Motion-picture technology, the means for the production and showing of motion pictures. It includes not only the motion-picture camera and projector but also such technologies as those involved in recording sound, in editing both picture and sound, in creating special effects, and in producing animation.
Motion-picture technology is a curious blend of the old and the new. In one piece of equipment state-of-the-art digital electronics may be working in tandem with a mechanical system invented in 1895. Furthermore, the technology of motion pictures is based not only on the prior invention of still photography but also on a combination of several more or less independent technologies; that is, camera and projector design, film manufacture and processing, sound recording and reproduction, and lighting and light measurement.
Telecine, the recording on videotape of films originally produced for the cinema, is an important activity in television broadcasting, in the videotape rental market, and even in the home-movie market. In this technique the film is projected onto an image sensor for conversion…
Motion-picture photography is based on the phenomenon that the human brain will perceive an illusion of continuous movement from a succession of still images exposed at a rate above 15 frames per second. Although posed sequential pictures had been taken as early as 1860, successive photography of actual movement was not achieved until 1877, when Eadweard Muybridge used 12 equally spaced cameras to demonstrate that at some time all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground at once. In 1877–78 an associate of Muybridge devised a system of magnetic releases to trigger an expanded battery of 24 cameras.
The Muybridge pictures were widely published in still form. They were also made up as strips for the popular parlour toy the zoetrope “wheel of life,” a rotating drum that induced an illusion of movement from drawn or painted pictures. Meanwhile, Émile Reynaud in France was projecting sequences of drawn pictures onto a screen using his Praxinoscope, in which revolving mirrors and an oil-lamp “magic lantern” were applied to a zoetrope-like drum, and by 1880 Muybridge was similarly projecting enlarged, illuminated views of his motion photographs using the Zoöpraxiscope, an adaptation of the zoetrope.
Although a contemporary observer of Muybridge’s demonstration claimed to have seen “living, moving animals,” such devices lacked several essentials of true motion pictures. The first was a mechanism to enable sequence photographs to be taken within a single camera at regular, rapid intervals, and the second was a medium capable of storing images for more than the second or so of movement possible from drums, wheels, or disks.
A motion-picture camera must be able to advance the medium rapidly enough to permit at least 16 separate exposures per second as well as bring each frame to a full stop to record a sharp image. The principal technology that creates this intermittent movement is the Geneva watch movement, in which a four-slotted star wheel, or “Maltese cross,” converts the tension of the mainspring to the ticking of toothed gears. In 1882 Étienne-Jules Marey employed a similar “clockwork train” intermittent movement in a photographic “gun” used to “shoot” birds in flight. Twelve shots per second could be recorded onto a circular glass plate. Marey subsequently increased the frame rate, although for no more than about 30 images, and employed strips of sensitized paper (1887) and paper-backed celluloid (1889) instead of the fragile, bulky glass. The transparent material trade-named celluloid was first manufactured commercially in 1872. It was derived from collodion, that is, nitrocellulose (gun cotton) dissolved in alcohol and dried. John Carbutt manufactured the first commercially successful celluloid photographic film in 1888, but it was too stiff for convenient use. By 1889 the George Eastman company had developed a roll film of celluloid coated with photographic emulsion for use in its Kodak still camera. This sturdy, flexible medium could transport a rapid succession of numerous images and was eventually adapted for motion pictures.
Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of the motion picture in 1889. The claim is disputable, however, specifically because Edison’s motion-picture operations were entrusted to an assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, and generally because there are several plausible pre-Edison claimants in England and France. Indeed, a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1902 concluded that Edison had not invented the motion picture but had only combined the discoveries of others. His systems are important, nevertheless, because they prevailed commercially. The heart of Edison’s patent claim was the intermittent movement provided by a Maltese cross synchronized with a shutter. The October 1892 version of Edison’s Kinetograph camera employed the format essentially still in use today. The film, made by Eastman according to Edison’s specifications, was 35 millimetres (mm) in width. Two rows of sprocket holes, each with four holes per frame, ran the length of the film and were used to advance it. The image was 1 inch wide by 3/4 inch high.
