AV News 180 - May 2010
Food For Thought
J im M c C o rm ic k DPAGB
I'm currently working on a lecture for our local N.Y. & S.D. Digital AV Group
which I hope to complete for our May meeting. I decided that I should start with
the magic lantern era and chart the progress of the projected image up to the
digital age; ending with the question "Where do we go from here?" I've
suggested that it might be 3D; at the RPS AV Day at Bradford in October 2009,
Ian Bateman gave a demonstration of the medium and our editors very kindly
allowed me to include in my lecture, their photograph of the audience, complete
with 3D glasses, as shown on Page 47, Issue 179 of the AV News. My parting
shot is "Or could it be wide-screen?" more about that later.
In the second part of the lecture I make reference to the film industry and
formulate comparisons between the cinema and Audio Visual presentations.
Starting with the silent era where, in the beginning, we had pictures
accompanied by 'Intertitles' and live music. The comparison being that most
people starting in AV to-day begin with pictures, music and intertitles (now
referred to as text), the RPS refers to it 'Photo Harmony'. With the introduction
of colour and synchronised sound tracks, the cinema drew large audiences for
many years until a new kid appeared on the block, television.
In the late 40's cinema attendances began to drop dramatically, Sam Goldwyn
remarked "Why should people go out and pay money to see a bad film, when they
can stay at home and see bad TV for nothing?" The film industry had to respond,
they had to become larger than life, big was suddenly beautiful, the quest for
bigger screens, greater epics and bigger audiences became an obsession.
1952 gave us '3D Bwana Devil' (A lion in your lap). In the same year 'This is
Cinerama' offered a three-screen roller coaster ride (I believe this film can
still be seen in the theatre adjacent to the Media Centre at Bradford).
1953 'The Robe' heralded the arrival of the more successful 'Cinemascope'.
1954 Vista Vision used a 35mm horizontal camera to produce higher
definition wide screen.
1956 brought us the spectacular process of 70mm, Todd-AO.
But what they were all telling us was the cinema had gone 'Wide Screen'.
So where's all this leading us? Let's go back to 1953 and 'Cinemascope', the
process used 'Anamorphic' lenses at the filming stage to compress the wide
image onto 35mm film and again at the projection stage to expand the picture to
fill a wide screen. Todd-AO on the other hand didn't require special lenses as it
was filmed on 70mm stock, albeit on negative film, later converted to positive.
But there was a problem projecting all wide screen films. The distance from the
projection lens to the centre of the screen was shorter than the distance from the
projector lens to the edge of the screen, when the centre was sharp the edge
was out of focus and vice versa. The solution was to install a curved screen.
I hope by now you're following the direction I'm coming from, cameras employ
aspheric elements to ensure sharp edge to edge capture, projectors at the
moment have no such correction. If the AV fraternity decide to go down the wide
screen route will we experience similar problems? On small screens I don't
envisage a problem but where larger and wider screens are required i.e. national
and international festivals, might there be a problem? Only time will tell.
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