When working in a dark room years ago with 35mm film I always took the film completely out of its canister which means that you have about 5' / 1.5m of film trying to drop itself on the floor or anything else that can scratch it.
On YouTube last night I saw James Stephenson
, in a tank loading demo, where he left the film in the canister and only pulled short lengths out as he wound it onto the tank spiral and then cut it off from the mouth of the canister when fully loaded onto the reel. He suggests using blunt nosed scissors so you don't accidentally poke a hole in the changing bag.
I have been looking at the Agfa Rondinax Daylight Loading Tanks and others in a series of YouTube videos mostly by Malcom Peaker which follow on from the link I previously posted, there seem to have been quite a number of alternative makes to the Agfa, including the inevitable Russian Copy called, naturally, Sputnik.
The one that actually intrigued me was Agfa's Rondax which proceeded the Rondinax, it had no take up reel, the film was just pulled into the tank and wound onto itself, in development you just wound the film backwards and forwards onto itself the whole time. Peaker says that there were no scratches on the film and development worked properly. I was wondering if it was the surface tension of the water which kept the film from sticking together and allowed development to proceed.
Jobo also made one, the 2400, but it seemed to me that getting the film to start loading was quite fiddly.
The thing about all these tanks is that they required continuous agitation which means that you may have to modify your usual process to allow for this.
The "Massive Dev Chart" from digitaltruth.com gives development times and methods for practically every Film and Developer combination known to the human race, the chart is available to download in print form and there is a useful app one can purchase for both iOS and Android, the explanatory video makes it seem intuitive to operate, even for me.
CD