At first Edison’s motion pictures were not projected. One viewer at a time could watch a film by looking through the eyepiece of a peep-show cabinet known as the Kinetoscope. This device was mechanically derived from the zoetrope in that the film was advanced by continuous movement, and action was “stopped” by a very brief exposure. In the zoetrope, a slit opposite the picture produced a stroboscopic effect; in the Kinetoscope the film traveled at the rate of 40 frames per second, and a slit in a 10-inch-diameter rotating shutter wheel afforded an exposure of 6,000 second. Illumination was provided by an electric bulb positioned directly beneath the film. The film ran over spools. Its ends were spliced together to form a continuous loop, which was initially 25 to 30 feet long but later was lengthened to almost 50 feet. A direct-current motor powered by an Edison storage battery moved the film at a uniform rate.
The Kinetoscope launched the motion-picture industry, but its technical limitations made it unsuitable for projection. Films may run continuously when a great deal of light is not crucial, but a bright, enlarged picture requires that each frame be arrested and exposed intermittently as in the camera. The adaptation of the camera mechanism to projection seems obvious in retrospect but was frustrated in the United States by Dickson’s establishment of a frame rate well above that necessary for the perception of continuous motion.
After the Kinetoscope was introduced in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière produced a combination camera/projector, first demonstrated publicly in 1895 and called the cinématographe. The device used a triangular “eccentric” (intermittent) movement connected to a claw to engage the sprocket holes. As the film was stationary in the aperture for two-thirds of each cycle, the speed of 16 frames per second allowed an exposure of 1/25 second. At this slower rate audiences could actually see the shutter blade crossing the screen, producing a “flicker” that had been absent from Edison’s pictures. On the other hand, the hand-cranked cinématographe weighed less than 20 pounds (Edison’s camera weighed 100 times as much). The Lumière units could therefore travel the world to shoot and screen their footage. The first American projectors employing intermittent movement were devised by Thomas Armat in 1895 with a Pitman arm or “beater” movement taken from a French camera of 1893. The following year Armat agreed to allow Edison to produce the projectors in quantity and to market them as Edison Vitascopes. In 1897 Armat patented the first projector with four-slot star and cam (as in the Edison camera).
One limitation of early motion-picture filming was the tearing of sprocket holes. The eventual solution to this problem was the addition to the film path of a slack-forming loop that restrained the inertia of the take-up reel. When this so-called Latham loop was applied to cameras and projectors with intermittent movement, the growth and shrinkage of the loops on either side of the shutter adjusted for the disparity between the stop-and-go motion at the aperture and the continuous movement of the reels.
When the art of projection was established, the importance of a bright screen picture was appreciated. Illumination was provided by carbon arc lamps, although flasks of ether and sticks of unslaked calcium (“limelight”) were used for brief runs.
Introduction of sound
The popularity of the motion picture inspired many inventors to seek a method of reproducing accompanying sound. Two processes were involved: recording and reproducing. Further, the sound reproduction had to be presented in an auditorium and had to be quite good. This could not be achieved without a good amplifier of electrical signals. In 1907 Lee De Forest invented the Audion, a three-element vacuum tube, which provided the basis in the early 1920s for a feasible amplifier that produced an undistorted sound of sufficient loudness.
Next came the problem of synchronization of the sound with the picture. A major difficulty turned out to be the securing of constant speed in both the recorder and reproducer. Many ingenious ideas were tried. In 1918 in Germany, the use of a modulated glow lamp in photographically recording sound and a photocell for reproduction were studied. In Denmark in 1923, an oscillograph light modulator and selenium-cell reproducer were developed. De Forest tried a gas-filled glow discharge operated by a telephone transmitter to record a synchronized sound track on the film. For loudspeakers he experimented with a variety of devices but finally chose the speaker with horn. The operating signal was obtained from a light shining through the film sound track and detected by a light-sensitive device (photocell). These were used in a system called Phonofilm, which was tried experimentally in a number of theatres. In 1927 the Fox Film Corporation utilized some of these principles in the showing of Fox Movietone News.
Meanwhile, the Western Electric Company laboratories in the United States had been making extensive studies on the nature of speech and other sounds and on techniques for recording and reproducing such sounds. They experimented with recording on a phonograph disc and developed a 16-inch (40.6-centimetre) disc rotated at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute; they improved loudspeakers, introduced the moving-coil type of speaker, and generally improved the entire electronic amplification system. The Warner Bros. movie studio became interested in all these developments and formed the Vitaphone Corporation to market the complete system.
