motion-picture technology

motion-picture technology, the means for the production and showing of motion pictures. It includes not only the motion-picture camera and projector but also such technologies as those involved in recording sound, in editing both picture and sound, in creating special effects, and in producing animation.

Motion-picture technology is a curious blend of the old and the new. In one piece of equipment state-of-the-art digital electronics may be working in tandem with a mechanical system invented in 1895. Furthermore, the technology of motion pictures is based not only on the prior invention of still photography but also on a combination of several more or less independent technologies; that is, camera and projector design, film manufacture and processing, sound recording and reproduction, and lighting and light measurement.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

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History

Motion-picture photography is based on the phenomenon that the human brain will perceive an illusion of continuous movement from a succession of still images exposed at a rate above 15 frames per second. Although posed sequential pictures had been taken as early as 1860, successive photography of actual movement was not achieved until 1877, when Eadweard Muybridge used 12 equally spaced cameras to demonstrate that at some time all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground at once. In 1877–78 an associate of Muybridge devised a system of magnetic releases to trigger an expanded battery of 24 cameras.

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The Muybridge pictures were widely published in still form. They were also made up as strips for the popular parlor toy the zoetrope “wheel of life,” a rotating drum that induced an illusion of movement from drawn or painted pictures (see Figure 1). Meanwhile, Émile Reynaud in France was projecting sequences of drawn pictures onto a screen using his Praxinoscope, in which revolving mirrors and an oil-lamp “magic lantern” were applied to a zoetrope-like drum, and by 1880 Muybridge was similarly projecting enlarged, illuminated views of his motion photographs using the Zoöpraxiscope, an adaptation of the zoetrope.

Although a contemporary observer of Muybridge’s demonstration claimed to have seen “living, moving animals,” such devices lacked several essentials of true motion pictures. The first was a mechanism to enable sequence photographs to be taken within a single camera at regular, rapid intervals, and the second was a medium capable of storing images for more than the second or so of movement possible from drums, wheels, or disks.

A motion-picture camera must be able to advance the medium rapidly enough to permit at least 16 separate exposures per second as well as bring each frame to a full stop to record a sharp image. The principal technology that creates this intermittent movement is the Geneva watch movement, in which a four-slotted star wheel, or “Maltese cross,” converts the tension of the mainspring to the ticking of toothed gears. In 1882 Étienne-Jules Marey employed a similar “clockwork train” intermittent movement in a photographic “gun” used to “shoot” birds in flight. Twelve shots per second could be recorded onto a circular glass plate. Marey subsequently increased the frame rate, although for no more than about 30 images, and employed strips of sensitized paper (1887) and paper-backed celluloid (1889) instead of the fragile, bulky glass. The transparent material trade-named celluloid was first manufactured commercially in 1872. It was derived from collodion, that is, nitrocellulose (gun cotton) dissolved in alcohol and dried. John Carbutt manufactured the first commercially successful celluloid photographic film in 1888, but it was too stiff for convenient use. By 1889 the George Eastman company had developed a roll film of celluloid coated with photographic emulsion for use in its Kodak still camera. This sturdy, flexible medium could transport a rapid succession of numerous images and was eventually adapted for motion pictures.

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Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of the motion picture in 1889. The claim is disputable, however, specifically because Edison’s motion-picture operations were entrusted to an assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, and generally because there are several plausible pre-Edison claimants in England and France. Indeed, a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1902 concluded that Edison had not invented the motion picture but had only combined the discoveries of others. His systems are important, nevertheless, because they prevailed commercially. The heart of Edison’s patent claim was the intermittent movement provided by a Maltese cross synchronized with a shutter. The October 1892 version of Edison’s Kinetograph camera employed the format essentially still in use today. The film, made by Eastman according to Edison’s specifications, was 35 millimeters (mm) in width. Two rows of sprocket holes, each with four holes per frame, ran the length of the film and were used to advance it. The image was 1 inch wide by 3/4 inch high.

At first Edison’s motion pictures were not projected. One viewer at a time could watch a film by looking through the eyepiece of a peep-show cabinet known as the Kinetoscope. This device was mechanically derived from the zoetrope in that the film was advanced by continuous movement, and action was “stopped” by a very brief exposure. In the zoetrope, a slit opposite the picture produced a stroboscopic effect; in the Kinetoscope the film traveled at the rate of 40 frames per second, and a slit in a 10-inch-diameter rotating shutter wheel afforded an exposure of 6,000 second. Illumination was provided by an electric bulb positioned directly beneath the film. The film ran over spools. Its ends were spliced together to form a continuous loop, which was initially 25 to 30 feet long but later was lengthened to almost 50 feet. A direct-current motor powered by an Edison storage battery moved the film at a uniform rate.

The Kinetoscope launched the motion-picture industry, but its technical limitations made it unsuitable for projection. Films may run continuously when a great deal of light is not crucial, but a bright, enlarged picture requires that each frame be arrested and exposed intermittently as in the camera. The adaptation of the camera mechanism to projection seems obvious in retrospect but was frustrated in the United States by Dickson’s establishment of a frame rate well above that necessary for the perception of continuous motion.

After the Kinetoscope was introduced in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière produced a combination camera/projector, first demonstrated publicly in 1895 and called the cinématographe. The device used a triangular “eccentric” (intermittent) movement connected to a claw to engage the sprocket holes. As the film was stationary in the aperture for two-thirds of each cycle, the speed of 16 frames per second allowed an exposure of 1/25 second. At this slower rate audiences could actually see the shutter blade crossing the screen, producing a “flicker” that had been absent from Edison’s pictures. On the other hand, the hand-cranked cinématographe weighed less than 20 pounds (Edison’s camera weighed 100 times as much). The Lumière units could therefore travel the world to shoot and screen their footage. The first American projectors employing intermittent movement were devised by Thomas Armat in 1895 with a Pitman arm or “beater” movement taken from a French camera of 1893. The following year Armat agreed to allow Edison to produce the projectors in quantity and to market them as Edison Vitascopes. In 1897 Armat patented the first projector with four-slot star and cam (as in the Edison camera).

One limitation of early motion-picture filming was the tearing of sprocket holes. The eventual solution to this problem was the addition to the film path of a slack-forming loop that restrained the inertia of the take-up reel. When this so-called Latham loop was applied to cameras and projectors with intermittent movement, the growth and shrinkage of the loops on either side of the shutter adjusted for the disparity between the stop-and-go motion at the aperture and the continuous movement of the reels (see Figure 6).

When the art of projection was established, the importance of a bright screen picture was appreciated. Illumination was provided by carbon arc lamps, although flasks of ether and sticks of unslaked calcium (“limelight”) were used for brief runs.