cartridge seems WAY too expensive these days. I think they should focus on creating a camera that feels like an old Super 8, yet replicates the quality and feel of maybe 16mm film using modern digital technology. Students could chose to switch off stability aids to give them that film camera shake. And offer a matching projector system, for that old time experience of sharing old home movies. The magic of the old super 8 cameras was not the physical film, but the ability to capture a moment.
Just for reference in 1965 a Beaulieu regular 8 wind up camera with C Mount interchangeable lenses cost $475.00 which in 2023 would be $4423. And in 1969 a Beaulieu 4008ZM cost $829 which in 2023 would be $6930.
Yeah, strange how there's nothing on Logmar's first Super 8 camera that they made like 30 of... Also no mention of the job listing from Kodak a few weeks ago saying they plan to release the camera very soon
You can't actually get any old super 8 camera and sync sound to it. You need a crystal sync super 8 camera. If you don't you will get constant drifting.
The two main problems with buying used S8 cameras is #1, they rarely run at the correct speed; #2, poor registration; #3, they're noisy. If Kodak had just put out a relatively quiet S8 camera with C-mount and a registration pin, I would have snatched up that bad boy in a heartbeat. With HD being commonplace now, I wouldn't want to shoot on anything less than 16mm and there's certainly plenty used cameras on the market that would meet my criteria there.
Then this would be for you. This camera has all of those qualities. They're using the Logmar technique where it doesn't rely on the built-in pressure plate. It actually takes the film out of the cartridge kinda like how the transport mechanism in a VHS VCR takes the tape out of the cassette and wraps it around the video head drum.
At $750 with the promised cloud and development features it would have been a nice buy I could maybe rationalize. Almost a decade later, made of plastic, and at multiple thousands… absurd. Digital backups with audio would have been cool
NGL for me the biggest wow factor was how clean the lcd footage was. Working as a technician in a film school it, where we use arri flex, SDI just looks god awful. Up and coming 1st ACs wanting to focus pull and Directors wanting to know how their film is going to look, only to bare witness to a grainy and hazy 480p (if even that) feed really is not a selling people until they see their work after it's been processed. Seeing the beam split feed on that lcd just looks fantastic in comparison. If this was an upgrade to 16mm and 35mm cameras I'm sure they'd be used far more, set aside the purchase and processing costs. Shame a camera like this hasn't been released. For film oriented education and courses something like this would be fantastic to sell the idea of film to a generation to then sell rentals.
Use my code VOYAGER and the link shakerandspoon.com/voyager to get $20 off your first Shaker & Spoon box!
Btw, they are hiring people in Canada that will help work and market a Super 8mm camera. So yeah, they haven’t abandoned it yet. That information is still accurate as of October 2022.
I know! They've been doing that for a while tho. Been 7 years since they announced it so either going to be completely different camera or I guess it could be the same thing 😂 if it is can't wait to make an un abandoned episode 😂
I have to admit this is the first sponsored segment in a TH-cam video that I’ve watched all the way through!
@@StevenBradford 😂😂😂 good to know! Try to make them as fun as I can haha
@@FrameVoyager Kodak capturing Christmas feels nostalgic they need a new punchy marketing campaign.
let me introduce “don’t miss your zapruder moment now in accurate 8mm”
As someone who still shoots super8 on old cameras every now and then if this launched for like 350 or less tomorrow I would buy it instantly. I really wish Kodak would get there act together with this and also film development. Motion Picture film did a lot to save the company during the collapse and is probably the reason we still have any film stocks, still or video left. Kodak owes us lol.
For real! And yeah, unfortunately they wanted to charge like $2500 for this 😂
Totally agree! But cinema cameras are bit more complex than stills even without a digital sensor or screen. And Kodak isn't really a Canon or Sony. $400 is far to unrealistic. Sadly if there's gonna be new film stuff it's going to be pricey like the new Leica M6...
Btw I know it's stills but maybe the story of the Leica M6 would make an interesting video. It's the first newly produced film camera from a major company in a loooong time!
@@lewiya7439 It's a consumer grade super 8 camera, there isn't some big magic. Also you don't have to be Canon or Sony to have a digital part that can output your stuff on a screen. A $50 action cam offers a sensor and image processor that is good enough for that.
@@KiinaSu No it's not magic but to produce a camera that "cheap" you need the infrastructure and numbers. Thats what I mean with Canon and Sony. If Sony would need to start building cameras from scratch you bet they would cost even more. And Kodak isn't even able to expand their film production to meet demand or bring back/make a new film stock.
I truly believe in the future of film! But its going to be expensive premium low volume stuff first.
And a consumer grade camera doesn't make sense when it cost you $100 to shoot under 10 minutes.
A few days ago I was in a film store and a camera assistant brought a ton of super 8 cartridges for a professional production. Those guys can afford to shoot super 8 and they don't care how much the camera costs.