Warner Bros. premiered Vitaphone in 1926 with a program featuring short musical performances and a full-length picture, Don Juan, which had synchronized music and effects but no speech. In 1927 it brought out The Jazz Singer, which was essentially a silent picture with Vitaphone score and sporadic episodes of synchronized singing and speech. Warners presented the first “100-percent talkie,” The Lights of New York, in 1928.
Although the Vitaphone system offered fidelity superior to sound-on-film systems at this stage, it became clear that recording on film would be much more convenient. Among other disadvantages, it was extremely difficult with the wax discs to shoot outdoors or to edit sound. By 1931 Warner Bros. ceased production of sound-on-disc and adopted the sound-on-film option preferred by the other studios.
Sound-on-film, a system that in various guises had enjoyed several periods of popularity, underwent constant improvements in the 1910s and 1920s. Although a sound track on the picture negative was used for Movietone News, Fox’s dramatic productions used a separate sound film on fine-grain print stock that could be edited apart from the picture yet in synchronism with it. One serious problem of sound-on-film systems had been the distortion of the signal introduced by the glow lamp when recording the sound track on film. The Western Electric Company devised a “double-string” light valve. A wire was looped around a post and parallel to itself. When speech current was applied to the wire in a magnetic field, the wire vibrated toward and away from itself according to the applied electrical waveform. A steady beam of white light shining through the loop was modulated in intensity by the varying gap between the wires; the modulated beam was photographed while masked by a slit perpendicular to the edge of the film. The resulting sound track appeared as darker or fainter parallel lines on the edge of the film. Known as the variable density system, this method of optically recording sound was originally used by all but one of the major Hollywood studios.
The Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation (RKO) was created in 1928 to showcase the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Photophone system of variable area recording. With this system, the sound recording was modulated by a rotating mirror and the slit was parallel to the edge of the film; reproduction employed the perpendicular slit of the variable density sound track. Minor problems of incompatibility between recording and reproduction were solved in late 1928 when the track was narrowed down to stay safely within the area scanned by the beam. Identical side-by-side tracks were employed to compensate for lateral misalignment. Initially inferior in quality, the variable area system gradually drew even with the quality of the density system and supplanted it altogether in the 1950s.
Whereas there was wide variation in the speed at which silent films were photographed and projected, sound necessitated standardization of the frame rate. In 1927 the speed was standardized at 24 frames per second, or 90 feet per minute for 35-mm film.
The development of sound technology in the first years of talking pictures focused on two areas. One involved the development of blimped cameras, directional microphones, microphone booms, and quieter lights, so that sound could be recorded more cleanly at the time of shooting. The other technologies involved the ability to add, edit, and mix sound separately from the time the picture was recorded.Pierre Mertz Elisabeth Weis Stephen G. Handzo
Introduction of colour
From their earliest days, silent films could be coloured using nonphotographic methods. One means was to hand-colour frames individually. Another method made it possible to use monochrome sections for mood (e.g., blue for night scenes or red for passionate sequences). Monochrome stock was created by “tinting” the film base or “toning” the emulsion (by bathing the film in chemical salts).
The photography of colour was theorized decades before it was developed for motion pictures. In 1855 the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell argued that a full-colour photographic record of a scene could be made by filming three separate black-and-white negatives through filters coloured, respectively, red, green, and blue, the three primary colours. When converted to positives, the transparent exposed areas of the three films could pass light through the appropriate filter to produce three images, one red, one green, and one blue. Superimposing the three images would “rebuild” the image in its original colours.
In 1868 Louis Ducos du Hauron identified the additive and subtractive systems of colour. Both systems originate as red, green, and blue negative records. The difference occurs in the positive image, which may be composited from either the additive or subtractive primaries. The subtractive primaries—cyan, magenta, and yellow—are the complements of the additive primaries and can be obtained by subtracting, respectively, red, green, and blue from white. (Subtracting all three additive primaries yields black; adding all three yields white.)
In motion-picture prints, overlapping dye layers in the three subtractive primaries are simultaneously present on a clear, transparent base, and the image is projected with an exposure of white light. The dark areas of the cyan layer subtract all red colour, permitting only cyan (the mixture of blue and green) to pass through; the transparent areas pass all the white light. The magenta and yellow layers act similarly, and the original colour image is reproduced. The fineness of resolution is limited only by the structure of photographic grain or dye globules.
