Short movie clip of Richthofen

[Logan]

I was snooping around the Internet Archives looking for old aviation movies, but only found a short clip showing Manfred von Richthofen getting in his tripe and taking off.

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Wow, that's going to be popular here. Pretty amazing footage if it's authentic. Great takeoff too. What is the mechanic doing to the cylinders?

[Cigogne]

The film IS authentic and was taken by Anthony Fokker when he delivered the first FI triplane prototypes, FI.102/17 and FI.103/17 to JG.I. It has been copied many times and appears in nearly every WWI aviation documentary film. It is a great piece of footage.

[EdStevens]

The mechanic is priming the cylinders -- squirting a little raw petrol directly into each cylinder -- to help ensure that the engine will fire when the prop is swung.

Hello,
Really great. Two questions:
1) What is the plane at the very beginning of the film? It look like DVII!
2) What is the hand movement of MvR sitting in the cockpit to his guns?
Honza

Originally Posted by Honza

Hello,
Really great. Two questions:
1) What is the plane at the very beginning of the film? It look like DVII!

Hello friend from south! (Dzień dobry!)
Yes, I'm sure that it's D-VII. Look at the tail-plane.

Peteroz

[jumpinjan]

Back in the late '60s they were selling 8mm 50foot rolls a various WWI films and I bought an 8mm movie of this MVR clip. I also have the Albatros factory film. I found a few of these 8mm films on Ebay and they sold pretty high. I was surprised. I would like to get mine transcribed to video, and I have been wanting to do that for years & years.

Ya! Hello friend from North! (Dobrý den)
But how is it possible? DVII in 1917?
Honza

[Logan]

jumpinjan,

I often convert 8mm to video at work. There are two ways of doing it: scan each frame, or record the film playing. The first way makes a higher quality video, but can end up being expensive, although I think the price has been gradually going down. Do a google search for film video conversion and you should come up with a few sites. They will often charge you a minimum of 600 feet at about $.30 USD/foot, which probably doesn't include the cost of putting it on DVD or mini-dv. They will offer "restoration services" as well, but what they do actually decreases the amount of data in the video by compressing the exposure range and by using sharpening filters like in Photoshop. What I do is simply play it on the projector at a proper speed and record it with a mini-dv camera and convert it to any video format. It usually looks fine for standard definition video and is cheap, but sometimes it will flicker a bit more due to small differences in frame rates between the film and video. I'll be willing to do it at material cost if I can add the movies to the Internet Archives (if they're not there already), Google Video, and Creative Commons for others to look at.

[ww1 ace]

From what I know, this is the film of the Red Baron's last takeoff. The hand movements to me look like he is putting a shell in the chambers of his guns.