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Author Topic: Dolby SR-D or SDDS at 16 fps? Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-27-2003 01:45 AM                        quote: The FIRST movie cameras were driven by motors; Edison's cameras built by W. K. L. Dickinson & used for all the Edison pictures. Edison was Mr. Electricity, & of course used motors. Those things were monsters. Another problem with the Dickson/Edison technology was that it needed a shooting and reproduction speed of 48fps, because the Kinetoscope (i.e. as near as Dickson got to a projector) moved film continuously past a disc shutter, and without an intermittent movement it needed to be that fast to appear as a moving image to the viewer. Michael: Two possible reasons why 16fps became established as a de facto shooting speed for studio use in the late 00s and teens: firstly it is the minimum needed to project a flicker-free image which appears to be continuously moving (most projectors had three-blade shutters in those days), and secondly, 16fps equalled two revolutions of the cranking handle per second on the Bell and Howell model 2709 studio camera, which was introduced in 1912 and was the most widely used camera mechanism in the American film industry during the teens and 20s. Suggested reading. I suspect William would approve of chapters 2-4, which are a comprehensive demolition job on the way film studies is taught in universities.  |  IP: Logged William Hooper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1879 From: Mobile, AL USA Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-28-2003 12:59 AM                        Ramsaye's _Million & One Nights_ states that the 1845 Lumiere camera design was for 16fps as taking speed, & gearing for 2 turns per second because it lent itself to being easily maintained for 16fps. Most other successful cameras evolved from its design (or just lifted features outright).  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 01-28-2003 08:04 AM                        Did you mean the Lumiere camera of 1895 (not 1845)?  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-28-2003 04:14 PM                        Maybe it was Dickinson who invented the 1845 camera?  |  IP: Logged William Hooper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1879 From: Mobile, AL USA Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-29-2003 01:25 AM                        I thought it just got mentally typo-tangled with the link to the 1840s St. Charles playbill, but when I pulled out the book I found it's a funnier manifestation of recall/typo tangle mush than just that! From the chapter "Lumiere's Sixteen-A-Second" : "They worked through the winter of 1894-5 and into the spring. They were not satisfied with the exposure speed of the Edison pictures, which required forty-eight frames of the film a second. They tried reducing the speed to ten images a second and found that too slow. Finally sixteen images a second became their adopted rate. The Lumiere camera was evolved with a mechanism which gave an exposure of eight frames per turn of the crank, requiring two turns per second for normal operation. "This two turns of the crank per second was also the subject of some experiment aimed at discovering the speed which the operator could most readily maintain with minimum variation. Unsteady cranking would have meant jumpy pictures. The Edison Kinetograph camera avoided fluctuation by using a battery driven electric motor, which made the machine expensive, complicated and immobile. The Lumiere camera was cheap, small simple and light. The Edison Kinetoscope made its first trips from the "Black Maria" on a one horse spring wagon. Louis Lumiere carried his camera in one hand. This obscure little fact was to have considerable bearing on the first few years of screen business. Two important notes: 1) Ultimately everything you vow you'll never do, like type "it's" for "its" or "Dickinson" for "Dickson", you will some day do anyway. 2) No matter how great an example Jeffry Johnson will constantly provide, pileups will continue to occur from mushy recall & failure to actually haul the book down & quote precisely from it.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-30-2003 01:57 AM                        Point taken: obviously the convention of two revolutions=16fps was established by Lumière and then adopted by others. Barry Salt attributes this to Hell & Bowell (see - even I can make typos, too! ), which suggests that he picked it up from a secondary source and hadn't seen a Cinématogràphe. I must re-read the Dickson SMPE Journal piece reprinted in Fielding's Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television - I bet Edison tries to take credit for that, too, even though his films did run at 48fps at the time!  |  IP: Logged

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