My auntie thought of me this week and bought a vintage movie camera for my collection. This is the first video camera to make it into my collection, and it's a pretty nifty little machine. rd95 was super chuffed when I showed it to him. It's a Revere Model 88 Cine Camera. Here's what I know: it was manufactured in Chicago sometime in the 1940's-1950's. The company that made these was sold to the company that became 3M in 1960. Fully wound it would take 2 minutes of video, and had settings for 8-32 FPS. Since it was meant for use by the 'everyman' it had guides for exposure mounted to the film loading door and around the lens. This particular example came in a leather case with a strap. (I love the case on this thing, and I love the weird brain pattern of the metal camera casing!) More pics (mostly of the case and such) in the full imgur gallery.
*hat tip to kleinbl00 for the correction. This being my first non-still image film camera, I didn't know there's a big difference between the term movie and video. TIL.
It's a MOVIE camera, not a video camera. "Video" is the electronic representation of a moving image through the modulation of a waveform. Your camera uses film. Technically it's an 8mm camera, the progenitor of Super 8, distinguished by outsized perfs that diminish the image capture area. Video recording would not effectively exist for another eight years, when Ampex released Quad for broadcast use.
I just checked Amazon to see if we could still get our hands on Double 8 film. Looks like we can't, at least, not on there. Which is good. Cause then we'd have to figure out how to develop it. Then show it. Then we'd be finding ourselves down some weird, hipster, camera rabbit hole. . . . I kinda wanna go down that rabbit hole.
Dude if you're going to go that way the direction to go is 16. 16 is still used by cinematic hipsters. It can be developed for... well, a lot, comparatively, but they're just about giving the filmstock away. This camera plus this film is three minutes of black and white footage. Twenty bucks to develop. Last time I shot Super 35 the film stock, shooting ends, plus developing was a little over a buck a second.
Standard 8mm cameras (pre super8) used a special roll of 16mm stock. You shoot, the camera capturing/exposing down one side of the roll, until the spool is done, , then you flip it over (no shit) and expose the other side of the roll - then when you developed it, they split the roll and splice it. Super8 came along and was way more user friendly - just a frigging cartridge you plopped in. I was getting Super8 developed at Walmart as late as 2001 or so for like... $5/roll, but I think those days are over. That Revere is a really good looking little number. I wouldn't necessarily waste money shooting through it - it's an expensive way to record ~6 minutes of life. EDIT: shit... now you've got me going... I love vintage home cinema stuff. Here's the camera I keep at my desk. It's not actually a nice camera per se, and I've never run anything through it - but I liked the way it looked and it was at a thrift store for nothing. I don't think I'll ever shoot through it - it's simply a little reminder to forget about my day job and go make movies. ALSO - http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Revere I love this stuff.
it's a pretty standard, japanese knockoff 8mm camera. It's a little special (but not at all unique) because it has a three lens setup. You just swivel the mount to choose which focal length you wanted (tele, wide, standard). Pretty standard on older film cameras (before zoom was a thing). and of course... history repeating itself:
First and Second Image Top Left Knob is the FPS selector, middle knob is the guide to tell you how many feet of film you have left, bottom thing winds up the spring that moves the film and shutter. Third Image Little guide that tells you what to set your aperture to for particular lighting conditions. Fourth Image More in depth aperture guide, manufacturer information. Story While Dala was outside taking pictures of this, one of the neighborhood kids was playing a baritone or a trombone or something. It drove our dog crazy, causing it to bark bloody murder into the wind. I also got bored watching her take pictures so I decided to follow a particular lizard around the garden. I was not paying attention to what I was doing and ran head first into the wind chimes. I am not a smart man.