Showmen's Trade Review (Apr-Jun 1949)

E-48 SHOWMEN'S TRADE REVIEW, April 30, 1949 Large-Screen Video Moves Forward Claim Greater Speed, Improved Quality for Intermediate System Using Film Photographed From Receiver Tube Above, television is received in skyscraper tower of New York Paramount Building and (below) is projected seconds later. Interim processes are illustrated at bottom of page. Presentation of television events as part of the regular program of the New York Paramount Theatre (which has been routine there for the past six months) will soon be further improved in quality and simultaneity by the completion of new equipment, according to Richard Hodgson, Paramount's Director of Technical Operations. The new apparatus is now in construction not only for the Paramount in New York, but for other Paramount houses. It can be supplied to order to any theatre, Mr. Hodgson declares. The cost to the theatre of this earliest of practical large-screen television outfits compares favorably with the cost to the theatre of the earliest sound systems; current price for the entire television apparatus (not installed) being $35,000. The accompanying pictures outline the process. In New York, because of the crowding of steel-frame skyscrapers, an elevated point of reception is needed. The top floor of the 25-story Paramount Building is used. Piped down to the eighth floor by coaxial cable, the signal is seen on the screen of a television receiver. A unit called the "electronic shutter," interposed between the receiver proper and the cathode ray tube, causes the tube to show a negative instead of positive picture. Further, it shows the picture 24 times per second instead of 30 times per second as in conventional receivers. The image is photographed by a special camera which has no shutters and which effects pull-down in l/120th second. Camera and television receiver are electrically synchronized. During actual pull-down time the television receiver shows no picture. During this interval, however, the scanning process that produces the television picture has continued; therefore when the picture reappears the scanning process is halfway down the tube and the lower half of the picture appears first, the upper half following. This cycle repeats, with alternate frames joining in the middle. The result is a standard, 24frame positive print that can be projected with standard theatre equipment. As the film leaves the camera it passes through a recorder where the television sound is recorded upon it in the form of a conventional soundtrack, conventionally placed. From camera and recorder the film proceeds through a light-proof chute to a light-proof developing machine (shown in the accompanying picture with its cover removed for threading) where high-speed development and fixing are accomplished by means of concentrated solutions at temperatures as high as 140° Fahrenheit. Treatment of the film is completed with hot-air drying. From the drying chamber the film passes down a fireproof chute which runs through the floor, and thus passes into the province of Harry Rubin, Supervisor of Projection for Paramount Pictures and member of STR's Projection Advisory Council. The chute leads the film, through standard fire rollers, into the top af a specially-built upper magazine, as can be seen in the photograph. There is no reel in this magazine; the film merely passes through it into the projector, which is entirely conventional, as is the soundhead below it. The projector motor, however, is synchronized with the camera and developing machine motors. The man in the projection room picture is Harry Wickenhaver, veteran member of Paramount Theatre's projection staff. Emerging from the soundhead the film is taken up on a special, oversize reel in an oversize lower magazine — these provisions permitting 6,000 feet of film, or onehour's entertainment, to be played without interruption or changeover. Practical Showmanship When the television program is over the film can be removed from the lower magazine, cut into standard 2,000-foot lengths, and used over again as ordinary motion picture film whenever programming makes that desirable. When the program first appears it can be placed before the audience within 66 seconds of the actual event (and that interval will be markedly shortened by the new apparatus now under construction) or it can be merely reeled up and run later as the program may require. In the latter procedure, the film can be edited, like any other, before it is shown to the audience, and its dramatic impact thereby increased. No equipment of any kind need be installed in the auditorium. Television is projected at regular projection distance, through standard projection equipment, with all the brilliance of a standard projection arc lamp. It appears on the theatre's regular, perforated screen. In the New York Paramount the screen is 24 feet wide and the television brilliance is 14 foot-candles of incident light. Programs are obtained from two sources. The Paramount Theatre occasionally arranges with television broadcasters in the Metropolitan area for permission to reproduce their programs in the theatre. But in addition Paramount Television Productions, Inc., a subsidiary, has its own video camera crews and its own Federal Communications Commission license for television relay transmission on microwaves, and thus provides independent material. At left two television screens reproduce image. The larger is the monitor; special camera faces and photographs the smaller video image. From camera film proceeds in light-proof chute to developing machine (right) and thence through fire-proof chute to the projector.