I guess Cinerama had to continue on some how...

[Ed Gordon]

There has lately been some discussion of Dimension 150 on John Clancy's Youtube channel, "Movie Collector".

A few days ago as I type this, Steve and Michael Rowley visited as part of their tour of home cinemas across the country. Steve brought some historic newsreels for this show and also a D-150 (Dimension 150) lens. Steve is a big proponent of this 1960's projection solution which facilitated huge curved screens in cinemas that rivalled Cinerama. He explains the system and puts the lens in place on my Kinoton FP20 35mm projector to illustrate basically how it worked and what it did.

More will be coming on Dimension 150 in the future as Steve is building his own home cinema and aims to include a 118 degree D-150 curved screen so I intend to get up there and video that when it's ready.

Here is the latest video. The discussion of D 150 begins at the 3:25 in the video.

[Bobby Henderson]

All sorts of things are possible with LED-based screens. A deep curve Cinerama type of display is very do-able. The biggest downside is the display costs are still very high, even for just a 2K resolution screen in a standard sized foot print. Venues like Sphere will never be a common sight. I'm not sure if the one in Vegas is profitable, even with the immense seat count. I have a difficult time imagining something like a 12-screen multiplex where all its screens are self-emitting.

Right now it's still far more cost-effective to install a projector and use a reflective screen. But the cinema industry is in a precarious situation. If we end up losing a great deal of first run screens and end up with a situation where only the biggest cities have a few first run screens it could kill the viability of things like digital projector product lines. If the cinema industry in the US ends up with only a few dozen showcase sites those locations may be stuck having to use LED screens. The "food chain" for cinema grade digital projectors could disappear. The projectors and replacement parts have to be produced at a certain level of scale.

One day maybe we'll see a DCI 8K remaster of "This is Cinerama" on a huge curved direct view complete with the smile box look. But if it doesn't have a some kind of curtain/braille i'm gonna protest. ;-)

Right now the movie industry can't seem to move above 4K. There may be cameras that can shoot 8K or even 12K now. But everything gets down-rezzed or cropped to 4K, if not 2K. It has been over 20 years since the first 4K digital intermediate was produced with Spiderman 2. The only thing Hollywood has been doing with the massive advances in computing technology since then is just make 2K and 4K faster and cheaper.

[Ryan Gallagher]

One advantage a curved LED screen will have above a projected image on a deep curve screen: the LED screen will show the image entirely in focus (and not be cropping any of it either).

That definitely IS one advantage of LED direct view... perhaps when the whole industry moves that direction eventually we'll see a resurgence of deep curve cinemas? Industrial/AV world is already doing all kinds of curves with them for tradeshow/keynote stages. They can even manage a slight convex shape too, although concave is easier to make more extreme. Compound curves are still crazy-talk. (No one trusts those "flexible" units, and they are usually only flexible in one axis).

Forget the Sphere... "Cinema In the Round" is much cheaper/easier to implement with LED. "Surround Sight"? Haha. (Only half joking, I know there are some projects not too far from that concept out there).

One day maybe we'll see a DCI 8K remaster of "This is Cinerama" on a huge curved direct view complete with the smile box look. But if it doesn't have a some kind of curtain/braille i'm gonna protest. ;-)

[Bobby Henderson]

Steve, I love curved screens as well, but emissive screens unfortunately won't correct for the distortion that happens where you end up sitting below or above the center line across the screen... Or off to either side either. An image on the screen is just that, no matter if it's direct view or projected, it is going to have the exact same issues.

One advantage a curved LED screen will have above a projected image on a deep curve screen: the LED screen will show the image entirely in focus (and not be cropping any of it either). That is not the case with digital projectors throwing images onto curved screens. Even if a projector's lens is custom made for the purpose there is a far worse problem: the location of the projector port in a modern theater. That's either well above the back row of a tall stadium seating riser or even higher above over a balcony. No amount of optical or digital keystone correction is going to fix that mess. The image is going to be clipped, have smile-shape distortion and only be partially in-focus even when seen from the best seat in the house. This situation is worse than not being able to watch a 15/70 IMAX Dome show from the sweet spot middle of the seating area.

