I waiting for my bitches to get home. Let them do it.

Thanks, Ben. Yep, we decided to try reusing a batch of caffenol too and it seemed to work fine. Also - because we ran out of Vitamin C powder we tried out a couple of Tesco 1000mg Vit C tablets instead and it worked fine for some reason, even though it's about a 10th of the amount the recipe asks for :-)

cool, that's good to know. I'm almost out of Vitamin C myself.

We have a batch of K40 Sound film but don't yet have a sound camera or projector. When you shot your Ginger Baker video did you just process the film like normal and the sound played ok once you projected? - Roger & Sarahjane

Yes, I just shot and developed in Caffenol as usual and the sound came through fine. However as you can see, dark Jazz clubs are not the best conditions to get an exposure on 20 year old Kodachrome 40! I also shot some of that roll in daylight (sunny) and it came out great. How much K40 do you have? Maybe we can do a trade-off? I lend you my sound camera in exchange for a roll.

Oh, cool. We'll probably have bought a sound camera before we get down to London again but we're happy to send you a K40 Sound cartridge in the interests of scientific research. I think most of them expired in the late 1970s. What's the address to send it?

Cool - it's great fun!

Hey I've never developed any kind of film before. I think I'm okay with the chemical side of things but reading this comment, I realised I don't fully understand how to use a Paterson reel and which size I need to buy to fit 50ft of Kodachrome 40 in! Can you recommend which size would be roomy enough and then also just confirm that you wrap the film around the black middle pole bit of the tank rather than using the white "reels". Sorry I'm totally new at processing film so I just want to make sure I have the basics down! Any advice you have to offer would be greatly appreciated :) Thanks

@@jacksontuchscherer5332 Hi, Jackson. Sorry we missed your comment (which was apparently over a year ago!). Hope you managed to get it all sorted out. Personally we use a really big Paterson tank and we curl the film loosely around the black pole so that hopefully the chemicals are distributed fairly evenly.

Thanks very much, Daniel. Glad you liked the video. It's a lot of fun trying this out and quite a buzz when you actually see an image appear on stock that expired decades ago.

Thanks for the question, TEJ Food. You would really need to use some kind of developing tank (unless you have access to a dark room - not exactly sure how well that would work as we've never tried that). We use a pretty big Patterson tank but you could use a smaller one, which would be cheaper to buy. For the best result, many people rave about the Lomo Tank - a vintage bakelite spiral tank produced in the Soviet Bloc - which you can pick up on eBay.

Thanks, Gerry. No - Hi8 is a video format not film. You need to go totally old-school to do this and buy a Super 8 camera and some filmstock. There are loads of guides on how to pick cameras and film on eBay. And once you're ready to try out home processing, the four Caffenol guides on Zero Budget Film School's KZfaq page are a good place to start. xx

Is ther ways of duplicateing old 8mm film on New Stock Super8mm.. not Convert to DVD..

Hi, Gerry - you can use an old camera to shoot with new Super 8 filmstock (eg - TRI-X black & white reversal). You'll still need to get it processed and then it's up to you whether you want it converted to a digital format such as DVD. Once reversal film is processed you can project it straight through a Super 8 projector if you want to, or learn how to edit in the old fashioned way, using splices. Unfortunately, using Caffenol only produces a black & white negative. If you're using negative film in a projector it will show as a negative image unless you get somebody to create a positive print for you. That's why it's often a good idea to get a digital telecine copy of your film which you can bring into the computer to create positive images which you can then edit in editing software such as FinalCut.

Wow - how silly can you get? What knowledge - that you cannot dunk Kodachrome film in coffee and expect to get a useful image? Useful? If you are one of the half dozen people who owns an exposed roll of Kodachrome and wants to "process" it instead of decorating a display with it, have at it, but be original: use" use fresh pee; orange juice, burbon - it's all the same result. Fool.

@@randallstewart175 What is wrong with you? Let people have fun with their science projects would ya? Nobody is expecting a perfect clean image, the fun is the science experiment. Some people do this because they enjoy it, imagine that?!!?

Paterson developing tank i quess

Hi, Rony. Sorry about the delay replying. You could try processing them in Caffenol as long as you're happy that the results might be quite LoFi and what should have been a colour film will end up as a black & white negative. Also, we won't lie, we've had a few films that haven't come out at all - no frames, just totally black: possibly because the film stock was too old and damaged, or not stored properly in a fridge, or maybe something went wrong in the processing. The commercial labs can't process Kodachrome 40 properly any more (the last full colour developing was done in 2011) so I think they will also only be able to give you a black & white print but they might have ways of developing in a more consistent, higher quality. They also should be able to make you an HD quality digital telecine copy on DVD or USB etc. Hope that helps you decide what to do, Rony.

@@AvantKinema Ok thanks for the reply . I,ll take the change and try to develop in Caffenol , I will start with one and see what happens . Will let you know if it worked or not !

@@ronycoosemans4199 Cool. Good luck with it, Rony.

Hi, Lewi - if you put in 1ml of stop bath you'd need to put in 19mls of water.

Hi, Thomas - Caffenol only produces a B&W negative, as far as we know.

