Anybody know how many 35mm frames there are per foot?

I'm trying to figure out a formula to see how long the original
Edison's "Frankenstein" was supposed to run.

It was cranked at 22 frames per second and was 975 feet long.

Fred "Ogle Eyed" Wiebel wrote:
Anybody know how many 35mm frames there are per foot?

I'm trying to figure out a formula to see how long the original
Edison's "Frankenstein" was supposed to run.

It was cranked at 22 frames per second and was 975 feet long.

16 frames per foot, give or take a hair depending on whether you're
measuring negative or positive film (they're designed with very slightly
different perforation pitch so that they can both fit on the same
sprocket wheel in the printer, with the negative running directly on the
sprocket wheel and the positive film on top of the negative).

So there are about 975*16=15600 frames; divide this by 22 to get
approximately 709 seconds, or about 11 minutes and 49 seconds.

Of course the 22 frames per second rate is the least accurate of all
these numbers (probably not controlled to anything better than a few
percent variation), so this could be off by several seconds either way.

-Neil Midkiff

It would surprise me very much if that was cranked as fast as 22 frames
per second, but it could have been. As you probably know, the vast
majority of projectors were hand cranked at the time and therefore the
speed was whatever the projectionist wanted it to be.

In the 1910s, most places that I know of were cranking at 16-20 frames
a second, but those numbers may vary.

I realize that this often creates a firestorm of controversy, because
the ideas change too... do you project it at the speed at which it was
photographed? It's possible that audiences expected things to be a
little accelerated in those days and thus you might crank it a bit
faster than the cameraman did.

Last year at *** (deleted) convention we ran a Lon Chaney picture at
about 18 frames and that was the speed at which it was shot. At that
speed it also played like a stiff corpse instead of a lively action
picture. The accompanist yelled at the projectionist (not me), and it
was an ugly situation. I stayed out of it. They both had a perfectly
defensible position.

The ultimate answer is, "Your mileage may vary," so it needs to be as
fast as you think it needs to be. This is the exact reason that most
magazines gave footage counts instead of run times.

Eric (who hopes this doesn't blow up into a full-scale war.)