I just sent some vintage 16mm marching contest reels from the 70s to be digitized.
The company said that they have video, but no audio, and they want to charge me a partial fee for the work. I'm wondering why they didn't stop, and tell me this after the first reel had not sound.
Can old 16mm reels lose their audio over time, from heat, cold, etc.? The company is telling me they found no audio track, but I'm reading that you can tell if there was originally a track by just looking at the film.
They shouldn't lose just audio in time - you can end up with parts of the reels that become too brittle to feed through a projector/reader. It's part of why I think preservation of these reels should be happening now, while it still can be done.
As far as some having no audio, that can actually be the case. I don’t think that's normal on 16mm, but some 8mm definitely is missing audio tracks. Depending on the camera used, they may have also not cared about audio for a football team, for instance, on plays. Because film cameras are so noisy as they run, it’s normal to use a separate reel-to-reel recorder for audio as a separate audio gaffer's job in the film industry back then. (That still continues in the modern form most of the time now) It's possible at the time they did that with those contests and you have another reel to reel recording somewhere? I've never seen those for anything than concert recordings in our piles.
I would look at the film when you get it back and hold it to the light. You can definitely see the waveform on film reels if it has it. I know we definitely have some from the 50s that didn't have audio. When I presented it to the community I added a recording of our modern band playing one of their concert marches.
Info from Legacy Box: Although most 16mm home movies were shot without sound, there is a way to tell if your film has audio. If your 16mm film has sprockets on both sides, it is a silent film. If it has sprockets on one side and a rust colored strip that runs along the edge of the reel, you have sound! This strip denotes the magnetic portion where the audio is stored and it will run alongside the reel. For the 16mm, the magnetic strip will be on the opposite side of the sprockets.
