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This article is primarily about the use of 35 mm film in movies. For more detailed information on its use in still photography, see 135 film. 35 mm film is the basic film gauge most commonly used for both still photography and motion pictures, and remains relatively unchanged since its introduction in 1892 by William Dickson and Thomas Edison, using film stock supplied by George Eastman. The photographic film is cut into strips 1 3/8 inches or 35 mm wide — hence the name. The standard negative pulldown is four perforations per frame along both edges, which makes for exactly 16 frames per foot. A wide variety of largely proprietary gauges were used by the numerous different camera and projection systems independently invented around the late 19th century and early 20th century, ranging from 13 mm to 75 mm. 35 mm was eventually recognized as the international standard gauge in 1909, and has by far remained the dominant film gauge for both image origination and projection. Despite threats both from smaller and larger gauges, and novel formats, its longevity is largely because its size allows for a relatively good tradeoff between the cost of the film stock and the quality of the images captured. Additionally, the ubiquity of 35 mm movie projectors in commercial movie theaters makes it the only motion picture format, film or video, which can be played in almost any cinema in the world. The gauge is also remarkably versatile in application. Within the past hundred years, it has been modified to include sound, redesigned to create a safer film base, formulated to capture color, accommodated a bevy of widescreen formats, and incorporated digital sound data into nearly all of its non-frame areas. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the manufacturing of 35 mm motion picture film has been a duopoly between Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm. Early history In 1880 George Eastman started to manufacture gelatin dry photographic plates in Rochester, New York. Along with W. H. Walker, Eastman invented a holder for a roll of picture-carrying gelatin layer coated paper. Hannibal Goodwin's invention of nitrocellulose film base in 1887 was the first transparent, flexible film; the following year, Emile Reynaud developed the first perforated film stock. Eastman was the first major company, however, to put these components into mass production, when in 1889 Eastman realized that the dry-gelatino-bromide emulsion could be coated onto this clear base and eliminate the paper. With the advent of flexible film, Thomas Alva Edison quickly set out on his invention, the Kinetoscope, which was first shown at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. The Kinetoscope was a film loop system intended for one-person viewing. Edison, along with assistant W. K. L. Dickson, followed that up with the Kinetophone, which combined the Kinetoscope with Edison's cylinder phonograph. Beginning in March 1892, Eastman and then, from April 1893 into 1896, New York's Blair Camera Co. supplied Edison with 1 9/16–inch filmstock that would be trimmed and perforated at the Edison lab to create 35 mm gauge filmstrips (at some point in 1894 or 1895, Blair began sending stock to Edison that was cut exactly to specification). Edison's aperture defined a single frame of film at 4 perforations high. Edison claimed exclusive patent rights to his design of 35 mm motion picture film, with four sprocket holes per frame, forcing his only major filmmaking competitor, American Mutoscope & Biograph, to use a 68 mm film that used friction feed, not sprocket holes, to move the film through the camera. A court judgment in March 1902 invalidated Edison's claim, allowing any producer or distributor to use the Edison 35 mm film design without license. Filmmakers were already doing so in Britain and Europe, where Edison had failed to file patents.• A variation developed by the Lumière Brothers used a single circular perforation on each side of the frame towards the middle of the horizontal axis. It was Edison's format, however, that became first the de facto standard and then, in 1909, the "official" standard of the newly formed Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust established by Edison. Scholar Paul C. Spehr describes the importance of these developments:
The film format was introduced into still photography as early as 1913 (the Tourist Multiple) but first became popular with the launch of the Leica camera, created by Oskar Barnack in 1925. Amateur interest The petrochemical and silver compounds necessary for the creation of film stock meant from the start that 35 mm filmmaking was to be an expensive hobby with a high barrier to entry for the public at large. Furthermore, the nitrocellulose film base of all early film stock was dangerous and highly flammable, creating considerable risk for those not accustomed to the precautions necessary in its handling. Birt Acres was the first to attempt an amateur format, creating Birtac in 1898 by slitting the film into 17.5 mm widths. By the early 1920s, several formats had successfully split the amateur market away from 35 mm — namely 28 mm (1912), 9.5 mm (1922), 16 mm (1923), and Pathe Rural, a safety 17.5 mm format (1926). Eastman Kodak's 16 mm format won the amateur market and is still widely in use today, mainly in the Super 16 variation which remains very popular with professional filmmakers. The 16 mm size was specifically chosen to prevent third-party slitting, as it was very easy to create 17.5 mm stock from slitting 35 mm stock in two. It also was the first major format only be released with the non-flammable cellulose diacetate (and later cellulose triacetate) "safety film" base. This amateur market would be further diversified by the introduction of 8 mm film in 1932, intended for amateur filmmaking and "home movies". By law, both 16 mm and 8 mm gauge stock (as well as 35 mm films intended for non-theatrical use) had to be manufactured on safety stock. The effect of these gauges was to essentially make the 35 mm gauge almost the exclusive province of professional filmmakers, a divide which mostly remains to this day. How film works
