Harrison's Reports (1930)

108 HARRISON’S REPORTS And television pictures today are far from possessing the brilliancy of motion pictures. They are short on that point, and for obvious reasons : For an ordinary motion picture the light of the high-intensity arc is focussed on the frame of the picture while it is projected on the screen. The result is that the light is brilliant ; it is able to illuminate the entire picture on the screen so intensely that the eye feels no strain in watching the picture. The focussed light is, in fact, so brilliant that dark-colored glasses are used near the projector gate to protect the operator’s eyes from injury, and in many cases from eventual blindness. The whole picture is, as you well know, projected on the screen as a unit, and the light is spread on it uniformly. The case is not so, however, with television pictures : there is only one light dot on the screen at a time ; and this dot has to cover the entire screen to produce a single picture. The brilliancy of the dot cannot be compared with the brilliancy of the arc in motion pictures, for it is very dim. But even if the flying dot could be fairly bright — four or five times as bright as the present-day dot, its brightness will be “diluted,” so to speak, by its rapid travel in covering the area of the entire screen. In other words, the moderate amount of light in the dot has to be “spread” very thin to cover the screen. As a matter of experimental fact, it is very difficult to get a screen picture that can be more than one per cent as bright as the average motion picture. This obviously is a severe handicap and until it is overcome the lights in the theatre will have to be made, during a television showdng, much dimmer than at present to enable jieople to see the television image. For these reasons, television experimenters are racking their brains to invent some means whereby they can produce brighter images than at present. Some methods have been proposed for getting around the problem of screen dimness, which arises, as said, from the rapid travel of the flying light dot; but these are so complicated, and are liable to give so much trouble in operation, that no one as yet is in a position to say that the remedy is not worse than the disease. In any event, it will be poor showmanship to show a television picture immediately after a motion picture, because of the great difference in brightness. A third factor to be considered in any comparison betw'een motion pictures and television pictures is that of the general color of the picture. In one television system arc-light illumination is used and black-and-white pictures are obtained. But in some television systems the highlights of the picture are orange or pink, and the shadow's black. Such a color comlfination is inartistic and is somewhat trying to the eye. In yet another system, a more pleasant yellow-green light forms the highlights, the shadows again being black. In general, however, television jiictures do not have as agreeable a general color as motion pictures, although this handicap will probably be overcome in a large measure in the future. A fourth factor of importance in comparing television pictures with motion pictures is the possibility of producing the entire picture in natural colors. In moving pictures some beautiful effects have been obtained even with tw’o-color processes, and if a three-color process should be perfected (and there is every hope that some day it w'ill be perfected), the beauty of some scenes will be en July 5, 1930 chanting. In television pictures, however, natural colors will be difficult to obtain for a long time, 'i ne best color achievement in television so tar has been the production of pictures of postage-stamp size; they have a fair color value. But it is a long way between this and full size natural color television pictures, which necessarily involve all the prolaems of television and a good many additional problems. Consequently, we may safely dismiss color television from practical consideration for a long time to come, unless some radical new development crops up. There is one feature common to both moving pictures and television pictures — motion ; it gives the pictures an effect of realism, for the objects are made to appear lifelike, even though individually they do not possess such a characteristic. If we were to throw a single motion picture film frame on the screen, for example, and hold it there long enough to examine it (but not long enough to burn the film), we cannot help noticing that the images are not as sharp and as life-like as they appear on the screen in motion. We would notice, for instance, that the silver grains and the blur of motion disfigure, in a way, the images. Likewise in television pictures — we can almost count the grains (dot-elements) in individual pictures. But the succession of pictures makes such a defect disappear ; motion makes the images real and induces the mind to concentrate itself on the action and to forget, in the case of pictures, the silver grains, and in the case of television, the dot-elements. In the case of television, motion has made spectators accept highly imperfect images with complacency, because of the novelty. They are interested in the new art and are overlooking the imperfections. But one feels sure that they will not be so tolerant when this sort of pictures become common. After considering all these facts, we cannot help coming to the conclusion that the quality of the television performance today lags far behind the quality of the motion picture performance in man}' important particulars. Television will, no doubt, be improved as time goes on ; but unless some revolutionary discovery is made, the motion picture will remain the master — superior in detail, brightness, natural color, and general picture quality. In a forthcoming issue, Harrison’s Reports will give further details concerning television problems and will present a series of tests to assist the exhibitor to judge television quality and to utilize it effectively when it finally becomes available. RUNNING TIME FOR SHORT SUBJECTS The first attempt to obtain the running time of short subjects has proved successful only in part. In some cases, it was much easier to ask of the distributor to move the Himalayas than to give the footages for his shorts. The attention of the small exhibitors is called to the fact that the Index now contains the running time, not only of the features that I have reviewed, but also of those that I have not reviewed. The exhibitor will thus have the information by which he will be able to determine the number of shorts he may book in order to make his program the length he wants. \\'^ith the next Index I hope to be able to give the running time of most short subjects. Another thing that I desire to call the attention of all exhibitors is the printing of a list of Vitaphone shorts.