P3D How to salvage mounted V-M film

["Ivester, Paul" <ivestep@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

How to salvage a mounted roll of View-Master film.

Some of you may have experienced that sinking feeling upon opening 
that little yellow box, and instead of finding a tightly wound 
roll of developed film, discovered that our friends at Qualex have 
mounted your View-Master film in standard 2X2 inch mounts, 4 
frames to a mount, disregarding the "Do Not Mount - Return Uncut"  
messages written on the front and back of the envelope, as well as 
on the film cassette.  I have previously only had my "Do not 
mount" request ignored on full frame transparencies and on Realist 
format (which were returned in stereo mounts, and still needed to 
remounted for reasons of accuracy).

The majority of the pairs on this V-M roll could not be reshot, so 
I decided to try to salvage them.  I peeled open the mounts and 
verified that all the cuts were between frames.  I decided to try 
to splice the roll back together.  I did this with pre-perforated 
film splicing tape, which I had trimmed so that I used only the 
perforation portion.  I taped the film strip back together with 
the tape on the perforation area only, and no tape on the images.  
I spliced on one side (both edges) of the film only in order to 
conserve tape.  When I finished I was able to punch out the film 
chips in the normal manner with the V-M film cutter.  In this way 
I was able to salvage the entire roll.

Paul Ivester
Seattle, WA USA

mailto:ivestep@xxxxxxxxxxx




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