Other common types of photographic films In addition to black & white and color negative films, there are black & white and color reversal films, which when developed create a positive ("natural") image that is projectable. There are also films sensitive to non-visible wavelengths of light, such as infrared. Color Originally film was a strip of cellulose nitrate coated with black-and-white photographic emulsion. Early film pioneers, like D. W. Griffith, color tinted or toned portions of their movies for dramatic impact, and by 1920, 80 to 90 percent of all films were tinted. The first successful natural color process was Britain's Kinemacolor (1908-1914), a two-color additive process that used a rotating disk with red and green filters in front of the camera lens and the projector lens.Hart, Martin. (1998) "Kinemacolor: The First Successful Color System" Widescreen Museum. Retrieved July 8, 2006 But any process that photographed and projected the colors sequentially was subject to color "fringing" around moving objects, and a general color flickering.Hart, Martin (May 20, 2004). "Kinemacolor to Eastmancolor: Faithfully Capturing an Old Technology with a Modern One" Widescreen Museum. Retrieved July 8, 2006 In 1916, William Van Doren Kelley produced the first commercially successful American color system using 35mm film called Prizmacolor. Initially a system that used frame sequential photography and projectected through additive synthesis, Prizma was refined to bi-pack photography, with two strips of film (one senstitized for red and one for blue) threaded as one through the camera. The method of projection was also changed: each record was printed and processed on duplitized stock, creating a successful subtractive color process. This basic principle behind color photography set the standard for many later successful color formats, such as Multicolor, Brewster Color, and Cinecolor. Although color was available for years prior, color in Hollywood feature films became popular with Technicolor, whose main advantage was quality prints in shorter time than its competitors. In its earliest conception, Technicolor was a 2-color system, recording red and green. 1922's Toll of the Sea was the first film printed in their subtractive color system. Unlike Kinemacolor, which recorded color frame-sequentially, Technicolor's camera recorded red and green frames simultaneously through a beam splitting prism onto one strip of film. Two prints on half-width stock were processed from this negative, and one was toned red, and the other toned green. The two strips were then cemented together, forming a single strip similar to duplitized film. In 1928, Technicolor introduced imbibition printing (similar to lithography) that streamlined the process. Using two matrices coated with hardened gelatin in a relief image, thicker where the image was darker, aniline color dyes were transferred onto a third, blank strip of film. In 1934, William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger revived the Multicolor process under the company name Cinecolor. Cinecolor enjoyed large success in animation and low-budget pictures, largely due to its inexpense and good image results. But while Cinecolor used the same duplitized stock method as Prizma and Multicolor, its main advange was inventing processing machines that could do larger quantities of film in a shorter time. Technicolor re-emerged with a three-color process for cartoons in 1932, and live action in 1934. Using a beam-splitter prism behind the lens, this camera incorporated three individual strips of black and white film, each one behind a filter of one of the primary colors (red, green and blue), allowing the full color spectrum to be recorded.Hart, Martin (2003). "The History of Technicolor" Retrieved July 7, 2006 A printing matrix with a hardened gelatin relief image was made from each negative, and the three matrices transferred color dye onto a blank film to create the print.Sipley, Louis Walton. (1951). A Half Century of Color The Macmillan Company, New York. In 1950 Kodak announced the first Eastman color 35 mm negative film (along with a complementary positive film) that could record all three primary colors on the same strip of film.Kodak | Motion Picture Imaging Chronology of Motion Picture Films Retrieved July 10, 2006. An improved version in 1952 was quickly adopted by Hollywood, making the use of tri-strip Technicolor cameras and bi-pack cameras (utilized in two-color systems such as Cinecolor) obsolete in color cinematography. This "monopack" structure is made up of three separate emulsion layers, one sensitive to red light, one to green and one to blue. Safety film Although Eastman Kodak had first introduced acetate-based