I was ready to buy this as soon as Kodak announced it was for sale. I’d still buy one if they would ever sell them.
Hey Frame Voyager, got some good news for you. Spoke with a rep from Kodak at B&H's BILD expo today, and she told me the project actually isn't dead! They had some issues bringing the product to market, made worse by the pandemic, but she said they are still actively pursuing its release. I told her there were many people excited about the product, she said she was too - fingers crossed it gets released soon!
Can confirm this is true, I was at this expo as well.
They announced it roday
Let’s hope they brought the price down :)
@@AllenMichaelnope, $5k
@@KyleMiko seriously? I’d rather put 5k towards 16mm….
I remember I found out about this camera when I was thinking about shooting short films on film and not even realizing it was abandoned until later. It really is a shame, the updated price point seems a little crazy even with all the features and tech when I can go to an antique store and get an original Super 8 camera for like twenty bucks.
I feel like a super16 version of this(with maybe a new super16 cartirdge system) would have been groundbreaking at that price, and would have made much more sense on a prosumer level and would have renewed interest in s16mm
Funny enough Kodak actually had made a super 16mm camera. It was the Kodak Reflex Special, of the 1960's. However, it was really trying to compete with the Bolex rex, Mitchell 16 reflex II, Arriflex 16, and Cinemaproducts CP16. However, because of the crowded market, and the lack of interest in theatrical projection of 16mm outside of education (and the death of 16mm for news gatherings which was the primary growth of the 16mm business in the 50's), ultimately it wound up dying off. Previously Kodak also had the Cine Kodak special, I & II, which were non reflex models, and were very popular due to offering a range of features found on professional cameras of the era, while being a good bargain compared to the Mitchell Pro 16, or Maurer Pro 16. They also offered a "Bolex killer" in the form of the K-100, a more budget oriented portable model with c-mount turret and was intended to offer a competitive model to the bolex 16, Bell howell 70, 75, Keystone A-12, A-15, Revere 16mm, and other handheld amateur daylight loading 16mm cameras of the early to mid 50's. The K-100 had a good longevity, produced until almost the 70's, long after it's competitors had exited the market, and 16mm had lost interest with the average consumer.
Yeah, 16mm with a C-mount, all those yummy Kern lenses and others are still plentiful and supremely cheap compared to 35mm cine lenses.
@@MrAllstar i feel for most use cases an ef mount would have been best, since you can easily adapt any vintage mount for it
@@AlucardaPapere The pro option would definitely go well with an Ef mount but for the standard edition 16mm Cmount lenses have an amazing legacy and look. There are some truly beautiful cmount lenses and they aren't very expensive because these's so little demand. Many of the finest lens houses made cmount lenses in the days of 16mm cine..
@@MrAllstar I get what you mean, but I wouldn't see a product like this as something for not professional or prosumers
Do you think this camera could one day actually happen still?
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I said this in another video about this but it would be so cool if a company like Arri made a 35mm and 16mm camera with these features. A analog camera with cleaner monitor capabilities with a built in digital sound recorder, all while still recording on a analog format would be awesome!
Agreed! The look of a 16mm or an 8mm digital would still be worth it imo.
The most recent 16mm and 35mm cameras that you can sometimes find on eBay or for rental come equipped with video assist or were modified for video assist. Most productions with the budget to shoot 16/35 film wouldn't rely on in-camera audio. The reason it's attractive for Super-8 is because the market for these is mostly hobbyists, kids, or very small productions, but I think a better idea would be designing a video assist module adaptable for any Super-8 camera. To come out with one camera that's better than all the others will tank the market immediately.
ARRI made a 35mm digital camera with inhalers film Emulator
It'd be nice, but I have the feeling ARRI would feel like that was "beneath" them. The Alexa's more or less become an industry standard now.
I hope Kodak never stops making the films. I use super 8 a lot.
This would be a great time for Kodak to comeback as the demand for film is starting to grow
It’s funny how the guy demoing the camera at the trade show uses the menu to set the film type manually. In fact the old Super 8 cartridges came with notches that interacted with pins in the camera to set the film type. This would adjust the exposure and engage the tungsten/daylight filter automatically. So the new camera doesn’t do this at $75 per cartridge?
There are good reasons to set the film speed manually. Often a photographer or cinematographer will want to shoot the film at something other than the rated speed. Cameras that set the film speed automatically usually don't have the ability to override the default sensitivity setting. (Of course, they could, but they usually don't, probably because having a way to automatically detect the film speed and then override it is more expensive than auto or manual settings.)
