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3 strip technicolor was actually smarter than that. It only used a single camera with two exposure surfaces. The image was split in two by a prism, with a green filter in front of one strip, a second strip that was only sensitive to a narrow frequency (in the blue range), and a third strip behind the blue strip and behind a red filter.

Really ingenious. This means you're not trying to do the same camera operations at the same time with three separate cameras

Steamboat Willie (1928) is eight minutes of silent-era sight gags with a thin narrative thread.

Nitrate stock. Synchronized Cinephone sound-on-disk.

That makes the original an artifact for MoMA and the Library of Congress.
The digital restoration on Disney DVD: $15 Vintage Mickey

The expiration of copyright gives you the right to produce derivatives based on the characters and story of Steamboat Willie - and only Steamboat Willie.

If you want the Mouse of The Sorcerer's Apprentice,* you will have to wait a little longer.

[*Fantasia (1940) Three-strip Technicolor. Fantasound Three-channel stereo.
Do you see a pattern forming here? The expiration of copyright doesn't guarantee the survival of primary sources or the money and resources needed to restore them.]

You might work for Technicolour, but you're not using the original 3 matrix dye-transfer process. And that's what I'm talking about. But if you know anything about the history of the company (and you should), you'd know that.

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or6.htm

It's true that the vast majority of fans of this film prefer the original recordings, but mono sound? Fantasia was recorded with a very innovative multi-track sound system which Disney called "Fantasound". It was probably the most advanced sound system of its time. For more information, see http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/sound/Fantasound1. htm

"I thought widescreen came about in response to television?"

Yep. Other than a few experimental pictures, everything (including cartoons) up to 1952 was photographed in the Academy 1.37:1 ratio (changed from 1.33:1 in 1930 to accommodate the soundtrack).

Grandparent's complaint of stuff falling outside of the frame is probably due to excessive overscan on his television, but an improperly aligned film chain or bad lab work on the print that's being shown can cause the same problem.

Actually 1.33:1 (the "Academy Ratio") is literally full-frame on a regular TV. A 1.85:1 movie is only "full-frame" on widescreen TVs (16:9 as opposed to 4:3).

When a movie shot to be framed in 1.85:1 is full-frame on a TV it usually makes sense to have it be "open matte" or "unmatted" which means the entire 1.33:1 image of the film is shown. There's many DVDs of this type.

The "widest" movie I can think of off the top of my head is It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World which is 2.75:1.

There's also an interesting article from 1953 on the up-and-coming "CinemaScope" process.

For a very good discussion of the foolishness of letterbox fanatics, this article on Martin Hart's "American Wide-Screen Museum" website.

For years, DVD reviewers have been fussing about the artistic importance of maintaining the original aspect ratio. For years, studios have known that some video fans will go apeshit if the aspect ratio of the DVD is different from the original, but apparently don't know or care about whether the original frame information and composition was truly preserved or not. So studios just have been happily chopping the picture to the right shape.

This is just an extreme case.

Apparently letterbox fans don't complain; just so long as they see big black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, they are happy.

The fact that it apparently went on for years, without the DVD community noticing or blowing the whistle, just goes to expose the fallacy of the belief that a) cinematographers compose their frames with exquisite care, and b) sophisticated viewers can easily tell the difference between a presentation that reflects the cinematographers' finesse and one that does not.

And if you are not old enough to recognize that, and do not even know who Lowell Thomas was, take a look at this site.

Dolby Digital EX encodes a back surround channel in recordings by distributing in among the two rear surround signals in a Dolby Digital 5.1/5.0 mix. Thus, if the user has the correct equipment, the commonalities between those two signals are reproduced on a speaker set behind the listener.

However, if a normal Dolby Digital recording is played back on such a system in Dolby Digital EX mode, it may sound disorienting. If you use two speakers, offset from the center rear, each reproducing the same signal, it's less so.

The obvious next step was to figure out a way to send a discrete signal to each of the rear surrounds.

There are other experimental designs, which add speakers at various elevations, a second independent LFE channel and so on. The 1950s road show "standard" used 5 front channels and one rear channel. Naturally some of these setups may be wholly incompatible with others.

Or, at least, a distant relative of the Waller Gunnery Trainer, which used five movie projectors. (Waller, who invented this system, went on to create Cinerama. Cinerama used three synchronized projectors to produce a wraparound widescreen experience).

In short, it is a very, very fast RGB strobe sequence that has no equivalent that I know of in any other display technology.

Some early color movies (filmed with the Kinemacolor system, before the Technicolor sandwich approach became feasible) had the same sort of strobe effect, except it was RG not RGB.

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or1.htm

What is interesting is that Technicolor went through various technology changes:

System 1 [1917 - 1922]

System 2 [1922 - 1927] and System 3 [1927 - 1933]

System 4 [1932 - 1955]

Also of interesting to color palette junkies is Cine Color

All part of the Old Color System pages of the Wide Screen Museum

Do I have to be running a server to download linux ISOs, pr0n videos and public domain (50-year-old) movies?

