A film recorder...it's to transfer images... It's for taking images that are done in computers... and putting them on to... motion picture film. So they can use that film either in a theatre or... or they can store it in a vault for archiving. So, there's two kinds of film recorders. There's a laser film recorder. A laser film recorder uses laser beams, and it actually has... it has parts in it that move the laser beam on the film so that it draws the picture on the film with laser beams. It's not more expensive than the other kind. It's just different.
The other way is... the kind we've got, a CRT film recorder and that's... that's cathode ray tube... and it's like a picture tube inside the film recorder. And this one is a high... very high resolution... CRT... a very high resolution picture tube in it, so that it can display a really high resolution picture, and it displays the picture through red, green and blue filters, so you get your colours on the... on the... film.
So, to use the film recorder, the first thing you need to do is... load a roll of film into the film magazine. You do that in a lightproof tent, so you don't... you don't expose the film to any light. So, you load the film into the magazine, and then what you do is you load the magazine onto the camera that's attached to the film recorder.
So, once you've done that, you can thread the film through the film gate. And the film gate is the part of it that lets the light through onto the film, either from the laser beams or from the CRT. In our case, it's the CRT. And then the film goes through the sprockets... that pull... it's the little sprockets that pull the film... through... with the little holes that are on film. A sprocket is just a little pin on a wheel that... fits into the sprocket holes on 35 mm film. So that pulls the film through, so you go, move it through one frame at a time. So, you thread it through the sprockets, and then you load it into the take-up reel. Then you close up the camera, and close up the magazine. And then you... take your computer files that were made on computers. They'll be on a hard drive. You plug the hard drive into the computer that's attached to the film recorder, and the computer will feed the images to the film recorder one at a time. So, the computer feeds an image to the film recorder, the film recorder opens the film gate, images the picture onto the film, one at a time, and then the sprockets move to the next frame and the computer feeds the next image into it, and then the sprocket holes move it another frame and the computer feeds another image to it.
For most film recorders, it takes about 4 to 5 seconds to do a frame, and the reason it takes that long is because they're very high resolution. We use a very slow speed film, which means it takes a lot of light to expose it, and the reason we use a slow speed film is because it has a very fine grain structure in it.
So, once the whole roll of film is exposed, and you can have up to 15,000 frames on a roll of film, then we unload the film magazine, open the camera, uh, unload the camera, take the film magazine off the film recorder. Then we'll put it back in the lightproof tent, move it into a sealed film can so that no light gets into it, and then we ship that to the processing lab. Our processing lab is in Edmonton, and they have a motion picture film-processing machine. And then, once the film's developed, it's ready to make prints... or... make video copies... whatever they want to do with it.