Well for starters, the film speed communication notches were designed before film speeds exceeded 100 iso for motion picture use, (and in 8mm speed and grain size are much more important than pretty much anything else); so those notches really only communicate like, iso 25, 50, 64, 100 ish, since that was what kodachrome, and Ektachrome were, and Plus-X reversal. But Kodak offers 200T and 500T as well as 7266 Tri-x reversal which is 200 or 160 iso. So these exceed the orginal code notch definition; anyone using older cameras with it have run into this issue on cameras of a certain vintage not supporting the progressively higher notch code number in later films. And of course film technology advances have enabled higher film speeds with less of a grain consequence but it's still there.
But as for why they'd want to control that in electronic settings are probably manifold. Since the camera was going to generate sync and exif on an SD card for use with digital post production, being able to manually set the ISO (even if it would be set automatically), is useful if you push or pull the film in processing for certain effects, and have a record of what you did. Additionally if you're pushing in camera, to be able to have the camera do exposure compensation and overide the film speed the cartridge would communicate is very useful of a feature to have. And neither of these things rule out it having communication pins. Plenty of super-8 cameras had a full auto mode that would register these data pins, but could be manually overidden for whatever purpose you had in mind. The high end like the braun nizo, canon super-8's etc. had this as well as manual aperture and shutter speed/frame rate functions to essentially do this.
@John Porter @Will 93 @comeradecoyote The Beaulieu Super8 cameras have adjustable ISO settings up to 400.
lol
I am fascinated by this camera. I was truly impressed when they originally announced it and followed its development eagerly. And then it seemed to become obvious that it was never going to happen. And that just made me sad. But it is, what it is.
😏😏😏To cure your sadness... Use my code VOYAGER and the link shakerandspoon.com/voyager to get $20 off your first Shaker & Spoon box!
But for real! It's kinda odd they never released it.
@@FrameVoyager Funny enough… they might still be working on it hahaha.
@@FrameVoyager most shameless plug I’ve seen in a while. Really?
@@martyjackson4166 more of a joke 😂 but yes... I have no shame
I believe that Kodak just had some new job postings for people to work on this camera indicating that this is coming on sooner rather than later
🤞🤞🤞
God I hope so
I was a defender of film for a long time until I realized, with the advent of RAW footage and advances in color grading, how far film emulation have come. The money spent on Kodak's super 8 can now be spent on a digital camera with raw recording and a couple hundred $ more for a film conversion plugin, (or might even learn how to do it yourself). However, using vintage lenses in emulating the film look does most of the work, to be honest, I'd go as far to say as 70-80 percent of filmic look depends on using non-digital lenses AKA not your Sigma 18-35.
This camera looked so cool and it seemed like it had support from studio filmmakers. This could’ve been like the BMPCC of film.
sigma fp > bmpcc
@@imwb7805 I’ll stick with BlackMagic, more ergonomic
TIME TO REVISIT THIS ONE!
💀💀💀
@@FrameVoyager I’m sorry 😂
When I saw this news I came back to this video but many beat me to it. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this camera now.
There’s a reason why business and organization management teachers in high school assign students to do their first CASE STUDY on Kodak. That’s probably one of the 4 lowest low points a business can have.
Ending partnerships
Bankrupt
Loosing identity
Being known for failing
This is one of my favorite series in the entirety of TH-cam.
😅 appreciate it!
Actually strange they didn't release this. Marketing/media production companies would kill for a film camera that allowed you to view the footage as you were recording it. This aesthetic is very popular, especially in fashion adverts and the like so it seems like a nobrainer
With the suggested retail price of $2,500, it would have been in direct competition with digital cameras. And while purists might say that you actually need to shoot on film for film look, particularly in the advertising industry, people are a lot more pragmatic and open to applying any sort of filters in post.
Marketing companies would see the costs of shooting with real film and immediately decide to go with digital and a post-production work that gets 80% of the way there with a fraction of the cost.
I would be more interested in their CCD sensor which was also used in the Digital Bolex.
this actually would have been such a sick camera.
It was not abandoned and Kodak is still working on it. Just last week, Kodak put out job listings for engineers to help them with this camera. It will come out and this video will not age well.
I hope they release it so I can make a Un-ABANDONED episode lol... but I mean it's been like 7-8 years since they announced it. So either they are going a different direction or they have had a lot of internal issues with the product.
God I hope this is true
I was really hyped when this was first announced... totally forgot that this was even a thing... 10 years ago I was really into shooting on Super 8... but then I began to study Film and got into 16mm... Almost same price, better image quality... of course it's a different look, but when you want to "shoot film on a budget" you should really lean towards 16mm
This Super8 film had me really excited for digitising my Super8 collection. I hoped it would make digitising more affordable. But alas.
I love Abandoned Cameras. I was playing with Panavision and Arri film cameras, when in New Orleans there was a rollout of the Arri Alexa. New vocabulary: rec 709, LUT, etc. And Arri rolled out the D20 & D21, and I never saw one in person. I saw the "Far & Away" Panavision Camera (65mm) at Panavision Tarzana, and Bob Richarson used it on "Hateful 8" and burnt out motors because a 2000 foot mag needs two motors, which the Arri 765 has.
