There were no anamorphic adapters used.
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Regarding the marrying of Pro Tools for playback with film, this was an outgrowth of the desire to get away from the ailing Tascam MMR-8 and MMP-16 units to accommodate filmmakers desire to view their workprint with their freshly mixed track immediately after leaving the re-recording stage. While I was the driving force behind making this work, I cannot take all of the credit. Two of my colleagues from the WB Sound Department were instrumental in making this happen. Namely Evan Daum and the late Jeff Berlin.
In 2019 I had made several unsuccessful attempts to lock ProTools 10 to a Simplex 35/70 projector by taking the bi-phase signal from the shaft encoder and turning it into SMPTE timecode.
The projectors would slew and the JSK-1128 boxes were outputting slewed timecode. When following timecode, Pro Tools requires it to be jitter-free and not slew.
Jeff constructed a bi-phase generator at his bench to simulate a shaft encoder, and we fed it directly into an AVID Sync HD box into the bi-phase port this time. We varied the output frequency of the generator and the session dropped out. Just when we were about to put the project down and rethink it, Evan came over and had a look at the way the session was set up. He adjusted the session settings and we found that the audio would indeed play back and follow the varying bi-phase signal.
The next step was to try it out in a booth with a projector pulling film under mechanical load. It worked repeatedly on both machines. We tried it in 2 more projection rooms and had success.
Pro Tools has been successfully married to film for dailies as well as workprint for several features to date. A clean bi-phase signal is absolutely necessary.
While I haven't done it yet, I would imagine that it is possible to play an ATMOS track with a 70MM film print utilizing Pro Tools and a Dolby renderer unit.Comment
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Cool to hear about those efforts. I guess another question would be how many rooms have both ATMOS and 70mm capability? Certainly not many, but at least for new releases ATMOS mastering probably already exists, so minimal extra work there. Fun to think about.
We are not one of those rooms currently, but there is a slim chance we might be after our slated restoration.Comment
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Atsushi Nishijima
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Focus Features Director Yorgos Lanthimos (second from left), director of photography Robbie Ryan and actor Emma Stone on the set of Bugonia. The film was shot with VistaVision cameras, which were popular in the 1950s and are being used in new films like Bugonia and One Battle After Another.
VistaVision is a widescreen movie format from the 1950s that's enjoying a comeback. Some of today's top filmmakers hope the old tech gets new audiences into theaters. In fact, two films getting awards buzz — One Battle After Another and Bugonia — were shot with restored VistaVision cameras, and Hollywood has more films using the technology coming.
Paramount Pictures introduced cinemagoers to VistaVision in 1954 with White Christmas. A promo that ran before the film screened announced VistaVision was "the ultimate in film presentation that will thrill all your senses, with its unbelievable clarity, sharpness, brilliance."
"It created a widescreen image that would look amazing when it was projected," says Charlotte Barker, director of film restoration and preservation at Paramount Pictures. Her office is filled with VistaVision memorabilia and a vintage "elephant ears" VistaVision camera. She's even writing a book about VistaVision. A widescreen competition
Mandalit del Barco / NPR
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NPR Charlotte Barker is the director of film restoration and preservation at Paramount Pictures and she is writing a book about VistaVision.
According to Barker, VistaVision was part of the widescreen craze of the 1950s. That movement started with Cinerama — which used three synchronized cameras and three projectors to run onto three huge, curved screens.
Then 20th Century Fox came out with another panoramic format called CinemaScope — which needed just one projector and one screen, shot from cameras with a single lens. Barker says CinemaScope "would squeeze an image onto regular 35-millimeter film, but by doing that, that added a lot of film grain. That's what Paramount didn't like about that."
Barker says VistaVision was Paramount's answer to CinemaScope. It also uses 35-millimeter film, but instead of running through the camera vertically, it feeds through horizontally, like a still camera. The result is an image twice the size.
"There's no grain and the image clarity is beautiful," says Barker. "It showed the full view of your eye, like what your vision sees in your peripherals. That was the scope of VistaVision."
Courtney Theophin / NPR
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NPR Actor/director Giovanni Ribisi looks through a refurbished VistaVision camera, which he "frankensteined" with various lenses and other parts.
As early as the 1920s, filmmakers experimented with other formats, and a man named Edwin C. Clark filed a patent for a widescreen horizontal movie system. Paramount held on to the idea, and eventually developed it into VistaVision in the 1950s, led by the studio's sound director and chief engineer Loren Ryder and John R. Bishop. Their technical achievements earned them Academy Awards.
Filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille used VistaVision for the 1956 remake of his epic The Ten Commandments, and Alfred Hitchcock used VistaVision cameras to shoot many of his iconic films, including North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief and Vertigo.
Barker says Paramount and its directors hoped the format would lure people to movie theaters, at a time when television was becoming popular.
"This was absolutely a ploy to try to get people back in," she says, "to show them something that they couldn't get from their own couch at home."
Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images
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Corbis via Getty Images Director Alfred Hitchcock on the set of To Catch a Thief, which was filmed with VistaVision cameras.
But Barker says VistaVision soon fell out of fashion once another technology, Panavision, created better wide-angle lenses. In addition, union projectionists wanted to be paid more for screening films on special VistaVision projectors. Paramount released its last VistaVision film, One-Eyed Jacks, in 1961.
"After that, they just couldn't justify spending the extra money, especially for the amount of film that had to be used in the camera," she says. "Think about it: it was twice the amount of film cost." One with the force
VistaVision found a new hope in the 1970s, when George Lucas' team at Industrial Light & Magic used it to shoot the special effects of Star Wars.
"George wanted a realistic representation of space travel," says visual effects supervisor John Dykstra, who led the team in winning the 1978 Academy Award for best visual effects for Star Wars.
Dykstra says they developed their own cameras with the horizontal format.
"We built more than one," he recalls, "but we [also] did modifications on existing VistaVision cameras. They were basic legacy devices. They were big, clunky things."
Dykstra says the cameras allowed them to capture the motion of miniature props better than the old stop-motion animation.
/ Industrial Light & Magic
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Industrial Light & Magic John Dykstra peers through the viewfinder on ILM's motion control camera that would ultimately be known as the "Dystrflex" while filming Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
"George, bless him, was trying something different," recalls Dennis Muren, who was also on the team. He stayed on with Lucasfilm as a visual effects supervisor for 40 years.
"We built equipment to do all the maneuvering of the spaceships in this better format, this bigger film aspect ratio, more consistent with the live action photography, so they look real," he says. "So the shots look like you're out in space, flying around." A Hollywood comeback
Now, in this age of streaming, live-action filmmakers have revived VistaVision, once again hoping audiences watch in cinemas.
Most of the period drama The Brutalist was shot in VistaVision by Lol Crawley, earning him the 2025 Oscar for best cinematography.
"The VistaVision camera enabled us to shoot these incredible high-resolution images and avoid this sort of distortion of a wider angle lens," says Crawley, who first came upon the format as a camera technician, responsible for loading VistaVision cameras for the Star Wars film The Phantom Menace.
The architecture, marble quarries and landscapes Crawley shot in Hungary for The Brutalist were gorgeous; but he says the vintage Beaumont VistaVision camera he used was as finicky as a classic car.
"I will just roll with the punches with these cameras because they're just beautiful pieces of machinery," he says. "And you have to forgive them their failings."
That's because VistaVision cameras are divas: larger-than-life and very noisy.
"I can't think of anything more off-putting than trying to give this very nuanced, sensitive, quiet performance with this camera rattling away at you," he says. "Sometimes we just had to put up with it. Other times we would do what we could to baffle the noise from the camera."
Courtney Theophin / NPR
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NPR Giovanni Ribisi (left) and Mikai Karl set up a refurbished VistaVision camera, which he lent to the crew of One Battle After Another.
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From his home in Los Angeles, actor Giovanni Ribisi demonstrates his refurbished VistaVision camera, which he bought 12 years ago at a shop in New York. "It was this amazing camera. And they were just kind of trying to get rid of it," he says. Ribisi pieced it together with various lenses, a viewfinder and other parts. "This is like Frankenstein," he says, adding that getting together the pieces "was like a back-alley drug deal, where I went in with a bag of cash and we traded."
Ribisi says there's something very emotional about watching footage from VistaVision cameras. "It has this sort of analog feel to it that there's just nothing else like it," he says. "If you want to talk about nostalgia, this is one of the things that kind of breaks my heart, because people don't really know how to build these things anymore."
Ribisi lent his cherished camera to Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot the dark comedy thriller One Battle After Another. The film's director of photography, Michael Bauman, says they ended up with three cameras, which were very loud.
Mandalit del Barco / NPR
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NPR Michael Bauman is the director of photography for One Battle After Another, which featured VistaVision cameras.
"It's kinda like starting up a lawn mower," says Bauman, imitating the sound. "All of a sudden, the camera would go wooomp, and just stop. All right, we got a jam – we gotta figure it out. Sometimes film would come flying out because it was jammed up; sometimes the magazine that holds the film would just be dead."
