posted 06-29-2006 03:33 PM                    

quote: Paul Mayer

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there are no public-access microfilm records for the LVRJ for any year prior to the late '90s.

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posted 06-29-2006 04:15 PM                    

quote: Michael Coate

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Those other two titles had their narrow aspect ratio segments altered somewhat for their laserdiscs and DVDs.

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posted 06-29-2006 05:32 PM                    

quote: Paul Mayer

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I'm pretty sure Woodstock played at the Cinerama Dome here in 70mm.

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posted 06-30-2006 04:24 PM                    

quote: Bill Gabel

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But in the recent release on DVD of "Concert for Bangladesh" there is a short featurette about how they put the film together and how they built the first optical printer to blow up 16mm to 70MM in 1972 for this film. That is two years after the release of "Woodstock" in 1970.

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posted 06-30-2006 08:32 PM                    

quote: Paul Mayer

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Also remember seeing print ads in American Cinematographer talking about how well the 16mm-to-70mm blowups came out.

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quote:

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16mm to 35mm---But Which Way to Go?

All of the footage for "WOODSTOCK" was, of course shot in 16mm.

We knew from the start that we were going to use multiple-images in certain sequences and that we wanted the film to end up in the so-called 'CinemaScope' format---that is, a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The question was: how to get all those opticals into it and blow it up to 35mm with the least loss of quality?

We eventually made tests at several optical houses, but the first one we went to was Pacific Title. There's a very bright guy who works there named Dick Bond and he came up with an excellent suggestion as to the way to go. We had originally assumed that we would go from the ECO original directly to a 35mm anamorphic negative, which meant that we would have had to use anamorphic lenses in positioning and printing our opticals---putting the squeeze in at that point, while selecting the sizes and positions of the various images. It was just too much.

Bond came up with the suggestion that we go from our ECO original directly to a Techniscope negative, with the opticals put in, flat-to-flat, all in one generation. That would mean that the only thing standing in the way of the release prints would be the 35mm anamorphic matrices that Technicolor would make in the course of their standard Techniscope printing process. They would put the squeeze in at that point and there would be no additional generations involved---no inter-negatives or inter-positives to dilute the quality. I might add that Technicolor has, far and away, some of the best anamorphic lenses in the country.

At any rate, that's the way we elected to go---and it was a good decision.

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Getting the Sounds Just Right

We were to end up with 4-channel stereophonic sound---a left, center and right channel, plus a surround channel.

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posted 07-01-2006 08:44 PM                    

quote: Paul Mayer

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Read my posts or your own quotes of me again Michael. In two posts above I used the term "ads." So yes, it was an advertisement in American Cinematographer that I am remembering, apparently incorrectly. If I recall correctly, that issue had a still from the IMAX space film, Voyage To the Outer Planets on the cover, which was the reason I read that particular issue.

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quote:

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Blow up 16mm to 70mm? Impossible.

"At least that's what Cecil and I [Don Weed of Film Effects of Hollywood] first thought when [producer/director] Saul Swimmer handed us the Eastman 16mm film footage from 'The Concert For Bangladesh.' We had our reservations, but we told him we'd try.

Then we started experimenting. Saul wanted to go to 70mm to get maximum stereo effect from the 14-track music tapes. Because the 16mm format is in the wrong aspect ratio to be blown up directly to 70mm wide-screen, we realized that we would lose about 50% of our original 16mm frame area... assuming that it could be done at all. No one had ever tried it, but we found the answer. We adapted a wet-gate system to an existing 65/70mm optical printer at Film Effects of Hollywood. Then we scanned each image vertically 'on the fly' as we were printing. Accurately.

"Our first trial experiments without the wet-gate were weak and scratchy. But we saw enough quality in the results to be convinced that the excellent Eastman 16mm negative would hold up going to 70mm. When we went to final process, the results were beautiful. Cecil, Saul and I were astounded. So was everybody else.

The last step was release prints. Those we hand-made by going directly from the 16mm Eastman color negative film to 70mm Eastman color print film 5385.

"We had done something probably no one else had ever done before. With the right materials, nothing's impossible in this business."

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