I remember when this was announced! Sounded like such a cool idea and I was happy Kodak were trying something new. If they ever got mark 1 out of production, I'm sure digital video capture could have eventually been integrated.. but shoving too much in already seems to be the reason for the price jump and... abandonment. Great vid as always!
Thanks for the update. Somebody was not thinking realistic about this. Another company who went from first to last. Though they still offer Kodak super 8 film carts though. But even 15+ years ago I got rid of my super 8 collection I picked up from thrift stores due to the price of film / developing for 3 minutes. As for the sound that makes sense. I can't remember but cameras that supported encoding sound to a external source was going for $$$. Something about timing the film with the audio recording so when you played the film / recording back to say digitize it. It would sync it back together. Anyway at that cost. Might as well just make a new / cheap 16mm camera.
I was a bit disappointed that you didn't include the Logmar aspect of the story since it seems they were developing this camera, and as i happens also recently abandoned two of their own analog cameras. Love this series tho and looking forward to the new god series:)
That one was hard because we plan on talking about them in another video. So it was kind of hard to introduce them here but we will talk about the connection with this camera in that video
Thank you for confirming what I had guessed when I first saw this camera being introduced. There are plenty of used motion picture cameras out there. It’s the stupidly expensive film that has always been the problem.
I literally just requested updates for this from the Kodak website today lol 🤞🏽
I think they're working on this but it's not going to be the same design
It could be great all you want, but it's a hard sell when 3 minutes of footage cost you 80$ and the format is famous for its low-quality feel. Had it been 16mm or super16, the cost of film could have been easier to justify with a superior image quality, unique look and a vast selection of lenses from low budget to Hollywood-grade.
A Canadian filmmaking friend of mine was in LA a few years back and saw a camera in person with some Kodak employees. He literally offered to buy it RIGHT THERE but they refused.
Yesssss, so keen i’m here early. Love this series 🤠
🔥🔥🔥🔥
Well, hell has truly frozen over. They finally announced a limited run.
Probably getting rid of the inventory 😂
Your so underrated 😢
Appreciate it!
I love the abandoned series!
I was so excited for this when it was announced. If it came out now I'd probably pay up to $1K for it
I remember them advertising this! I didn’t know it never panned out.
Yeahhh, it's still on their website just never released it
The size of the Super 8 film was so-ooo small, the slightest dust or scratch was visible.
I remember in the mid 90s, a guy where I worked went on holiday to South America and filmed it all on Super 8 - and where I worked had Rank Cintel Mrk 3 telecinie machine so I could transfer it onto video for him !
And I told him *not* to even *think* about looking at the film - bring it to straight to me still in the envelope from Kodak and I'll transfer it for you.
And it looked really good with just one pass through the machine - but 16mm - or even better 35mm - was so much easier !
I saw a foreigner who came to Thailand 50 years ago, saw him holding an 8 mm leather battery camera at Phra Kaew Temple. I'm interested but I'm running out of opportunities to buy. Because I was too young, when I grew up, I went to buy second-hand goods that foreigners had to sell before going back to the country. For less than two thousand baht, I'm very happy, but the film is hard to find in Thailand. Just keep the 8 mm movie camera to watch and play. Unfortunately, it's gone now. If I'm going to devise a new model that uses film to record, it's great. I'll definitely buy it for myself.
I think about this everyday. Held this camera back in 2015. Wish it would have been released 😭
Would have been cool to see!
Unfortunately, Kodak's brand is mostly attached to tat these days. The Kodak of the 20th century is long gone. Same for Polaroid.
On another note, the first thing I think about when someone says Kodak is the fact they used to record drivers making mistakes on the Magic Roundabout by their British HQ in Hemel Hempstead, England.
Agreed! They fell into the age old trap of not evolving with the day and time and trying to keep an old format alive.
Polaroid has sort of gotten a bit of a small resurgence honestly! I feel like polaroid could knock it out of the park if their cameras had the ability to take the photo on polaroid paper and save it digitally with a memory card in it!
Bs.
The camera is out now
I started getting into Super 8 filming around 2011 and I didn’t get an actual working camera (a Canon 518AZ) a year later. Upon hearing the new release of Kodaks new camera when I was a sophomore in high school I was very excited to see a revival of a format not commonly used. At that time all my film and development had to be shipped to CA to Pro8mm so it’d be longer than I wanted. I guess now I’ll just have to use my now trusty Canon 512XL til then
I remembered hearing about this NEW super8 camera and was hoping it would happen. I live in a smallish town with a Super8 film festival that ran for more than 10 years before covid shut it down. It won't be coming back anytime soon sadly. We keep hoping.
the camera didn't have me excited, as there are plenty of fantastic Super8mm out there. what had me excited was the back end. buying a cartridge with a set fee of developing and transferring to digital files after. would make everything so easy.
