VistaVision Returns!

[Ryan Gallagher]

Gaumont Kallee built exactly that for the screening rooms at Pinewood The PPT has the surviving one. But it can only be used for Lazy 8 as it runs from bottom to top. Also the prism required the machine to point 90 degrees from the screen

Would the bottom to top requirement only apply to keep original soundtracks playable with the relative reader locations? Or is there something I’m missing about the print orientation? Seems we are now in an era where perhaps original soundtrack locations can be ignored in favor of BLS's offboard sync'd approach?

I think in my head tetris a VV print with about 0% confidence: played top to bottom without the 90deg turn and horizontal mechanism, emulsion towards lamp, would have the printed image running vertically but without the horizontal and vertical flip needed for correct projection? So some extra prism work would be needed just to undo the lens image reversals too?

[Gordon McLeod]

Remember the content would run backwards if it was threaded the opposite direction

[Ryan Gallagher]

Remember the content would run backwards if it was threaded the opposite direction

Understood. I'm talking about this purely hypothetical approach where you play an 8perf VV print with the proper emulsion orientation vertically through a regular projector starting from frame 1. Ignoring soundtrack, motor speed and intermittent changes, it seems it should be possible with various prism/mirrors to do the necessary manipulations to the image to get it horizontal and oriented correctly. Is that even possible? It would take more than just a dove type prism to do the rotation, there may be some image flipping required too.

[Ed Gordon]

Update:

[Ryan Gallagher]

Wooo! *joins the applause*. I hope the screenings went off swimmingly.

[Sean McKinnon]

Ryan,

When I tell you that Vista Vision is absolutely amazing as a projection format it really is. I have never seen a better picture even on 70mm Kinoton "E" machines. I cant believe this industry didn't convert to all 8 perf horizontal projection. The shows went extremely well. I can also now share that we ran trailers for "One Battle After Another" in Vista Vision before the features with a full 5.1 sound mix.

[Leo Enticknap]

I cant believe this industry didn't convert to all 8 perf horizontal projection.

Cost. Dedicated projectors needed (can't also be used for regular 4/35), necessitating architectural booth modifications in most cases, double the stock footage needed for each release print, etc. etc. The inability to make a projector that also supported the dominant standard (4/35) was also part of the reason why Fox Grandeur (4/70) was stillborn (but the main reason was that exhibitors couldn't afford it after investing millions in the conversion to sound, just as the Great Depression started to bite). 5/70 became the dominant large film theatrical format largely because Philips came up with a design for a single projector that supported both.

[Sean McKinnon]

I understand all those reasons though I question the architectural modification excuse because the way the magazines were situated above and below it is really not that much wider and they could have standardized on 8/35 horizontal and gotten rid of the dual projector problem. The image is far superior to 4/35 more like 5/70 but steadier never mind the film speed increased the HF response of the audio track. Oh well... one can dream.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Ryan,

When I tell you that Vista Vision is absolutely amazing as a projection format it really is. I have never seen a better picture even on 70mm Kinoton "E" machines. I cant believe this industry didn't convert to all 8 perf horizontal projection. The shows went extremely well. I can also now share that we ran trailers for "One Battle After Another" in Vista Vision before the features with a full 5.1 sound mix.

I am glad everyone had fun there! Surely was a treat for all. I have the recent North by Northwest VV restoration to 5p70 in my future, but now when that VV logo splashes on screen, it's not gonna feel quite as "special", knowing the world has experienced a couple "as intended" screenings again. Great job everyone.

I'd be curious if your shaft encoder methods would translate to other formats. Maybe there is now a way to get digital 7.1 or ATMOS mixes to track alongside any running film?

[Sean McKinnon]

As much as I would love to take credit for it using shaft encoders and un-married soundtracks isn’t anything new. In the past we used magnetic dubbers, then DVD-Ram players, and I believe Steve Levy at Warner Bros. may have been the first or one of the first to marry pro-tools. In fact as long as movies have been mixed using DAW’s you would need a way to sync them. The Kinoton EC and ECII were made to do this back in the Late 80’s.

there is nothing but someone wanting to do it at the studio level preventing a film/Atmos presentation. Maybe we will see one in the near future.

[Ryan Gallagher]

As much as I would love to take credit for it using shaft encoders and un-married soundtracks isn’t anything new. In the past we used magnetic dubbers, then DVD-Ram players, and I believe Steve Levy at Warner Bros. may have been the first or one of the first to marry pro-tools. In fact as long as movies have been mixed using DAW’s you would need a way to sync them. The Kinoton EC and ECII were made to do this back in the Late 80’s.

there is nothing but someone wanting to do it at the studio level preventing a film/Atmos presentation. Maybe we will see one in the near future.

Yeah I guess it's not all that different than dubbers or DTS/IMAX's disc approach. The shaft encoder just feels more universal and print agnostic. Sinners would have been good to try it with, as it seems you could either choose "special film formats" or digital picture with "special audio formats", but not both.

[Leo Enticknap]

...though I question the architectural modification excuse because the way the magazines were situated above and below it is really not that much wider...

That wasn't the issue: it was that the ability to run both VV and 4/35 would have required two sets of projectors in the booth (assuming changeovers), and therefore the actual floor space in the booth would have been the issue, plus the horizontal angle/keystone from the projectors at either end. Trade press articles from the early '30s suggest that this was part of the reason for Grandeur's failure.

Though a combined VV and 4/35 projector might have been possible. When Rank licensed VV in the UK, they inadvertently killed the British cinema projector industry in the process, through their ownership of Gaumont-Kalee. Kalee bet the farm on a VV projector, of which only a few units were made (I'm not sure if any survive). They were installed in the Odeon Leicester Square, but I'm not sure about anywhere else. To try to salvage something, a lot of the machine tools were re-used to create Gaumont-Kalee's final 4/35 projector, the GK-37. I used some in my very first days as a rookie projectionist in England in the '80s, and my memory of them is that they were built like tanks, clunky, and very difficult to thread compared to their main competitor in British cinemas at the time, which was the Cinemeccanica Vic 5. But unless they could have devised a means of rotating the entire projector mechanism by 90 degrees while the reel magazines and lamphouse remained static, it's hard to imagine how a combined 4/35 and VV projector could have been designed.

Incidentally, some of the British VV movies that were made during the brief Rank VV era are almost forgotten gems. The Battle of the River Plate and Simon and Laura are my favorites.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Since we shared the pre-podcast of perf damage. Here is their post-TCM edition. Some footage from the booth included.

[Sean McKinnon]

Hey! I know that fat guy in the suit jacket! One clarification the lens adapters used was to correct for the distortion from the deeply curved IMAX screen.

[Paul Finn]

I don't understand the use of an anamorphic projection lens adapter with genuine VV format film print projection? My memory of the VV process did not involve a squeeze/un-squeeze picture mechanism.

Paul Finn