Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1930-1949)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

and film industries," Jour. SMPTE, 56: 44-51, Jan. 1951. 6. O. H. Schade, from reference 1 above, RCA Rev., 9: see p. 678, Dec. 1948. 7. Pierre Mertz, "Data on random noise requirements for theater television," Jour. SMPTE, 57: 89-107, Aug. 1951. Author's Comments The authors were careful to point out that this paper was of an essentially interim nature, and did little beyond defining some of the major difficulties with which those who seek to make motion pictures by a television intermediate process are faced. This being the case, the authors deliberately refrained from making reference to the very considerable amount of bibliography which exists on this subject. The introduction of any additional process into a reproduction system must degrade the result unless the additional process can be made to correct errors in the process. It is certainly possible to apply electrical corrections for tone distortions introduced by the film characteristics, and by overemphasis of the higher detail frequencies it would appear also possible to correct in a large degree for aperture distortion, lens losses, etc. (As an analogy it is interesting to recall that the introduction of an electrical process into the recording of sound on disc — essentially a mechanical process — considerably improved the overall results.) The authors, moreover, believe that other gains in terms of definition can be achieved. For example, it appears that the present average standard of quality in motion pictures has gradually advanced, against economic pressure, to a state where it is generally acceptable to the picture-going public. There seems good reason to suppose that if higher processing costs could be justified, marked improvements could be effected both in the production of the original negative and its subsequent reproduction through the stages leading up to the multiple release print. The authors feel that if the economic advantages they claim for the process which they advocate are realized, some proportion of the savings will be available to improve the photographic part of the process with considerable gain in overall results. Dealing now with the other points in the discussion, the authors would make the following comments: (a) The film density ranges which they have mentioned were those quoted: by a well-known manufacturer of film stock and the authors took them as a fair average basis on which to work. In point of fact there is no difficulty in extending the contrast range to any value which the film will accept so that the figures reported by Tuttle could be realized without serious difficulty. (b) The authors admit that the statement that "good-quality 35mm lenses of today are capable at full aperture of resolving eight to ten times the fineness of detail normally required for making a film optically" is misleading if divorced from its original context, which was omitted from the paper at a late stage for security reasons. They can only repeat the view of a leading lens designer who states that "an f/2 lens can provide on Maximum Resolution Plates, 8 to 10 times the axial resolving power obtained with emulsions used in the film industry. Thus one could argue that it is the fact that the film industry uses grainy emulsions which: defines fineness of detail." The authors hold the view that this increased resolving power may to some extend be exploited. (c) The authors believe that the conventional explanation of "dynamic resolution" is valid, and although it is difficult to establish quantitative results they have carried out a number of experiments which by observation were extremely convincing and in which the effect of dynamic resolution was most marked. (d) The authors are only too well aware of the losses introduced by terminal equipment and as previously stated have been at pains to introduce into the electrical circuits corrections to compensate as far as possible for them. The limit to this process is, of course, the signal-to-noise ratio. To date they have been surprised 460 December 1952 Journal of the SMPTE Vol. 59