Agreed! Like you could go to an antique store and buy one for $25. I did haha
@@FrameVoyager I got a higher end power zoom Canon one off eBay that lets me change frame rates from 1 to slow motion speeds. I just wish Kodak would finish the ecosystem for like all films.. they could seriously do it for theirp still, medium format, 16mm super 8 if they want to embrace students and indie creatives. they could make boat loads of money. even just simple 1080 clean transfers would be awesome for short form content, IG videos, wedding and travel videography.
As always, fascinating and excellent.
Film cameras will never be a hit until the complete high-quality film-to-digital path, developing, scanning, is made affordable.
That goes for stills and video. I want to see a digital to film transfer that is high resolution and affordable That would be the best of both worlds. Start with digital for imaging, pp and editing then transfer to film easily and affordably. Use a 16mm film projector for movies and a film enlarger to print from negatives on traditional paper.
I was really looking forward to this.
Weeeeelll... Kodak DID keep up with the digital development and were even at the forefront for a while. My first digital camera, I bought off a newspaper photographer It was the Kodak DCS 520 (Canon EOS1 body) from about 1998 or 99. I bought it around 2002, and for me, back then, it was a fantastic camera, though the resolution was so-so with only about 2mpx. Actually, I think the biggest drawback was the huge NiCad batteries. Oh, and the PCMCIA "memory card". I think I had to transfer files using firewire or something... :D
This is such a cool idea though. Somewhat similar to Fujifilm’s instax hybrid cameras. That price is nuts though.
There was no reluctance for Kodak to go down the digital path... that is a myth. In the early to mid 2000s, Kodak had plenty of digital cameras, from budget up to expensive units that attracted photographers. They were simply out competed in the market by other digital camera makers.
Phones wiped out the entry level market in any case, and Kodak didn't have credibility in the DSLR market.
They aught to make it simpler and cheaper to produce. Old cameras used to be so simple and that’s why they lasted so long. A cheaper simple version would be an amazing consumer product
Their film side is still very much alive... And their technology in manufacturing is near unmatched.
Check out the series by smarter everyday - he got a very in-depth tour of the whole process.
For sure! But they are not what they used to be
The film side was what saved them in the first place.
I wasn't excited for the camera when they announced this, it was the cloud service. If even one more development place pops up, it's a good thing.
I would of bought this in a second. I still shoot a lot of film still in every format. Would of been amazing to be able to change lenses for S8!
Do I understand correctly that this is still not released?
Also.
Is there any other alternative? For 8mm + digital
Yes. The Logmar S8 that came out in 2015. You can find film footage from the camera on TH-cam. They have a new version called the Gentoo Gs8 that will be released next year.
I think about this camera often
I guess in a sense since no one else has made anything close to it at this point... they could still release it.
Kodak is manufacturing film again (!!!) and they're ramping up production as demand is INCREASING! That makes me incredibly happy!
“I commented because I’m a discord member. And I’m sad too, video made me sad. Now I’m thirsty”
😅😅😅 Use my code VOYAGER and the link shakerandspoon.com/voyager to get $20 off your first Shaker & Spoon box!
Skip Super-8, and give us a new Double Super-8 camera. I only recently learned about this short-lived format. Imagine the 16mm stock that regular 8mm movie film used, but given the smaller sprocket size of super-8. So it was a 16mm format, born out of Super-8. Canon made some of these cameras back around 50 years ago.
Whew, the camera's admission fee is a bit steep, but $20 per minute for film and processing - i dunno, too rich for my blood. And I am a BIG Super8 fan!
It's interesting how you make videos about all kinds of cameras, but you still post it on yt in 16:9 format
Love the videos nonetheless
It's actually 17:9 😉. But unless I post in certain aspect ratios it limits some of the features like end screens on the videos.
But Kodak made the first digital Canon and Nikon DSLR models. First under their own brand and later under Nikon and Canon branding. I don't remember how Nikon got into their own DSLRs but Canon made D30 after Canon branded D6000 (Kodak DCS) and terminated the contract with Kodak. This almost completely killed the digital back business for Kodak. Kodak was also the first manufacturer allowing reporters to transfer photos over a phone line. IIRC this technology was used for several Olympics games and likely elsewhere. Again IIRC New York Times went (mostly) digital with EOS D2000 and the Nikon counterpart.
I feel like this camera has all the right things going for it, but like the A-Cam digital is more of a miss in terms of timing and development. If they announced a new Super 8 or Super 16 today at prices within used semi-pro cameras they'd be selling like hotcakes.
I got to hold one of these at a pop-up in London that was promoting both this and Kodak's ill-fated mobile phone. While the phone wasn't that impressive, I was really hyped to try this in a real world setting & its sad we never got to see the dream realized.
