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A shot is the film exposed from the time the camera is started to the time it is stopped. Shot and Scene are interchangeable terms.
This term is often a little confusing because it does not mean a camera that is itself silent, and therefore usable for sync sound, but it means a noisy, unsilent camera, usable only for shooting silent, M.O.S. scenes.
18 frames per second. A slightly archaic notion left over from the time when 16mm was used exclusively for home movies. It is not always that easy to find a projector that will project at 18 frames per second and so films shot at silent speed will often be speeded up slightly, whether the filmmaker intended this of not.
16mm film with a row of perforations along one edge. On the film can this will be indicated by 1R appearing on the label.
In 35mm a reel is 1,000 feet of film (or usually a little less).
Single System refers to recording, editing or projecting sound and picture together on the same piece of film. Cameras used for tv news would record the sound on a magnetic stripe as well as photograph the picture. Also super-8 sound. Single system has some distinct editorial disadvantages, hence the more common use of Double System for shooting and editing.
An untimed black and white dupe print of your workprint, used for projection in a sound mix. A slop print is used because splices can jump and cause the film to go out of sync, and a slop print will have no splices.
A rather unattractive sounding name for Filler.
A type of light with a built-in surface to act as a bounce card, providing soft, indirect light on the subject.
Basically just a quilted mover’s blanket. Often it is thrown over the camera (and the camera operator) to cut down on camera noise, as a sort of improvised Barney.
see Filler.
A playback head for reading mag stock, mounted on a bracket that snaps onto a synchronizer. It is pugged into the squawk box.
24 frames per second. The normal speed for filming and projecting.
A metal cylinder with a flat plate at one end and a hole through the center, used between reels on the spindle of a rewind to space out the reels the same distance as the gangs of a synchronizer. Although it is a little shorter, in a pinch you can use cores as spacers.