In the old D-150 days the big cinema palaces of that era often had projection booths positioned where they could throw the image at the screen at a fairly level angle. IIRC, the National Twin in Times Square had a projection booth under the balcony to be able to throw a more level image.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Just cross-posting the video Tony shared to this most recent cinerama thread, a brief technical tour of the Pictureville Cinerama (Bradford, UK)

My lawyer will be contacting you for pirating my content.....

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Sounds like it. That movement was actually on Ebay about 20 years ago. I sent those pictures to Marty way back. I guess he never put them up, so here they are...

[Ed Gordon]

Cinerama was ridiculously complicated and very costly to shoot with in it's original format, and it slowed a production way down. They even shot the dialog live in six channels. However, they were in the process of developing a camera with a horizontal 12 perf (I believe) pull to replace the 3-camera, and 65mm versions. I actually have pictures of this movement that I've shown to various camera people in the Los Angeles area, and they are usually in disbelief at the photos. I think in the end, there were really too few stories that could have made use of that sort of film format. It was really intended for spectaculars and the like. Sure there have been a few movies that could have benefited, but would it really have been worth it? I really don't think so...

Mark, is this the system you are talking about:

Now it happens that the original specs for Ultra-Panavision (70mm with a 1.25 squeeze) yield the same aspect ratio as Cinerama (2.76), and 3-panel prints could be made from the negative, although this has never been done. (Imagine the chariot race from Ben-Hur projected this way!) Worse, Reisini also called a halt to all R&D, which stopped production of Waller's design of a 16-perf pull-across camera with a curved gate, and curved real element lens. Three-panel prints would be made from the single negative, forever solving the image kinking problem where the panels (each with its own vanishing point) met. Waller had never stopped trying to improve the process, and had always seen 3-panel as first generation technology. He would know none of the fate of his brainchild, however. He passed away in 1954, just days after receiving an Academy award for Cinerama.

From: https://www.widescreenmuseum.com/wid...imblepage8.htm

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I like curved screens too but they are a struggle. I don't like the geometric distortions they bring. One thing I'm hoping for in the emissive screens is the ability to have a curved, distortion free (with respect to geometry) image.

Steve, I love curved screens as well, but emissive screens unfortunately won't correct for the distortion that happens where you end up sitting below or above the center line across the screen... Or off to either side either. An image on the screen is just that, no matter if it's direct view or projected, it is going to have the exact same issues.

As far as the curved gates go, lenses of that period, especially the Todd-AO lenses had enough depth of focus to deal with what amounted to a very slight curve, some gate runners had a six foot or more radius. They were meant for one thing and one thing only.. to stop the film popping foreword as the on and off heat hit it.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Cinerama was ridiculously complicated and very costly to shoot with in it's original format, and it slowed a production way down. They even shot the dialog live in six channels. However, they were in the process of developing a camera with a horizontal 12 perf (I believe) pull to replace the 3-camera, and 65mm versions. I actually have pictures of this movement that I've shown to various camera people in the Los Angeles area, and they are usually in disbelief at the photos. I think in the end, there were really too few stories that could have made use of that sort of film format. It was really intended for spectaculars and the like. Sure there have been a few movies that could have benefited, but would it really have been worth it? I really don't think so...

[Ryan Gallagher]

Just cross-posting the video Tony shared to this most recent cinerama thread, a brief technical tour of the Pictureville Cinerama (Bradford, UK)

[Marcel Birgelen]

Steve, I was told by a guy from DCI at a CinemaCon a ways back that they limited the range of some adjustments in their guide to manufacturers. That's why I was wondering...

About the only test in the whole DCI test plan regarding image transformations is a test where a projected circle has the same with and height and is in fact, displayed as a circle and not an ellipse or other deformed form. About 95% of those specs and tests are about DCI security...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

News flash...there isn't any DCI police. If it doesn't violate security, they aren't going to stop anything and nothing at the theatre level will ever be inspected (unless it shows up as pirated content).

Steve, I was told by a guy from DCI at a CinemaCon a ways back that they limited the range of some adjustments in their guide to manufacturers. That's why I was wondering...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Marcel.... I thought DCI forbid altering image shape? That's what I was told at one of my training classes... Did they finally give in?