Bauman says throughout the shoot, he was constantly tweaking the bespoke cameras.
"You're trying to resurrect a great format back from the dead and it can be frustrating at times," he says. "But the visual value of what we were getting was well worth the pain and misery at the time."
You can see the payoff in the dramatic climax of One Battle After Another. Bauman and his crew strapped a VistaVision camera to the front bumper of a car for a chase through a rolling desert landscape.
"So we could get the camera just a few inches off the surface of the road, which provides that super dynamic image of the wide lens, of going over the hills, what we called the river of hills," says Bauman. "It's an incredibly powerful sequence."
Michael Bauman / Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures Camera and Steadicam operator Colin Anderson is behind the camera while filming a scene in the desert for One Battle After Another.
Like Hitchcock, today's filmmakers cover the cameras with soundproofing cases to muzzle the noise. That was especially useful for scenes with lots of close-up dialogue in the film Bugonia.
Though much of the movie is set in a cramped basement, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos says he wanted the wide-angle look.
"I felt the juxtaposition of filming close-ups of faces in a very limited space with that kind of format made them iconic," he told NPR. "It's almost like photography portraiture."
Lanthimos first experimented with VistaVision in 2021 for a scene in his film Poor Things. And for Bugonia he again worked with cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
"Igot a little bit traumatized when the whole shoot was going on a daily basis. But, I loved it," says Ryan. "It's a massive camera. Because the magazines are horizontal, you can almost put your cup of tea on it. It was great."
Ryan says they were able to work out some of the kinks.
"It's called VistaVision, so you think you're going to get all this landscape photography, but the landscape in Bugonia is the face," he says. "Looking at the iconic bald Emma Stone with antihistamine cream all over helped make that even more super real. And it just zings off the screen, the results are so gorgeous."
Hollywood's new love affair with VistaVision isn't ending with One Battle After Another and Bugonia. A number of high-profile projects are using the format, including Wuthering Heights, Greta Gerwig's Narnia and a new Tom Cruise movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
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Am pretty sure the camera shown was designed and built by Greg Beaumont. Greg's dad was the VV camera engineer at Paramount back in the 50,s and 60's. Greg also came up with the idea of using the Arriflex 400 and 1000 foot magazines on the cameras that he designed. Greg also inspired me to build a VistaVision projector that I used a lot on SFX Dailies in the past.
Tanks for posting this stuff Harold!
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Jim,
In my projector, I modified the arm of the intermittent to accept the larger diameter 32 tooth sprocket, made an offset bracket to mount the pad roller arm in the correct position...also machined the rounded intermittent pads out of stainless, made a new star wheel outboard bracket that was oil-able through a hole on the top. Like Gord mentioned, the cam shaft was all sealed, and the thing never did leak. I changed the oil, which was LaVezzi oil back then, after every job the projector was on. The feed sprockets were stock LaVezzi, and the pad roller arms are ex-cinerama. The gate is a modified C flat gate, and the trap is a slightly modified Cinerama trap. SFX guys always want to see beyond the frame lines, and I machined those out to accommodate that. I used a modified top from a Westrex R-8 Warnerphonic sound reproducer, and with a slight twist as it always was, the film goes up to the hold back sprocket and to the take up reel. I did that to save room. As some of the booths the carpenters built on site were fairly tight. I had used all the Westrex R-8's I could come up with to build standard dailies systems, which is where I got the small hold back compartments. The projector was driven by a Bodine solid state drive vari-speed motor. Also, the projector casting itself is turned 180 degrees front to back, and I milled a slot in the casting for the shutter, which is under the white cover. So the front of the projector is actually the back of the original C Model projector as were the original VV projecors. On the front I mounted a modified Kalee model 21 framing knob assembly, which is self locking. The original machines typically had a pair of vice grips being used to lock the framing position.
Interestingly, I got a call for the projector before it was finished. It was runnable, so I took it to the site, for the movie Miracle On 34th St, and set it up and ran some film. All was well and later that day I ran the SFX plates for the crew. The other interesting thing that happened was it turned out that Sr Richard Attenborough, who was starring in the film, was fascinated by the projector. He stood outside the large booth window and watched the projector run rather than watching the SFX plates. Oh, I will add that the projector was all assembled and aligned with dial indicators on a large granite plate I had in my shop, guaranteeing a tack sharp image. It also took me about a year and a half to build it because of other jobs that were going on.Comment
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