You seen their top gear at CES? LED lightbulbs and shitty head phones? This company really missed any and all chances.
Given that the last logmar max8 camera this was based on sold on eBay for over 6 grand, I actually think there would have been (and still is) a surprising market for this thing - rental houses and owner / operators. People were paying pro8mm 3 grand already for thier rebuilt cameras anyway (IIRC that one had crystal sync for sound too), and some LA rental houses legit carry them for music video clients. Hopefully with the increased demand for film right now they’ll reconsider, but I think it’s really a pro / prosumer camera and not a consumer camera
The Logmar has a far superior movement inside, something more like a Mitchell, this allows for a far steadier picture than the traditional Super 8 gate. Looking at the footage samples in this clip, you can still see how unsteady the film is, and despite being able to stabilise in post, you’re still not going to achieve getting the maximum detail from the film stock. Looking at Kodak’s Reelz scanner, I’d imagine their camera wouldn’t be as good as it potentially could be. Here’s hoping with newer manufacturing methods, building bespoke film cameras will finally be not just a dream.
@@computationalcinematographer well the logmar had you actually thread the camera and had a proper pressure plate. The only other alternative would have been to have a removable pressure plate that fits into the film cartridge behind the exposed area of the film like the Leicina Special and the seemingly now cancelled Logmar Gentoo. I think Kodak didnt want to have a part that could be so easily lost or sent to the lab be part of an otherwise turnkey new camera.
@@robingphillips The altered pressure plate has been done before too. Probably two schools of thought out there, good enough, and as good as possible. Super 8 neg scanned at 4k when shot well can look incredible, but I’m not sure that’s what they are going for.
@@computationalcinematographer I bet it was definitely "good enough." Still, I'd have bought one even at the $3k price range for a variety of reasons if it was at all comparable to the pro8mm conversions. alas
I wish they had chosen to go with Super 16mm. If they could make 16 more accessible (design large idiot-proof cartridges for instance) and add a traditional viewfinder along the LCD screen, it'd be a dream for someone who wants to shoot 16 but is clumsy like myself. You can make a feature on 16mm. It looks cinematic right out of the box. I could see an explosion in great short films and indies if they consider a 16mm camera down the road. The ability to quickly change out cartridges would be a god send to small crews. Multi Camera set ups etc. Anyways, that's a dream. I think a lot of people want an onramp to film, but Super 8 isn't quite it.
The neat thing is these are never really dead, every project can be revived. Its actually very easy. Most of what you pay for in buying things like that is the connivence of not having to do it yourself
For sure!
Years ago I went to a presentation for professional photographers by Kodak. They introduced us to a professional digital slr. Their first foray into the field. It was terrible. It was akward to use and produced slightly blurry images with pretty bad colour fringing. It looked like a finished product but I don't think it ever made it to the shelves of camera stores. Most of the chit chat at the end was about my wristwatch that had a built-in usb cable and some storage. No one there had ever seen anything like it. The Kodak guys dumped my test shots into the wristwatch. I think it had a huge 256mb lol.
*Ive got a scoop on this camera!*
Kodak did not actually make this themselves. They hired a company called Logmar. Logmar has since discontinued this project, opting for making a super 65mm motion picture camera. The company has said that they may return to developing a super 8 camera after the s65mm project is completed.
😉 we're going to cover them in an upcoming video!
They seem to have dumped just about all of their other projects to pursue the 65mm camera. They had several other things on tap, including a couple Super-16mm cameras, a 35mm cam, and a second Super-9 model.
Super “number” mm is not a format. It’s always Super 8, Super 16, Super 35, which are larger gates the on 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm formats. Super 8mm is not a thing.
Probably a slip of the tongue
@@FrameVoyager Or maybe y’all digital guys don’t know your way around film. It’s only a third of all Oscar movies last year and nine of the billion dollar plus movies of the last ten years were shot on film.
Well Super 8 film is in fact 8mm wide… it was originally just 16mm film split in half, which was used in the old 8 mm home movie cameras. But then Kodak changed the sprocket hole spacing and made the gate a little wider, yielding a slightly larger frame image, and packaged the film in cartridge making it easy to load, and thus Super 8 was born.
Curious as to why you chose to say it's abandoned but didn't mention the Kodak job listing in Toronto for a Production Systems Engineer relating to the manufacture of the super 8 camera they say they will be "rapidly launching this year"
I think it will be a completely different camera design than this one. And they've been saying that for years since they announced it. But hey! If they actually release it, can't wait to make an un abandoned video 😅
Consumer use of Film in my household died when cell phones could shoot HD or 4K footage. A wonderful concept but horrifically expensive to use if it ever succeeded.
Yes thank you!!!
No problem! I remembered your comment
I remember this announcement.
How disappointing that it turned out to be a complete non-event.