Like Steve already indicated, there is nothing in the specs that doesn't allow for this, as long as DCI security isn't compromised. Also, when you've used anamorphic lenses with DCI in the past, you already stretched the picture over the entire height of the imager, hence you already altered the shape of the image by stretching it.

The only thing DCI explicitly forbids, and which I still think is utterly stupid is anything but "square pixels" in the DCP container. Non-square pixels with anamorphic lenses could fix scope in DCI, where we not only maximize light output, but also maximize the horizontal resolution and avoid any real-time scaling that potentially introduces new artifacts. Unfortunately, the scope-route in DCI essentially died a silent death after most manufacturers decided to abandon their support for it.

Still, if you need to do image manipulation to compensate for some challenging geometrics that can't easily be solved with optics, Christie's CineLife series DCI projectors in combination with their Mystique add-on software, is currently the only viable, DCI-certified route, although as you may expect, not entirely cheap.

[Vern Dias]

That is correct, no anamorphic lens used. The only media that benefits from using anamorphic are those few DVD's that were encoded anamorphic..



Source: https://www.hometheaterforum.com/com...bluray.324364/

I did some initial testing and set my HTPC desktop to 1920x826 (2.35). Doing this solved three problems; (1) I don't have to zoom out to fill my scope screen, and media in other AR's (1.33, etc) still fill the screen without horizontal black bars and (2) when the letterboxed content ends there is no light spilling off the top and bottom of the image, and finally (3) since my desktop is no longer 16:9, the top and bottom of the desktop is not off the screen as is was when I had to zoom for wider aspect ratios on my 2.35:1 screen.

"That is correct, no anamorphic lens used. The only media that benefits from using anamorphic are those few DVD's that were encoded anamorphic.."

Actually that's kinda like comparing apples and oranges: Anamorphic pixels on a source media vs using an anamorphic projection lens to provide the horizontal stretching and then vertically stretching (scaling) the letterboxed source to fill the full 1080 or 2160 height of the projector's imaging panel .

Using an anamoprhic lens allows you to illuminate an additional 487,680 pixels of the 2,073,600 pixels on an HD projector's imaging panel for that 2.35:1 image which will deliver a substantial increase in screen brightness and the pixel density of the image on the screen.

Of course, this advantage all comes with the $ associated with purchasing an anamorphic lens.

[Ed Gordon]

That's one way to do it. It looks like it doesn't require using an anamorphic lens. The downside is a loss in brightness because you are not using the entire imaging area of the panel in the projector.

I do it somewhat differently in that I do use an anamorphic lens which means that I get the maximum screen brightness the PJ is capable of .

That is correct, no anamorphic lens used. The only media that benefits from using anamorphic are those few DVD's that were encoded anamorphic..

Anamorphic, 16 x 9, enhanched for widescreen TV's were different slogans manufacturers used to describe that a DVD was also formatted 16 x 9 within the disc. DVD is a 4 x 3 format and including the movie in 16 x 9 on the same disc increased the vertical resolution by 33%. It was a way for manufacturers to increase the quality of the DVD video. There is no need for anamorphic since Blu-ray is high definition 1080P/24 or 1080i/60 or 1080i/50.

480i:
3 x 4 Letter box = 172,800 259,200 pixels (360 x 480 720 x 360 skinny pixels
16 x 9 anamorphic: = 337,920 345,600 pixels (704 x 480) 720 x 480 fat pixels

1080P
HD Blu-ray: = 2,073,600 pixels (1920 x 1080
HD Blu-ray letterbox = 1,568,640 pixels (1920 x 817)

Source: https://www.hometheaterforum.com/com...bluray.324364/

I did some initial testing and set my HTPC desktop to 1920x826 (2.35). Doing this solved three problems; (1) I don't have to zoom out to fill my scope screen, and media in other AR's (1.33, etc) still fill the screen without horizontal black bars and (2) when the letterboxed content ends there is no light spilling off the top and bottom of the image, and finally (3) since my desktop is no longer 16:9, the top and bottom of the desktop is not off the screen as is was when I had to zoom for wider aspect ratios on my 2.35:1 screen.