The first film colour systems were additive, but they were confronted by insurmountable limitations. In an additive system, the three colour records remain discrete and meet only as light rays on the screen. The best picture results when a separate film is made for each colour; however, each colour can occupy alternating frames or small, alternating portions of each frame of a single film. (A contemporary example of additive colour can be seen in projection television, in which red, green, and blue lenses converge to produce an image so enlarged that the separate colour areas, or dots, become discernible.)
The best known of the early additive processes was Kinemacolor (1906), which, for manageability, reduced the three colour records to two: red-orange and blue-green. A single black-and-white film was photographed and projected at 32 frames per second (twice the normal silent speed) through a rotating colour filter. The two colour records occupied alternate frames and were integrated by the retention characteristic of the human eye. As there were no separate red-orange and blue-green records for each image, displacement from frame to frame was visible during rapid movement, so that a horse might appear to have two tails. Inventors tried to increase the film speed, reduce the frame size, or combine two films with mirrored prisms, but additive systems continued to be plagued by excessive film consumption, poor resolution, loss of light, and registration problems.
The first subtractive process employing a single film strip in an ordinary projector without filters was Prizma Color in 1919. (Prizma Color had been introduced as an additive process but was soon revised.) The basis was an ingenious “duplitized” film with emulsion on both sides. One side was toned red-orange and the other blue-green. The stock long outlasted the Prizma company and was in use as late as the early 1950s in such low-cost systems as Cinecolor.
Similar enough to provoke litigation was an early (1922) process by Technicolor in which separate red and green films were cemented back-to-back, resulting in a thick and stiff print that scratched easily. Although only four two-colour Technicolor features were produced by the end of the silent era, Technicolor sequences were a highlight of several big-budget pictures in the mid-to-late 1920s, including The Phantom of the Opera (1923–25) and Ben Hur (1925). Technicolor devised the first of its dye-transfer, or imbibition, processes in 1928. Red and green dye images were printed onto the same side of clear film containing a black silver sound track.
When Technicolor’s appeal seemed on the wane, it devised a greatly improved three-register process (1932). The perfected Technicolor system used a prism/mirror beam-splitter behind a single lens to record the red, green, and blue components of each image on three strips of black-and-white film. Approximately one-third of the light was transmitted to the film behind a green filter in direct path of the lens; the film was sensitized to green light by special dyes. A partially silvered mirror (initially flecked with gold) directed the remainder of the light through a magenta (red plus blue) filter to a bi-pack of orthochromatic and panchromatic films with their emulsion surfaces in contact. The orthochromatic film became the blue record. As it was insensitive to red light, the orthochromatic film passed the red rays to the panchromatic film. A 1938 improvement added red-orange dye to the orthochromatic film so that only red light reached the panchromatic layer. In 1941 Monopack Technicolor was introduced. This was a three-layer film from which separation negatives were made for the Technicolor dye-transfer printing process.
Using the dye-transfer method, it was necessary to make gelatin positives that contained the image in relief. Dye filled the recesses while the higher areas remained dry. Each gelatin matrix thus imprinted its complement onto the film base. As in the two-colour process, a black silver sound track was printed first on clear film. When magnetic sound became popular, the oxide strips were embossed after printing. Technicolor gave excellent results but was very expensive.
In 1936 Germany produced Agfacolor, a single-strip, three-layer negative film and accompanying print stock. After World War II Agfacolor appeared as Sovcolor in the Eastern bloc and as Anscocolor in the United States, where it was initially used for amateur filmmaking. The first serious rival to Technicolor was the single-strip Eastmancolor negative, which was introduced in 1952 by the Eastman Kodak Company but was often credited under a studio trademark (e.g., Warnercolor). Eastmancolor did not require special camera or processing equipment and was cheaper than Technicolor. Producers naturally preferred the less expensive Eastmancolor, especially since they had, in response to the perceived threat of television, increased production of colour films. (After the 1960s black-and-white films were so rare that they cost more to print than colour films.) The 1950s vogue for CinemaScope and three-dimensional productions, both incompatible with the Technicolor camera, also hastened the demise of Technicolor photography.
Dye-transfer printing remained cost-effective somewhat longer, but Technicolor was forced to abandon the process in the 1970s. This has created a significant problem for film preservationists because only Technicolor film permanently retains its original colours. Other colour prints fade to magenta within seven years, yet the hard gelatin dyes of a Technicolor print remain undimmed even after the film’s nitrate base has begun to decompose.
