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soundtrack as an image of a digital signal. Between the perforations is the lens. Note the thin Frame Line s of anamorphic prints.]] 35 mm film is the basic for movies ("single-frame" format) is four Perforations per Frame along both edges, which makes for exactly 16 frames per footHummel, Rob (ed). ''American Cinematographer Manual'', 8th edition. ASC Press: Hollywood, 2001. (for stills, the standard frame is eight perforations). A wide variety of largely proprietary gauges was used by the numerous camera and projection systems invented independently in the late and the quality of the images captured. The ubiquity of 35 mm Movie Projector s in commercial Movie Theater s makes it the only motion picture format, film or video, that can be played in almost any cinema in the world. The gauge is remarkably versatile in application. In the past one hundred years, it has been modified to include sound, redesigned to create a safer Film Base , formulated to capture color, has accommodated a bevy of widescreen formats, and has incorporated digital sound data into nearly all of its non-frame areas. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm have held a Duopoly in the manufacture of 35 mm motion picture film. EARLY HISTORY See Also: Kinetoscope In 1880, developed the first Perforated film stock. Eastman was the first major company, however, to mass-produce these components, when in 1889 Eastman realized that the dry-gelatino-bromide Emulsion could be coated onto this clear base, eliminating the paper.Mees, C. E. Kenneth (1961). ''From Dry Plates to Ektachrome Film: A Story of Photographic Research''. Ziff-Davis Publishing. pp. 15–16. With the advent of flexible film, , to use a 68 mm film that used friction feed, not sprocket holes, to move the film through the camera. A court judgment in March 1902 invalidated Edison's claim, allowing any producer or distributor to use the Edison 35 mm film design without license. Filmmakers were already doing so in Britain and Europe, where Edison had failed to file patents.1 A variation developed by the Lumière Brothers used a single circular perforation on each side of the frame towards the middle of the horizontal axis.Lobban, Grant. "Film Gauges and Soundtracks", BKSTS wall chart (sample frame provided). unknown It was Edison's format, however, that became first the de facto standard and then, in 1909, the "official" standard of the newly formed Motion Picture Patents Company , a Trust established by Edison. Scholar Paul C. Spehr describes the importance of these developments: The film format was introduced into still photography as early as 1913 (the Tourist Multiple) but first became popular with the launch of the Leica camera, created by Oskar Barnack in 1925.Scheerer, Theo M. (1960). ''The Leica and the Leica System'' (3rd ed). Umschau Verlag Frankfurt Am Main. pp. 7–8. Amateur interest The Petrochemical and Silver compounds necessary for the creation of film stock meant from the start that 35 mm filmmaking was to be an expensive hobby with a high Barrier To Entry for the public at large. Furthermore, the Nitrocellulose Film Base of all early film stock was dangerous and highly flammable, creating considerable risk for those not accustomed to the precautions necessary in its handling. Birt Acres was the first to attempt an amateur format, creating Birtac in 1898 by slitting the film into 17.5 mm widths. By the early 1920s, several formats had successfully split the amateur market away from 35 mm — namely 28 mm (1.1 in) (1912), 9.5 Mm (0.37 in) (1922), 16 Mm (0.63 in) (1923), and Pathe Rural, a safety 17.5 mm format (1926). Eastman Kodak's 16 mm format won the amateur market and is still widely in use today, mainly in the Super 16 variation which remains very popular with professional filmmakers. The 16 mm size was specifically chosen to prevent third-party slitting, as it was very easy to create 17.5 mm stock from slitting 35 mm stock in two. It also was the first major format only to be released with the non-flammable Cellulose Diacetate (and later Cellulose Triacetate ) "safety film" base. This amateur market would be further diversified by the introduction of 8 Mm Film (0.31 in) in 1932, intended for amateur filmmaking and "home movies".Slide, Anthony (1990). ''The American Film Industry: A Historical Dictionary''. Limelight (1st ed). ISBN 0-87910-139-3 By law, both 16 mm and 8 mm gauge stock (as well as 35 mm films intended for non-theatrical use) had to be manufactured on safety stock. The effect of these gauges was to essentially make the 35 mm gauge almost the exclusive province of professional filmmakers, a divide which mostly remains to this day. HOW FILM WORKS > See Also: Photographic film Color film (motion picture) Exposure (photography) Film base Inside the photographic emulsion are millions of light-sensitive Silver Halide crystals. Each crystal is a compound of Silver plus a Halogen (such as Bromine , Iodine or Chlorine ) held together in a cubical arrangement by electrical attraction. When the crystal is struck with light, free-moving silver ions build up a small collection of uncharged atoms. These small bits of silver, too small to even be visible under a microscope, are the beginning of a Latent Image . Developing chemicals use the latent image specs to build up density, an accumulation of enough metallic silver to create a visible image.Upton, Barbara London with Upton, John (1989). ''Photography'' (4th ed). BL Books, Inc./Scott, Foresman and Company. ISBN 0-673-39842-0. The emulsion is attached to the Film Base with a transparent adhesive called the subbing layer. Below the base is an undercoat called the antihalation backing, which usually contains absorber dyes or a thin layer of silver or carbon (called rem-jet on color negative stocks). Without this coating, bright points of light would penetrate the emulsion, reflect off the inner surface of the base, and reexpose the emulsion, creating a halo around these bright areas. The antihalation backing can also serve to reduce static