Cinema Canada (Nov 1976)

by Rodger J. Ross TECH NEWS 60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE S.M.RTE. An event of more than usual interest in film and television circles was the appearance in July of a special issue of SMPTE Journal commemorating the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ 60th anniversary. Founded originally in 1916 as SMPE, mainly to promote motion picture standardization, the Society added the letter ‘‘T” for television to its title in 1950. The first president — and one of the 10 engineers signing the incorporation papers 34 years earlier — was C. Francis Jenkins, an early television pioneer. Thus from the very beginning, the Society has been closely associated with the development of television systems, as well as motion pictures. A particularly interesting feature in this special issue of the Journal is a reprint of an article from the Transactions of SMPE, September 1925, reproducing letters written by Thomas A. Edison, George Eastman, Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, describing their work in developing motion picture systems. Mr. Eastman tells in his letter how, in 1889, 100-foot lengths of transparent film base were made by coating large sheets of glass with a solution of wood alcohol and soluble cotton, the first nitrate film base used for many years in making professional 35 mm. motion pictures. Photographs on page 493 show the glass table on which the first sheets of transparent base were made, and the modern casting wheels 18 feet in diameter and 5 feet in width, polished to a mirror finish, for continuous coating of safety base film. Another feature article with the title “101 Years of Television Technology” reviews television developments from the year 1875 when George R. Carey in Boston, Mass., disclosed Long: time Supervisor of Technical Film Operations at the programming centre of the CBC,. Mr. Ross is the author of two books, Television Film Engineering and Color Film for Color Television and has just won the Agfa-Gevaert Gold Medal, awarded by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. 16 / Cinema Canada an idea for a television system that would transmit and receive moving visual images electrically. It was not until 50 years later that technical advances and new discoveries enabled these ideas to be transformed into actual working systems. John Logie Baird in England and C. Francis Jenkins in the USA succeeded in transmitting small silhouette images in 1925, but Jenkins is credited with making the first radio (over-the-air) transmission of moving images across the Anacostia River near Washington, DC. This fascinating story, prepared especially for the 60th anniversary issue of the Journal by Richard S. O’Brien and Robert B. Monroe, includes a chart on page 459 showing the dates of many significant events in the long history of television development. A photograph shows Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin with a display of television camera tubes, an area of development in which he made important contributions, starting with the filing of a patent in 1923 for an electronically scanned camera pickup tube and a cathode ray display tube. Another very interesting photograph shows the small group headed by Charles Ginsburg that was responsible for one of the most important technical developments in the history of television broadcasting — the Ampex videotape recorder. The development of color motion picture processes is the subject of another article by Roderick T. Ryan, starting with the earliest crude methods of tinting and toning to the present high-quality multilayer subtractive color systems. In the course of 60 years over 100 color processes have been described in the technical literature, but only a very few have survived. Over the years the emphasis has shifted from additive to subtractive processes. Complicated mechanical and optical devices for filming and projection have been abandoned in favor of conventional equipment developed originally for making blackand-white motion pictures. Color quality and uniformity have been improved over the years, and film speeds have increased dramatically. For the foreseeable future color film production seems to be committed to the use of multilayer materials. But the author of this article points out that an ancient system of rotating filter discs and sequential frame recording of colors on film has been given a new lease on life with the transmission by the NASA Surveyor of the first color pictures from the moon. Sidney P. Solow of Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood contributed an article for this special issue of the Journal on ‘Milestones in the History of the Motion Picture Laboratory”. The birthday of the motion picture laboratory coincides with the date of August 1889 when George Eastman sent some film to W.K.L. Dickson at Thomas A. Edison’s laboratory in Newark, N.J., for use in his Kinetoscope. They had two darkrooms, one for punching, trimming and joining the films and printing the positives, and the other for developing, fixing and washing the films. These operations were carried out with large black enameled drums suspended at each end and immersed in long shallow troughs. In this article Mr. Solow describes the most important events in the evolution of motion picture laboratory technology in the last 25 years. The laboratories have had to continuously up-date equipment and procedures to handle the many new materials and processes as they were introduced — the change-over from nitrate to safety-base films; multilayer color films; electronic timing; additive color printing systems; liquid gate printing; color duplicating materials, and computerization of laboratory operations, to mention only a few. The evolution of motion picture camera design is described in two profusely illustrated articles, the first by Edmund M. Di Giulio of Cinema Products Corp., and the second, a reprint of a paper from the July 1967 issue of the Journal, also by Mr. Di Giulio, who was then