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The cinema in flux: the evolution of motion picture technology from the magic lantern to digital era
Lipton L., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2021. 817 pp. Type: Book (978-1-071609-50-7)
Date Reviewed: Jul 4 2022

How often have you sat in a modern multiplex cinema and wondered how the special effects that you’re seeing on the screen were created, and how they’re now being shown on that screen through a digital projector that’s being completely controlled by a laptop computer at the ticket desk?

It’s likely that the storyboarding, modeling, animation, texturing, lighting, and rendering processes used in making the movie were performed on computers. But it wasn’t always so. This book traces the evolution of motion picture technology from Huygens’ magic lantern right through to the sorts of 3D digital cinema projectors found in modern multiplex theaters. Its author has been granted more than 70 US Patents in the field of electronic stereoscopic displays and has helped adapt the ZScreen stereo projection system for installation in more than 30,000 cinema auditoria worldwide.

There are ten parts in the book. The first two parts discuss the magic lantern and its development into what we now know as a slide projector. Light sources (from candles to carbide and beyond) and lens arrangements are illustrated and devices like the zoetrope, for achieving basic animation effects, are pictured.

The camera obscura has been considered a precursor of and inspiration for the photographic camera, and some chemistry-based image development procedures are described. George Eastman is credited with having produced the first device to perforate celluloid film for indexing and there are some interesting photos taken inside an Eastman factory in 1926.

In the third part of the book (“The Celluloid Cinema: The 35mm Medium”) one can learn about Edison’s coin-operated Kinetoscope, which used a spoolbank arrangement for 35mm film inside a wooden pedestal. A number of these machines were installed in Kinetoscope parlors in 1895, both in the US and in Europe.

There is a photograph and a schematic for a 1921 model Simplex projector; it used 35mm film and was hand-cranked, but it looks surprisingly similar to the 16mm projectors used at my school when I was growing up.

Portability has been an important characteristic of news cameras, and a number of such cameras are pictured in this section. One of these is an Aeroscope, powered by internal compressed-air cylinders that were recharged using a bicycle pump. It also used a gyroscope for stability. Compound lenses are used in a number of cameras to correct chromatic aberration, and anamorphic lenses are used for changing the aspect ratio of CinemaScope and other images; these are discussed in some detail.

Wurlitzer organs and sound-effect machines were employed for adding sound to silent movies, and between 1908 and 1912 groups of “talking picture play” performing troupes added some vocal effects. Optical and magnetic stripes in various formats were incorporated into celluloid films in the decades that followed and these are discussed in Part 4.

Part 5 introduces the seemingly strange technologies that were employed for color movies in the period up to 1952, when Eastman Kodak introduced a high-quality color print film.

Some wide-format systems are described in Part 7. CinemaScope was introduced, in 1953, and used an anistropic lens with both magnetic and optical sound tracks on the film so that it could be used in cinemas equipped with either form of sound technology. VistaVision was released a couple of years later; it used a horizontal film movement to produce images that could be projected onto screens with various aspect ratios. Cinerama, Todd-AO, and IMAX systems are also discussed.

In Part 8 there is a discussion of stereoscopic mechanisms leading up to the polarized 3D release of Kiss Me Kate, in 1953; the author observes that stereoscopy didn’t really became a viable technology until the advent electro-digital cinema.

Developments in television are covered in Part 9, right from Bain’s early telegraph facsimile apparatus through to Thomson’s cathode ray tube and Baird’s spinning Nipkow disks. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting in 1936, and RCA presented its color television system in 1950. There are some intriguing diagrams in these chapters.

The final part in the book traces the adoption of video cameras as a video-assist device for The Bellboy in 1960, and for editing and visual-effect purposes subsequently during celluloid film production.

Some elaborate electro-mechanical digital projection devices were used initially in cinemas, leading eventually to single-lens Digital Light Projection (DLP) devices around 2000, and to adoption by major studios of a common Digital Cinema Protocol in 2008.

Several types of 3D glasses have been developed for use with digital 3D movies. RealID glasses are passive and use circular polarization; they are used in conjunction with ZScreen polarizing filters in front of single-lens projectors. The polarizing filters are laminated to pi-cell layers that are switched on and off electronically. A polarization-conserving screen must be installed in cinemas that use ZScreen filters. CrystalEyes glasses use wireless-triggered battery-prowered electro-optical shutters and will work with a standard matte screen; many of these were sold for chemists modeling drug molecules. The Dolby Cinema projector uses a pair of color filters in front of a single lens to send frame-alternating images to a matte screen. The color filters pass light at different wavelengths and viewers wear passive glasses to assemble stereoscopic images.

There are almost 800 pages in this book, so it’s not something you would want to read in one night. But if you’re studying computer science with a view to working in animation or movie production, you absolutely should read it. And even if you’re not, you’ll find that the pictures and descriptions of the devices that led to what we see in our cinemas today are absolutely fascinating.

Did you know that the JPEG 2000 file format is used for compressing digital films for transmission and packaging ready for transport to cinemas? If you’d like to find more details about file formats and compression methods used in digital cinematography, you’ll find them in [1].

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Reviewer:  G. K. Jenkins Review #: CR147465 (2209-0129)
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