buildup, which was a significant problem with old black and white films. The film, which runs through the camera at 18 inches per second, could build up enough static electricity to actually cause a spark bright enough to expose the film; antihalation backing solved this problem. Color films have three layers of silver halide emulsions to separately record the red, green, and blue information. For every silver halide grain there is a matching color coupler grain. The top layer contains blue-sensitive emulsion, followed by a yellow filter to cancel out blue light; after this comes a green sensitive layer followed by a red sensitive layer. Just as in Black-and-white , the first step in color development converts exposed silver halide grains into metallic silver – except that an equal amount of color dye will be formed as well. The color couplers in the blue-sensitive layer will form yellow dye during processing, the green layer will form magenta dye and the red layer will form cyan dye. A bleach step will convert the metallic silver back into silver halide, which is then removed along with the unexposed silver halide in the fixer and wash steps, leaving only color dyes.Malkiewicz, Kris and Mullen, M. David ASC (2005) ''Cinematography'' (3rd ed). Simon Schuester. pp. 49–50. ISBN 0-7432-6438-X In the 1980s Eastman Kodak invented the T-Grain , a synthetically manufactured silver halide grain that had a larger, flat surface area and allowed for greater light sensitivity in a smaller, thinner grain. Thus Kodak was able to break the problem of higher speed (greater light sensitivity — see Film Speed ) means larger grain and more " Grainy " images. With T-Grain technology, Kodak refined the grain structure of all their "EXR" line of motion picture film stocksProbst, Christopher (May 2000). "Taking Stock" Part 2 of 2 ''American Cinematographer Magazine'' ASC Press. pp. 110–120 (which was eventually incorporated into their "MAX" still stocks). Fuji films followed suit with their own grain innovation, the tabular grain in their SUFG (Super Unified Fine Grain) SuperF negative stocks, which are made up of thin hexagonal tabular grains.Holben, Jay (April 2000). "Taking Stock" Part 1 of 2 ''American Cinematographer Magazine'' ASC Press. pp. 118–130 Other common types of photographic films In addition to black & white and color negative films, there are black & white and color Reversal Film s, which when developed create a positive ("natural") image that is projectable. There are also films sensitive to non-visible wavelengths of light, such as Infrared . ATTRIBUTES Color See Also: Color film (motion picture) Originally, film was a strip of cellulose nitrate coated with black-and-white photographic Emulsion . Early film pioneers, like D. W. Griffith , color Tinted Or Toned portions of their movies for dramatic impact, and by 1920, 80 to 90 percent of all films were tinted.2 The first successful natural color process was Britain's Kinemacolor (1908–1914), a two-color additive process that used a rotating disk with red and green filters in front of the camera lens and the projector lens.3Hart, Martin. (1998) "Kinemacolor: The First Successful Color System" Widescreen Museum. Retrieved July 8, 2006 But any process that photographed and projected the colors sequentially was subject to color "fringing" around moving objects, and a general color flickering.Hart, Martin (May 20, 2004). "Kinemacolor to Eastmancolor: Faithfully Capturing an Old Technology with a Modern One" Widescreen Museum. Retrieved July 8, 2006 In 1916, William Van Doren Kelley produced the first commercially successful American color system using 35mm film called , creating a successful subtractive color process. This basic principle behind color photography set the standard for many later successful color formats, such as Multicolor , Brewster Color, and Cinecolor . Although color was available for years prior, color in Hollywood feature films became popular with Technicolor , whose main advantage was quality prints in shorter time than its competitors. In its earliest conception, Technicolor was a two-color system, recording red and green. 1922's '' Toll Of The Sea '' was the first film printed in their subtractive color system. Unlike Kinemacolor, which recorded color frame-sequentially, Technicolor's camera recorded red and green frames simultaneously through a beam splitting prism onto one strip of film. Two prints on half-width stock were processed from this negative, and one was toned red, and the other toned green. The two strips were then cemented together, forming a single strip similar to duplitized film. In 1928, Technicolor introduced imbibition printing (similar to Lithography ) that streamlined the process. Using two matrices coated with hardened gelatin in a relief image, thicker where the image was darker, aniline color dyes were transferred onto a third, blank strip of film. In 1934, William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger revived the Multicolor process under the company name Cinecolor . Cinecolor enjoyed large success in animation and low-budget pictures, largely due to its inexpense and good image results. But while Cinecolor used the same duplitized stock method as Prizma and Multicolor, its main advange was inventing processing machines that could do larger quantities of film in a shorter time. Technicolor re-emerged with a three-color process for cartoons in 1932, and live action in 1934. Using a beam-splitter prism behind the lens, this camera incorporated three individual strips of black and white film, each one behind a filter of one of the Primary Colors (red, green and blue), allowing the full color spectrum to be recorded.Hart, Martin (2003). "The History of Technicolor" Retrieved July 7, 2006 A printing matrix with a hardened gelatin relief image was made from each negative, and the three matrices transferred color dye onto a blank film to create the print.Sipley, Louis Walton. (1951). ''A Half Century of Color'' The Macmillan Company, New York. |
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