film, it was far too brittle and prone to shrinkage, so the very dangerous nitrate-based celluose films, which had to be handled with extreme care or else they were prone to catching fire and exploding, were generally used for motion picture camera and print films. In 1949 Kodak began replacing all of the nitrate-based films with the safer, more robust cellulose triacetate-based "Safety" films. In 1950 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Kodak with a Scientific and Technical Academy Award (Oscar) for the safer triacetate stock. Most if not all film prints today are made from synthetic polyester safety base (which started replacing Triacetate film for prints starting in the early 1990s). However, the downside of polyester film is that it is extremely strong, and in case of a fault, will stretch and not break (potentially causing damage to the projector and ruining a fairly large stretch of film - 2-3ft or ~2 sec.), and will melt the frames if exposed to the projector bulb for too long. Original camera negative is still generally made on a triacetate base. Common formats See list of film formats for a comprehensive table of known formats Academy format In the conventional motion picture format, frames are four perforations tall, with an aspect ratio of about 1.37:1, 22 mm by 16 mm (0.866" x 0.630"). This is a derivation of the aspect ratio and frame size designated by Thomas Edison (24.89 mm by 18.67 mm or .980" by .735") at the dawn of motion pictures, which was an aspect ratio of 1.33:1.• Widescreen The commonly used anamorphic widescreen format uses a similar four-perf frame, but an anamorphic lens is used on both the camera and projector to produce a wider image, today with an aspect ratio of about 2.39 (more commonly referred to as 2.40:1. The ratio was 2.35:1 — and is still quite often mistakenly referred to as such — until a SMPTE revision of projection standards in 1970). and Cinemascope became obsolete in 1967 in favor of Panavision and other third-party manufacturers. The 1950s and 1960s saw many other novel processes such as VistaVision, SuperScope, Technirama, and Techniscope, most of which ultimately became obsolete. Vistavision, however, would be revived decades later by Lucasfilm for special effects work, while a SuperScope variant became the predecessor to the modern Super 35 format popular today. Super 35 The concept behind Super 35 originated with the Tushinsky Brothers' SuperScope format, particularly the SuperScope 235 specification from 1956. In 1982, Joe Dunton revived the format for Dance Craze, and Technicolor soon marketed it under the name "Super Techniscope" before the industry settled on the name Super 35.Mitchell, Rick. Society of Camera Operators Magazine, The Widescreen Revolution: Expanding Horizons — The Spherical Campaign", Summer 1994. Retrieved August 12, 2006. The central driving idea behind the process is to return to shooting in the original silent "Edison" 1.33:1 full 4-perf negative area (24.89 mm by 18.67 mm or .980" by .735"), and then crop the frame either from the bottom or the center (like 1.85:1) to create a 2.40:1 aspect ratio (matching that of anamorphic lenses) with an area of 24 mm by 10 mm (.945" by .394"). Although this cropping may seem extreme, by expanding the negative area out perf-to-perf, Super 35 creates a 2.40:1 aspect ratio with an overall negative area of 240 mm² (9.45"2), only a mere 9 mm² (.35"2) less than the 1.85:1 crop of the Academy frame (248.81 mm² or 9.80"2).Burum, Stephen H. (ed) (2004). American Cinematographer Manual (9th ed). ASC Press. ISBN 0-935578-24-2 The cropped frame is then converted at the intermediate stage to a 4-perf anamorphically squeezed print compatible with the anamorphic projection standard. This allows an "anamorphic" frame to be captured with non-anamorphic lenses, which are much more common, less expensive, faster, smaller, and optically superior to equivalent anamorphic lenses. Up to 2000, once the film was photographed in Super 35, an optical printer was used to anamorphose (squeeze) the image. This optical step reduced the overall quality of the image and made Super 35 a controversial subject among cinematographers, many who preferred the higher image quality and frame negative area of anamorphic photography (especially with regard to granularity). With the advent of Digital intermediates (DI) at the beginning of the 21st century, however, Super 35 photography has become even more popular, since the cropping and anamorphosing stages can be done digitally in-computer without creating an additional optical generation with increased grain. As DI becomes less expensive and more popular, it is likely to render Super 35 optical conversions completely obsolete in the near future. 