New arrivals: From the Rocco Gioffre collection is a small cache of wonderful items, including some fascinating ancient Cinema Engineering relics I built long ago. In the back row you see a single frame animation motor with a motion control interface box, an RCA friction head with pan handle, some Baltar lenses, some Cooke Speed Panchro lenses, and a 103mm Kodak Printing Ektar. In the front row, a Ronford Baker aluminum tripod with Panavision shipping case, and a wooden Mitchell Glendale tall boy tripod. Everything needs to be cleaned and evaluated before it can be added to our website.
The single frame animation motor comes from the days when most of us used Slo-Syn AC synchronous motors as a cheap and efficient way to make single frame animation motors. As motion control came into our lives, we wanted to be able to use our existing AC synchronous motors with the motion control systems. So, I built this little box that has a DC stepper motor and cable to go to the computer, along with the capacitor and wiring to run the AC motor. The DC motor in the box turns a cam to activate a set of micro switches that shoot one frame at the programmed time during the shot. This box could be used with any of our AC synchronous motors for animation, or anything else we were working on. It was a wonderful surprise to see that this relic is still around.