Ford is bringing back the crank starter on their new engine stop hybrid!
Makes about as much sense or how about bring back livery stables and horse trophies to lower auto emissions.
Kodak's marketing and product development team is like a slowly deflating balloon.
I was waiting for this camera. I guess I should stop waiting.
It might still come out... but it's definitley been a while
Everybody nowadays likes to beat Kodak up over not jumping whole hog into digital photography when they invented it in 1975. As one who was just getting into serious photography around that time, I would remind those asking why Kodak would make such a "boneheaded" decision that in 1975:
1. Personal computers as we know them today didn't exist, and their predecessors were barely in their infancy. So, no "digital darkroom" yet.
2. Memory chips were nowhere nearly as dense as they are now, and cost a fortune relative to today, so unless you were prepared to spend as much as it would've cost to buy four or five luxury cars at the time (and you'd probably have needed those as well just to hold the memory card, which would've been more like a memory billboard), the best you'd get with a digital camera would be low-res, grainy images that looked passable only on a TV set, which, in 1975, was, at best, a 20" CRT incapable of showing anything near HD. And Kodak's prototype digital camera *couldn't* display images on a standard TV set, anyway. According to a C|Net article I found, Kodak actually had to invent a custom display to show the images.
3. Digital color printers did not exist, so all you'd be able to do with your digital images is look at them on the display.
4. While hard drives, diskettes and digital tape existed, Grandma didn't have access to them or any means to read them unless she was a computer scientist employed by a university or maybe DARPA. Speaking of DARPA, the Internet was also in its infancy, and almost nobody outside of DARPA, universities and telecom companies had access to it. So, there was no way to share your 1975 Kodak digital images.
5. An 8-pound camera the size of a medium-size (modern day) printer? That would've sounded ridiculous to anyone except (maybe) studio photographers in 1975.
The bottom line is that digital photography in 1975 would have been low-quality, expensive and impractical, so it's really no wonder that Kodak's executives back then didn't see a future for it.
That said, Kodak does deserve some brickbats for failing to dust off their digicam and develop it in earnest 20 years later, after most of the aforementioned obstacles were far less problematic.
Saw an ad, it’s in production.
god, I was really *really* looking forward to this camera. I still sometimes Google it in the vain hope that I can purchase it
The release of this camera was announced today by Kodak.
Oh believe me, I know 😂
This would be neat to have. Unfortunately our vintage Super8 gave messed up when we left the batteries in it
Can you please do an abandoned episode on the Thomson GrassValley Viper FilmStream camera used to film the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ✌🏼
💯!!! It's on my list 😉
One of the problems is that the middle manager compensation has a base pay with approximately 15 % of their pay determined by FINANCIAL METRICS. This skews the middle managers focus toward their own greed rather then customer satisfaction or embracing new tech. The end result is that the company is highly resistant to any meaningful change or taking any real risk. This is personified by the companies focus on Commercial Print, an industry that has been shrinking over the past decade due to disruptive technologies such as the Internet.
I would suggest that Kodak needs to make a change by following the example of Xerox. Pick up the company and move at least one state over. This will shake out most of the "dead wood" and give the company a chance to revitalize itself.
Good Luck with that.
THE LOGMAR S-8 (CHATHAM) camera is the way to go. It is not abandoned, just the camera production has ended. But Chatham performs so well! It produces amazing stable 2K scans with sync sound. If only Kodak would make longer S8 magazines...
I just wish somebody would make a good digital cinema camera with the super8 form factor.
Digital bolex tried but they're was still no vf
One of the few cameras where no one needs to be sad that it got abandoned. At $400 it was already a bit of a gamble. But at $2,500, you could get a somewhat decent 4K digital camera, either new or used, not pay a butt load of money on film, and have Super 8 effects applied in post.
Also, the Kodak advertising got really dark in the end, "it could be one Christmas too late" - excuse me what? Buy a camera because grandpops might be already dead next Christmas!?
I added that ad in there for fun haha
@@FrameVoyager I only saw at the end that you too suggested to use film emulation, and I don't feel like that is sacrilegious, as long as you start out with a good enough camera.
I feel it's similar to game emulation. When you do it on a sufficiently fast computer, there won't be any difference to the real hardware, as every aspect of it can be emulated, including hardware glitches.
A modern, raw-recording 4K, 6K etc camera should give enough pixels and dynamic range to make the emulation perfect. Beyond that it becomes just a philosophical question, but the elephant in the room will always be 3 minutes of recording time.
Perhaps, but rather than jump through all those hoops with film simulation, why not just use the real thing? To me the idea of Kodak doing something like that would be sacrilegious. And the cost would be fairly close to the digital cam, not to mention that shooting film can make you a more disciplined filmmaker (unless you're possessed by the ghost of Michael Cimino).