Sorry, but the only public domain movies are those first published on or before December 31, 1922. Almost anything first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under effectively perpetual copyright in the United States, under a precedent set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision that gives Congress the power to set arbitrarily long terms on copyright.

Guess when the first Technicolor movie was made? 1923.

There's a nifty page about Technicolor's three-strip process at http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or6.htm

In fact, surround sound dates back to the 1950s, with the big-screen processes like Cinerama (7-channel sound), Todd-AO (6-channel sound), 35mm mag stripe (4-channel sound). It continued in the 70s and 80s with 35mm-to-70mm optical blow-ups, so that movies could be presented in the 70mm 6-track format. This lasted for a long time, with many movies (including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies) receiving 70mm 6-track presentations on their initial release. Then, finally, in the early-to-mid 1990s, today's digital sound processes started taking over, and now movies are 35mm-only, with 5.1 lossy-compressed digital sound.

Perhaps those of you who don't get it should look at what you have for an imagination and what you have for an attention span. This is a thinking person's movie, not a movie that will whack you over the head with "get it, moron!". Further, until you've made a movie and dealt with all the problems that come with one, ponder what you say. This was a spectacular thing that we're still talking about 32 years later.

The Technology. My bigger bitch is with the people here that bitch about the technology. Perhaps you've been standing behind the door, but it is you and I that make the technology happen. If we want video phones then we should get off our collective asses and code the damn things up.

And, if we want the things this movie guessed would happen, they're not beyond the edge of our technology. All it takes is a political will to do these things and it will happen. What happened to the US space program, post Apollo 11, can only be considered a travesty. There was a viable team of very smart, can-do people that attained a spectacular goal. What did we did to the team? We laid most of them off and said, 'thanks guys'. That NASA was capable of all sorts of cool things but instead the press and hence the country looked at Vietnam instead.

So if you want the BIG technology this vision of the future offers, argue for it with your government critters. They will listen if you will take the time to clearly state the case. They're actually there to do the right thing, if only they can figure out what that is.

--Multics

P.S. don't whine at me about the Space Shuttle either. They went from an Apollo command module (think row-boat) to a reusable space truck (think modern cargo ship) in one step. They're allowed to have made (and continue to make) some blunders along the way -- after all this is rocket science.

By the way, 70mm was first called "Todd-AO", not "Cinerama".

• Todd-AO was originally 65mm negatives shot at 30fps. "Oklahoma!" was filmed that way, as was "Around the World in 80 Days". The trouble with that system was that in order to have the movie shown in non-30fps equipped theaters, a second take of every scene had to be shot at 24 fps. "Oklahoma!" was essentially two movies done side-by-side. Later, Todd-AO was changed to 24fps for compatability, but kept the larger 65mm negative.
• Cinerama used 3 strips of 35mm film running side-by-side at 26 fps. "How the West Was Won" is one movie filmed in that fashion. Compatability was not a problem for Cinerama because in order to show it at all theaters had to install special equipment anyway, so theaters could upgrade to 26 fps at while installing everything else.
• Showscan is a 70mm process done at a whopping 60fps and is currently used for motion-simulator rides and such.
• Maxivision is new system using 35mm film running at 48 fps that solves the compatability problem that plauged Todd-AO by exactly doubling the normal frame rate, thus allowing every-other-frame prints to be made for normal, 24 fps theaters. It also uses an different sized frame area to get a larger negative (and thus more resolution) than ordinary 35mm. So far, no features have been made in MaxiVision.

I have also heard Sony is working on getting their digital cameras to work at higher frame rates. Personally, I think they should strive for higher resolution and color range first.

• Todd-AO was originally 65mm negatives shot at 30fps. "Oklahoma!" was filmed that way, as was "Around the World in 80 Days". The trouble with that system was that in order to have the movie shown in non-30fps equipped theaters, a second take of every scene had to be shot at 24 fps. "Oklahoma!" was essentially two movies done side-by-side. Later, Todd-AO was changed to 24fps for compatability, but kept the larger 65mm negative.
• Cinerama used 3 strips of 35mm film running side-by-side at 26 fps. "How the West Was Won" is one movie filmed in that fashion. Compatability was not a problem for Cinerama because in order to show it at all theaters had to install special equipment anyway, so theaters could upgrade to 26 fps at while installing everything else.
• Showscan is a 70mm process done at a whopping 60fps and is currently used for motion-simulator rides and such.
• Maxivision is new system using 35mm film running at 48 fps that solves the compatability problem that plauged Todd-AO by exactly doubling the normal frame rate, thus allowing every-other-frame prints to be made for normal, 24 fps theaters. It also uses an different sized frame area to get a larger negative (and thus more resolution) than ordinary 35mm. So far, no features have been made in MaxiVision.

I have also heard Sony is working on getting their digital cameras to work at higher frame rates. Personally, I think they should strive for higher resolution and color range first.