Arri 16S/B

Type: 16mm · Motion Picture

I got this camera for an R&D project that uses film as a medium. I was looking for a 16mm camera I could modernize around, keeping the 1960s body and lenses and fitting modern parts to them.

That took a lot of measuring, some custom parts and app development. Everything worked out, and so far it is running great.

Camera & Lenses

Arriflex 16S/B, converted to 12V, with three Schneider primes in ARRI Standard mount, made between 1966 and 1968: Cinegon 16mm T2, Cine-Xenon 35mm and Cine-Xenon 50mm, both T2.2.

The lenses have an old 49.5mm front thread that no modern filter fits. I stepped all three up to 55mm, so every lens now takes the same ND set, a polarizer and its own hood.

Focus & Monitoring

I spent some time retrofitting a LiDAR based autofocus system, driven from the gimbal (DJI system).

On a gimbal you can't put your eye to the finder or leave it open, so I built a custom video tap onto the eyepiece. A small USB camera with a zoom lens sits in part of the original eyecup on a magnetic joint and feeds an iPad mini. I wrote a small app for it that draws the frame over the picture. On this camera the lit area in the finder is exactly the gate, 1.37:1, so what I frame is the full negative.

The whole camera flies on a DJI RS 4 Pro.

exposure.computer

The tap is part of exposure.computer, an exposure calculator for motion picture film that I first built for my own use. You tell it the light, and it gives you the T-stop to shoot at, which ND to fit, and the ISO to set on your meter. The answers come from your actual camera, lenses, filters and stock.

It has three pages: the can to plan (stock, filters, lenses), the slate to shoot (meter reading in, stop out, and a board you can film), and the tap to frame (the finder on a screen, with the gate drawn on it). It works offline and can be added to a phone or iPad home screen.

It is in beta. I'm pushing it forward to support more film based rigs, with plug and play support for USB video taps.