The fifties were a time of tremendous innovation in
film
and picture formats. The
onslaught of television caused panic in the film industry. Because television adopted
the same
aspect ratio
as the academy 1.33:1 ratio, the film industry felt the need to
become wider. Hence, the widescreen formats we have today are a direct result of this
fear.
On September 30, 1952, the film
This is Cinerama
premiered as the first Cinerama film. Cinerama was
the first real
widescreen
feature film format and was
invented by Fred Waller. Engineers Hazard Reeves
and Wentworth Fling carried out tests to determine
the number of channals necessary to have for the
format. Reeves and Waller realized that at least 5
channels would be necessary behind the screen. A
7-track head stack was created to employ the
soundtrack. These seven tracks feed eight speaker
channels, five behind the screen and three around the
auditorium. Tracks 6 and 7 are manually switched
between stereophonic surround and monophonic
surround plus rear surround for selected scenes in the
film. In other scenes an "umbrella" configuration was
employed. The umbrella configuration sent one track
to both the left and right walls and the other to a
speaker in the middle of the rear wall. This was
commonly used to make sounds pass over the
audience.
The sound was handled by a 35mm magnetic full-coat
piece of film run in interlock with three projectors for
the 75-foot long, 146 degree curved screen. One of
the advantages of Cinerama was the fast speed that
the fullcoat piece of film. At over 29 IPS, Cinerama's
fidelity was height. Because of the expense and
difficulties of the system, it was abandonned in 1963.
Super Cinerama was later adapted for the Todd-AO
format using an anamorphic lense. In 1993, a
museum in
England
started a Cinerama theatre. Then
in
Dayton, Ohio
, another cinerama theater was
opened in 1996 because of
John Harvey
at the
New
Neon Movies
.
CinemaScope
On September 16, 1953, The Robe debuted as the first CinemaScope film. This anamorphic,
widscreen
format used an anamorphic lense to get its wide aspect ratio. This 4-track, discrete
magnetic format used an LCRS speaker set-up and was striped right on the film. The first
CinemaScope film, The Robe, was released on September 16, 1953. CinemaScope used a technique
which had the dialog on screen follow the action on the screen. To accomplish this, production
dialog was captured with three microphones. This practice continued for some years, but later
abandoned. In addition to the four magnetic strips, there was one small optical track on the film.
The magnetic tracks wore down quickly and production of them was difficult. Each reel had to be
