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A Progress Report
of Engineering Committee Work
BY F. T. BOWDITCH, ENGINEERING VICE-PRESIDENT
THE SEPTEMBER JOURNAL lists 19 Engineering Committees with i total of 313 members. More than 40 separate projects are presently under review by these groups; some have one project each, others as many as 10. So it is obviously impractical here to review all this activity in any detail. Instead, this report will be confined to a few highlights which indicate current trends.
One trend is the considerable increase in the number of committee meetings being held, in large part the result of the excellent coordination and secretarial activities of our Staff Engineer, W. H. Deacy, Jr. Ten such meetings are scheduled during the five days of this Convention, which is, as far as I am aware, a new high in this form of activity. Much of this is engineering survey work, such as that of the Screen Brightness Committee in its investigation of 100 typical theaters from coast to coast, the excellent work of the Color Sensitometry Subcommittee, the High-Speed Photography Survey, the study of air conditioning by the Theater Engineering Committee, and many others equal in importance to these few examples.
Also of major interest is the committee work in the field of standardization, where — to name only a few — typical projects now include the preparation of a new film leader suited to both television studio and motion picture theater projection, a method of calibrating and marking camera lenses in terms of light transmission, the specification of a standard base for a new projection lamp, the dimensional characteristics of magnetic sound tracks, and the continued work in the field of cutting and perforating motion picture film.
We have yet to find a satisfactory answer to the basic problem of when to standardize. An excellent time would be early in a new art, before machines and methods in different companies become fixed in conflicting fashion, but basic information is meager then.. Unfortunately, too, the need to standardize is not usually anticipated until actual conflict arises, and the resolution of the differences cannot help but cause economic loss to someone. Standardization becomes extremely difficult in such a case, although it is a pleasure to report increasing evidence of cooperative give-and-take in these matters. The
PRESENTED: October 17, 1950, at the SMPTE Convention at Lake Placid, N.Y. NOVEMBER 1950 JOURNAL OF THE SMPTE VOLUME 55 547