I found a page that was into half scanned… I wonder if this was malicious compliance.
View attachment 7123702
That actually happens a lot whether it's filmed on a rotary camera or a planetary camera. The rotary cameras just jam a lot because the papers feed between rollers into the machine and pop out the other side, kind of like the auto-feed on a copy machine, except even more primitive and clunkier. They're initially very cheap to buy; the maintenance fees are outrageous though, and they're always fucking broken.
With the planetary camera, the operator moves the documents from one side, onto a platform that's marked with a target pattern, the operator pushes a button to take the picture, and changes the document for the next one as fast as they can. This looks to me more like a rotary camera issue, because usually with a planetary camera issue, you'd also get a ghostly picture of the operator's hand in the shot. The planetary camera costs a little more to buy initially, but it's 100% more reliable.
The real drawback of the planetary camera is that the human operator can't run it without looking at each and every page, even if only for a fraction of a second. With a rotary camera, each file is just dumped into the feeder, no need for the operator to really look at it.
Commercial microfilm factories would inspect the finished film for quality and order correction reshoots of page runs, a few pages before and a few after the error, then splice the corrected film in after the fact. Usually with a planetary camera, the operator would know that they fucked up the timing, so they would take a second image of the page immediately after the fucked-up one, and later the fucked-up page would be cut out. However, this is a government agency doing the filming, so it wouldn't surprise me that quality control was poor and correction films rare. It costs them money to do it right.
I worked at and eventually ran a microfilm factory for a while in the 90s, so that's how I know these things. Government entities were very resistant to giving up what was an antiquated system even back then, and converting to digital.