A friend and fellow collector called me and asked about the Mitchell BNC rackover camera that I just acquired (serial #357). So this is the first of the collection I decided to take a look at. Surprisingly, this camera is in remarkably good condition. The camera turns over smoothly, there is little or no rust […]
Restoring Mitchell BNC Rackover #357 Read More »
This post comes a day later than our habit as we have spent much of the last week lifting, carrying, opening, and sorting a treasure trove of Mitchell camera equipment and lenses. (My back does not forgive me for this!) After several days of negotiation, I acquired a storage unit filled with absolutely wonderful movie
A Mitchell Camera Haul! Read More »
As we continued our search to find the proper name for the Mitchell geared head, which we still have not found, we came across this charming advertisement that Mitchell placed in “American Cinematographer” magazine in March 1931. In the ad, there are two camera operators, one using a geared head and one a friction head.
Trivia About the Mitchell Geared Head and Friction Head Read More »
An interesting question was posed recently to the committee I serve on at the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences asking about the history of geared pan/tilt heads. The questioner was only aware of the Worrall geared head, so many of us contributed our experiences with other styles and manufacturers of geared heads that
Mitchell Geared Heads Read More »
You know how you have that one thing that you are always meaning to do, but you just never get around to it? And the longer you put it off, the larger the thing gets? Well, tripods have become that thing for me. I keep meaning to make time to photograph them and list them
A Forest of Tripods! Read More »
Sadly, a former client passed away some time ago and his family asked if I would review his collection and rescue his movie-related gear. This was a wonderful life’s collection of audio, video, and motion picture film equipment. As my focus is only on motion picture film equipment, I dug out a Mitchell tripod, some
Rescue of a Garage Full of Stuff Read More »
Before we took some time off for the holidays, I was going through blue prints and photographs of some of the projects I have done in the past. What I was really hoping to share were some of the accessories that added functionality of the various cameras without modifying the cameras themselves. These records are
A Few Projects from the Past Read More »
As we wind down 2022 I wanted to revisit some of the highlights of the past year. Starting off the year, we were hard at work bringing the amazing Fox Cine Simplex camera and Freehead Camera Mount back to life: http://bit.ly/3hwC8WC After an in-depth restoration of the Dykstraflex camera crane and trojan head for the
2022: The Year in Review Read More »
The other day I was reminiscing with a new client about early motion control cinematography and I happened to mention one of the various versions of video taps that I built long ago. That spurred me to dig this out of storage for a nostalgic look. The concept behind this video tap was not to
A Look Back: Drop-In Video Tap for Mitchell Standard or GC Read More »
On Mitchell Standards and some early GCs, you could order an option that had a series of gear boxes that would do automatic fade-in/fade-out over a selected number of frames. Mitchell 46 at one time had this option, but the kind folks who tried to reflex it ripped out most of it and disposed of
Time for a little more work on Mitchell 46 Read More »