3-Perf Most motion pictures today are shot and projected using the 4-perforation format, but cropping the top and bottom of the frames for an aspect ratio of 1.85 or 1.66. In television production, where compatibility with an installed base of 35 mm film projectors is unnecessary, a 3-perf format is sometimes used, giving — if used with Super 35 — the 16:9 ratio used by HDTV and reducing film usage by 25 percent. Because of 3-perf's incompatiblity with standard 4-perf equipment, there generally is no cause for it not be used with the Super 35 mm film camera specification, which utilizes the whole negative area between the perforations, including what would be the soundtrack area in a standard print. Both specifications require optical or digital conversion to standard 4-perf sound prints, and can each easily be transferred to video with little to no difficulty by modern telecine or film scanners. With digital intermediate increasingly becoming a standard process for post-production, 3-perf has become more popular with productions which would otherwise be averse to an optical conversion stage. VistaVision The VistaVision motion picture format was created in 1954 by Paramount Pictures in order to create a finer-grained negative and print for flat widescreen films. This format is unprojectable in standard theaters and requires an optical step to squeeze the image into the standard 4-perf vertical 35 mm frame. While the format was dormant by the early 1960s, the camera system was somewhat revived for visual effects by John Dykstra at Industrial Light and Magic, starting with Star Wars, as a means of reducing granularity in the optical printer by having increased original camera negative area at the point of image origination. Its usage has again declined since the dominance of computer-based visual effects, although it still sees very limited utilization. Perforations Film perforations were originally round holes cut into the side of the film, but as these perforations were more subject to wear and deformation, the shape was changed to that now called the Bell & Howell (BH) perforation, which has a straight top and bottom edge and outward curving sides. The BH perforation's dimensions are 0.110" (2.79 mm) from the middle of the side curve to opposite top corner by 0.073" (1.85 mm) in height.Case, Dominic. Motion Picture Film Processing. Boston: Focal Press, 1985. However, because BH perfs had sharp corners, the repeated use of the film through intermittent movement projectors created strain that could easily tear the perforations. Furthermore, they tended to shrink as the print slowly decayed. Therefore, larger perforations with a rectangular base and rounded corners were introduced by Kodak in 1924 to improve steadiness, registration, durability, and longevity. Known as "Kodak Standard" (KS), they are 0.078" (1.98 mm) high by 0.11" (2.79 mm) wide. Their durability makes KS perfs the ideal choice for intermediate and release prints, as well as original camera negatives which require special use, such as high-speed filming, bluescreen, front projection, rear projection, and matte work. The increased height also meant that the image registration was considerably less accurate than BH perfs, which remained the standard for negatives.ScreenSound Australia, "Technical Glossary of Common Audiovisual Terms: Perforations". Retrieved August 11, 2006. These two perforations have remained by far the most commonly-used ones. BH and KS are also are known as N (negative) and P (positive) perforations, respectively. The Bell & Howell perf remains the standard for camera negative films because of its perforation dimensions in comparison to most printers, thus having the ability to keep a steady image compared to other perforations.Gray, Peter. "Sprocket Holes". Retrieved August 11, 2006. The Dubray Howell (DH) perforation was first suggested in 1931 to replace both the BH and KS perfs with a single standard perforation which was a hybrid of the two in shape and size, being like KS a rectangle with rounded corners and a width of 0.11" (2.79 mm), but with BH's height of 0.073" (1.85 mm). This gave it longer projection life but also improved registration. One of its primary applications was usage in Technicolor's dye imbibition printing. It never caught on when Kodak introduced monopack Eastmancolor film in the 1950s, although it persists in certain special application intermediate films to this day.Eastman Kodak. "Kodak Vision Color Intermediate Film - Technical Data". Retrieved August 11, 2006. In 1953, the introduction of CinemaScope required the creation of a different shape of perforation which was nearly square and smaller to provide space for four magnetic sound stripes for stereophonic and surround sound. These perfs are commonly referred to as CinemaScope (CS) or "fox hole" perfs. Their dimensions are 0.073" (1.85 mm) in width by 0.078" (1.98 mm) in height. Due to the size difference, CS perfed film cannot be run through a projector with standard KS sprocket teeth, but KS prints can be run on sprockets with CS teeth. Shrunken film with KS prints that would normally be damaged in a projector with KS sprockets may sometimes be run far more gently through a projector with CS sprockets because of the smaller size of the teeth. Though CS perfs have not been widely used since the late 1950s, Kodak still retains the perfs as a special-order option on at least one type of print stock.Eastman Kodak. "Sizes and Shapes". Retrieved August 11, 2006. During continuous printing, the raw stock and the negative are placed next to one another around the sprocket wheel of the printer. The negative, which is the closer of the two to the sprocket wheel (thus creating a slightly shorter path), must have a marginally shorter pitch between sprockets. While cellulose nitrate and cellulose diacetate stocks used to shrink during processing slightly enough to have this difference naturally occur, modern safety stocks do not shrink at the same rate, and are therefore negative (or intermediate) stocks are perforated at a pitch of 0.2% shorter than print stock. New innovations in sound
Technical specifications
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