ABSTRACT
You may sometimes find you want to slow down the action of a shot. That also involves using optical printing techniques. For example you might have some old film shot in the days of silent movies when filming speeds of around 16 frames per second prevailed. When projected at today’s sound film speed of 24 or 25 frames per second the people appearing in the scenes appear to walk unnaturally fast. You can reduce the jerkiness of this effect by making a duplicate master which is “stretch printed”. When a shot is stretch printed every second frame of original is printed twice. When the duplicate is shown at normal speed the original jerky movements are considerably smoothed out. The laboratories load an optical film printer with the old film and with new stock. The two pieces of film are run through the machine together and the old film is re-exposed frame by frame, normally exposing each shot twice, on the new roll of stock.
