Or at any rate, the boxes. A pal of mine who lives in Brooklyn recently shipped this back to me. It’s been sitting in his closet for several years now, since the last time I was able to watch it. I had to go to New York to find a working 6-plate flatbed editing table I could use. Which speaks to just how quickly this technology has been abandoned. As a college student, Columbia had four or five machines that were so much in demand they had to be booked several days in advance; now, if memory serves, they have a single, decrepit 4-plate.

So, what is a 6-plate flatbed? Basically, you have 3 “tracks” of media running in sync, with a feed reel and a takeup reel for each (thus, 6 plates). The tracks consist of 1 picture track, and 2 soundtracks. That’s right, only 2 tracks of sound. In my 16mm editing scheme that generally meant location sound on track A and sound effects/music/narration on track B. Of course, moving over to digital editing, I can basically have as many soundtracks as I want. And picture tracks too for that matter.

But the reason I need this rough cut now is to recover some missing bits of sound. Since the location sound is pretty much all on the A rolls, I’m thinking of digitizing all the A rolls. You never know what else might be missing that you don’t even yet know is missing.