Super 8 film stock.

I would imagine with modern laser technology and miniaturised electronics, super 8 optical sound might be more possible than in the 1970s when magnetic tape was basically your only choice. But nobody will be foolish enough to sink their fortune into such a system.

I liked shooting super 8 sound cartridges but that's been a pleasure lost to me since 2004 when I shot my last expired 200 foot cart.

Martin Baumgarten, who has more recently retired from selling cine film, was looking at striping film and loading it into sound cartridges circa 2000 but nothing came of it.

Yes, especially because now there is more fine-grained film stock. With optical sound sound quality also does depend on size of the grain - the smaller the grain the better the sound.
But today, as optical sound could be better than ever, no-one is interested any more.
On the other hand magnetic sound always was better than optical sound, so even if a millionaire starts to have a soft spot for optical sound on S8/Single-8 still the question was whether it would pay off in comparison to magnetic sound.
On the other hand optical sound on the film would never fade and it was cheaper as you don`t have to pre-stripe the film...

... i never shot with a sound camera. I once tried to do a sound movie (on the pre-striped Single-8 stock) with a portable tape-recorder (no sync), but i didn`t got the movie finished. It must have been great to have an all-in-one-system with lip-sync sound.

December 2024 I shot a full song at a gig, for a band who had noticed my 8mm amateur antics and wanted a music video shot on film.

I used my Elmo Super 110, probably my 2nd best super 8 camera but the most reliable. We pre-arranged a signal for me to start filming, and I shot at 18fps...ergo the band had three minutes to complete the song and I had no edits, just one three minute shot hoping to train the camera on a musician who was doing something interesting at the time.

The gig was professionally recorded and in March I got a rough mix of the audio, which I was able to successfully mate with the scanned film after some fiddling in NLE software.

So I guess technically speaking I shot a super 8 film with a soundtrack in December 2024. I've tried the whole cassette recorder and digital recorder thing but it's a big faff. I gave up post-striping film years ago too.

Anyway, here you go. Not a bad effort considering I am in no way a professional.


I really wish I'd had the chance to shoot music performances on super 8 sound cartridges.

Synchronization is remarkably good - i assume the camera to have a quartz for steady speed.
I had a portable tape recorder which was heavier than camera and tripod together... but as it was a home movie only it was pretty ok.

Harry Callahan said:

Synchronization is remarkably good - i assume the camera to have a quartz for steady speed.
I had a portable tape recorder which was heavier than camera and tripod together... but as it was a home movie only it was pretty ok.

Click to expand...

It's a stock Elmo Super 110, no quartz synch and it's certainly not been serviced since I bought it in 1986. Which tells you something about the quality of the better Elmo super 8 cameras. Mostly I just do this for fun though I did get paid a little for this job, enough to cover my costs.

Now that's really remarkable, steady speed for more than three minutes... unserviced. I am amazed.