When will it be refined to work with colour film?

No idea, Thomas. Might be better using something like C-41?

Hi, @Thane Mac Kodachrome 40 used to be colour film, but the chemicals to process it in colour are no longer available. It can now only be processed as a B&W negative. The last batch of colour-processed K40 was at Dwayne's Photo Lab in 2011: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne%27s_Photo

Sounds pretty boring to us, that, Igaluit. We like to experiment and try to make something out of old stock that other folk have discarded. If you want the easy route, you could always just stick with digital? Cheers.

I have nothing against experimenting, but the result in this case was just a monochrome-greenish film. But, if you have the time, all the power to you. I don't know what caffenol would do with the current film stock - I guess it's Ektachrome. I've heard of caffenol being used on B&W, but first I've seen it on chromes. If you're rescuing old film, that's another story. Caffenol might look great on black and white movie film.

Yeah, I think Caffenol is always used for BW negatives (or Reversal film if you add extra processes eg - hydrogen peroxide + lime juice). So people are going into using up old expired colour filmstocks knowing that they will get monochrome results, since labs stopped processing K40 in 2011. So, although the results are very LoFi, it's a cool way of doing something with stock that's been abandoned. We've tried it with some modern filmstock too - Kodak TRI-X - and you can get some pretty nice results with that.

Yeah, I guess that's the only way to rescue the film stock. It would give exactly the same result with Ektachrome, since it's colour - don't know what I was thinking.

Yeah, I reckon it would be worth trying out a C41 home processing kit on Ektachrome to see what kind of colour you get out of it. It's the Kodachrome that is totally obsolete as far as I know because it required very specific developing chemicals which are no longer available.

We've only had that happen once, at a workshop we were running, and we never got to the root of what went wrong. We had a participant using an AGFA Family camera which had previously always worked fine. She followed the caffenol process correctly, along with everybody else. The only thing I could think of was that because she had been using the AGFA's "still image" button, that maybe caused some kind of problem. Have you any way of testing that the camera definitely works? The blackness could be remjet which should rub away under water but it's unlikely you would have no images / frames appear whatsoever. Or is light getting into the cartridges too early somehow?

No way of testing the camera, but it happened with two different cameras, not sure what the chances of that are. I've seen a huge variety of developing times/caffenol variations on the web, if I was under or over developing, would I still get some kind of an image?

Yes, under or over developing you should get some kind of image, I would think, not just complete blackness. It can sometimes look very dark but, when you shine a light through the film, you can see that there's actually something there in the frames. By the way - don't throw the "dud" films away - you can always experiment with scratching and colouring them...

Good idea, and thanks for your help. I'll try to shoot a roll outdoors this time. Even though I had a hard key light on my subject, maybe it just wasn't enough light for film that's decades old. I was also measuring ingredients with teaspoons instead of a scale, so I'll use a scale this time as well.

Definitely worth another shot, Jb.

Hi, Dale. You need to make a digital video copy of the processed film. The easiest way to do this (unless you have access to a telecine analogue-to-digital convertor machine) is to project the film onto a screen and use a camcorder/DSLR/tablet or phone to make a video copy. Import the digitized footage into your computer and use your movie editing software (e.g iMovie, FinalCut etc) to turn the negative footage into a positive. If you can try out the "negative" or "x-ray" special effect in your movie editing software that should do the trick.

Thanks. The only problem I'm having is finding an easy to use software that can reverse the negative video I made of the Caffenol developed film. I know there must be one out there. Hopefully even free.

If you have an Apple product, iMac or iPad, you should get iMovie software free with that. It's not too difficult to learn how to use. I'm not sure about PCs but I'm sure there'll be some cheap or free Windows editing software out there that you can use to reverse the negative video, if you search on Google for "free easy use movie editing softwear windows" or something like that.

Yes

Hi, TRoDW. Kodachrome colour developing involved specific chemicals and processes and, as far as I know, there haven't been any labs who can do it since 2011. So, don't think you'll get colour with C-41 but it might be worth trying it out anyway as an experiment to see what you do get?

AvantKinema-DIY Yeah I've always wondered. Maybe someone's tried it.

AvantKinema-DIY Yeah I've always wondered. Maybe someone's tried it.

Yeah, I'm sure somebody will have tried it. We tried out C-41 on some other old Super 8 stock and did manage to get some colour. Can't remember if it was an Ektachrome cartridge.

C-41 Developer would create a black and white image. Unfortunately, Kodachrome didn't rely on dye coupling, which is the mechanism that creates the colour image in the C-41 process. Also the bleach (or Blix) in the C-41 process would remove the silver image after development, which would destroy the image. If you wanted to experiment with using a C-41 developer then I would use a standard Fixing solution (the same used for processing black and white images).

Thanks, Rolla. :-) Hadn't heard of using Ilfesol 3 for Super 8 but just found this clip of TRI-X developed that way. If you give it a go, let us know how it turns out... kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n8l3pcSkt5zYkas.html

Yes that would work. Basically you can use any black and white film developer.

What does "For for it" mean? Just wasted 6 minutes of our lives pondering that.