In the 1980s computerized versions of the hand-stenciled colour films of the silent era were developed to rejuvenate old black-and-white films for video.Elisabeth Weis Stephen G. Handzo
Wide-screen and stereoscopic pictures
Until the early 1950s, the screen shape, or aspect ratio (expressed as the ratio of frame width to frame height), was generally 1.33 to 1, or 4 to 3. In the mid-1950s the ratio became standardized at 1.85 to 1 in the United States and 1.66 or 1.75 to 1 in Europe. These slightly wider images were accomplished by using the same film but smaller aperture plates in the projector and by using shorter-focal-length lenses.
Many people have felt that, while vision at the extreme sides of the vision field does not usually contribute much information to the eyes, it does add substantially to the illusion of reality when it is present. Hence, there have been periods when film producers have attempted to introduce extremely wide formats. As early as 1929, Grandeur films were presented using 70-mm instead of the standard 35-mm film to give a wider field of view.
In 1952 a radical attack was made on wide-screen projection in the form of the Cinerama, which used three projectors and a curved screen. The expanded field of view gave a remarkable increase in the illusion of reality, especially with such exciting and spectacular subjects as a ride down a toboggan slide. There were technical problems, including the necessity of carrying three cameras bolted together at the correct angles on the toboggan or other carrier, synchronization of the three separate films, and matching of the image structure and brightness at the joining edges on the screen. After 1963 Cinerama replaced its three-film process with a 70-mm anamorphic system with an aspect ratio of 2.75 to 1.
The use of anamorphic lenses for wide-screen projection was introduced by CinemaScope in 1953. An anamorphic optical system photographs with a different magnification horizontally than it does vertically. The lens seems to squeeze the image so that on the film itself figures appear tall and thin. A lens on the projector reverses the effect, so that the images on the screen reacquire normal proportions.
In 1955 Todd-AO introduced a wider film (photographed on a 65-mm negative and printed on a 70-mm positive for projection), with several sound tracks added. Like anamorphic systems, the wider format could be achieved with a single projector. The first two Todd-AO productions, Oklahoma! (1955) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956), were made at 30 frames per second for a nearly flicker-free image; 70-mm films are now photographed and projected at 24 frames per second.
Amusement parks and world’s fairs have often featured 360-degree projection. The first system was presented at the Disneyland amusement park in 1955. At first, the projection involved 11 16-mm projectors and screens and, later, nine 35-mm projectors. The audience stood on a low platform in the middle. The result was extremely realistic. In one scene, showing the view from a cable car in San Francisco, the viewers were seen involuntarily to lean over on the curves, as if they were actually on the cable car. The format, however, has limited uses for general storytelling.
In the 1980s, efforts to improve picture quality took two routes: increase in frame rate (Showscan operates at 60 frames per second) or increase in overall picture size—height as well as width (IMAX and Futurevision). In these formats the sound tracks are usually printed on a separate, magnetic strip of film.
Another project intended to improve the illusion of reality in motion pictures has been stereoscopic, or three-dimensional, cinematography. “3-D” films use two cameras or one camera with two lenses. The centres of the lenses are spaced 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 inches apart to replicate the displacement between a viewer’s left and right eyes. Each lens records a slightly different view corresponding to the different view each eye sees in normal vision.
Despite many efforts to create “3-D without glasses” (notably in the U.S.S.R., where a screen of vertical slats was used for many years), audience members have had to wear one of two types of special glasses to watch 3-D films. In the early anaglyph system, one lens of the glasses was red and the other green (later blue). The picture on the screen viewed without glasses appeared as two slightly displaced images, one with red lines, the other with green. Each lens of the glasses darkened its opposite colour so that each eye would see only the image intended for it.
The Polaroid system, used for commercial 3-D movies since the early 1950s, is based on a light-polarizing material developed by the American inventor Edwin H. Land in 1932. In this method, known as Natural Vision, two films are recorded with lenses that polarize light at different angles. The lenses on the glasses worn by spectators are similarly polarized so that each admits its corresponding view and blocks the other. Early versions of Polaroid 3-D used two interlocked projectors to synchronize the two pictures. A later system, revived in the 1970s and 1980s, stacked the left and right components vertically on half-frames two sprocket holes high. The images were converged by means of a mirror and/or prism.