$2500 is steep to be sure, but it still undercuts Pro8mm's Classic by at least a grand, not to mention that the stock of Beaulieu 4008s that Pro8mm rebuilds to make the Classic is surely drying up. For a grand less, you get a built-in video tap, onboard digital crystal sync sound and a rock-steady transport. Hopefully the camera's quiet enough or they'd have released it with a good barney...
@@cubdukatBecause film also has a lot of drawbacks, particularly this rather small film. Bad quality, no real color-grading, only 3 minutes of recording time, and you have to wait for development. You're also pretty limited if you want/need to do any sort of CGI afterwards.
And there aren't any hoops with emulation. You get a plug-in, apply some presets, tweak it to your liking, and you're done.
@@graealex but.......at the end of the day it's still pretend digital shite. An interpretation, not the real thing. Emulation is what your Tinder date really looks like without the lame filters. Film rules and it makes you a better photographer/filmmaker overall.
I remember seeing this announced back in 2015 and I wanted that one so bad I think it was like 499 dollars
Don’t get me wrong I’m always in love with your videos but didn’t we vote for imax?
😅😅😅 You did! More of a "Which video are you most excited for" poll. The Digital IMAX script is coming along! Just taking a bit to make that one and getting some technical interviews for it done. You can expect to see that one in the next couple of weeks
@@FrameVoyager ok great😄👌🏻
The one thing about this camera is that it caters to celluloid fans. Of course, you can buy off the shelf professional digital motion picture cameras that can film for hours and don't have processing costs. But the market for this camera is for those who want to use film as a tool. A different market from father and son convenience of the 60s and 70s in those adverts. The digital hybrid and still using film (rather than having an actual digital camera in there as well) is the whole selling point. Analogue tech with digital assistance
Damn I thought this was gonna be like the digital bolex, but I guess that wouldn’t make sense as they’d wanna sell you their film.
Pretty pointless, you can get an 8mm camera for like £10. The added features certainly aren’t worth the silly asking price.
I rescued my Dad’s old Super 8 camera in the mid 90s when I was in Art School. It was so much fun, yet expensive to use. This was a time before digital cameras were widely available. My first digital camera was actually quite similar with its 480p video and lack of image stability, yet much more compact. $70 per cartridge seems WAY too expensive these days. I think they should focus on creating a camera that feels like an old Super 8, yet replicates the quality and feel of maybe 16mm film using modern digital technology. Students could chose to switch off stability aids to give them that film camera shake. And offer a matching projector system, for that old time experience of sharing old home movies. The magic of the old super 8 cameras was not the physical film, but the ability to capture a moment.
its $35-50 a cartridge which isnt bad
I guess it’s not so abandoned after all 😏
It's a good day when a camera rises from the dead 🥲🥲🥲
Just for reference in 1965 a Beaulieu regular 8 wind up camera with C Mount interchangeable lenses cost $475.00 which in 2023 would be $4423. And in 1969 a Beaulieu 4008ZM cost $829 which in 2023 would be $6930.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Logmar team that invented and developed the camera for Kodak.
Yeah, strange how there's nothing on Logmar's first Super 8 camera that they made like 30 of... Also no mention of the job listing from Kodak a few weeks ago saying they plan to release the camera very soon
You can't actually get any old super 8 camera and sync sound to it. You need a crystal sync super 8 camera. If you don't you will get constant drifting.
The two main problems with buying used S8 cameras is #1, they rarely run at the correct speed; #2, poor registration; #3, they're noisy. If Kodak had just put out a relatively quiet S8 camera with C-mount and a registration pin, I would have snatched up that bad boy in a heartbeat. With HD being commonplace now, I wouldn't want to shoot on anything less than 16mm and there's certainly plenty used cameras on the market that would meet my criteria there.
Then this would be for you. This camera has all of those qualities. They're using the Logmar technique where it doesn't rely on the built-in pressure plate. It actually takes the film out of the cartridge kinda like how the transport mechanism in a VHS VCR takes the tape out of the cassette and wraps it around the video head drum.
At $750 with the promised cloud and development features it would have been a nice buy I could maybe rationalize. Almost a decade later, made of plastic, and at multiple thousands… absurd. Digital backups with audio would have been cool
NGL for me the biggest wow factor was how clean the lcd footage was.
Working as a technician in a film school it, where we use arri flex, SDI just looks god awful. Up and coming 1st ACs wanting to focus pull and Directors wanting to know how their film is going to look, only to bare witness to a grainy and hazy 480p (if even that) feed really is not a selling people until they see their work after it's been processed.
Seeing the beam split feed on that lcd just looks fantastic in comparison. If this was an upgrade to 16mm and 35mm cameras I'm sure they'd be used far more, set aside the purchase and processing costs.
Shame a camera like this hasn't been released. For film oriented education and courses something like this would be fantastic to sell the idea of film to a generation to then sell rentals.