Conceptos teóricos

Early motion-picture toys used drawings, which were intriguing but fell short of the real thing. The first attempts at capturing a direct visual rep- resentation of reality began about the same time, in the 1820s, with Niépce and Daguerre’s photographic plates. Black and white (or sepia and white) and hand coloring were the only options for about 40 years, until Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell studied vision and determined that all col- ors could be represented with combinations of red, green, and blue. In 1861, he produced the first color photograph from a three-color process. Photog- raphy steadily improved but remained motionless for almost 60 years after its invention. In 1877, the same year Edison invented the phonograph, pho- tographer Eadweard Muybridge captured images of a moving horse as it

tripped strings attached to 12 cameras in sequence.5_{He realized that the}

motion could be recreated by placing the photographs on a rotating wheel and projecting light through them. This led to another string of oddly

named “magic lantern” gadgets such as the zoopraxiscope, phantasmagoria,

chronophotographe,and zoogyroscope.The early recording process was very cumbersome, requiring that dozens of cameras be painstakingly set up. In 1882, Étienne-Jules Marey was inspired by Muybridge’s work to create a single camera, patterned after a rifle, that exposed 12 images in 1 second on a rotating glass plate. This was a great improvement, but it made for a very short viewing time and did not bode well for popcorn sales. It was not until 7 years later that the celluloid roll film developed by George Eastman—the founder of Kodak—was used by Thomas Edison’s engineers to create the Kinetograph camera and the Kinetoscope viewing box for movies lasting up to 15 seconds. Lessons from the past were apparently missed by these and other pioneers, who tried to use continuous film motion only to rediscover that repeated still images were required. Edison’s lead engineer, William

Dickson, shot the first film in the United States,Fred Ott’s Sneeze.

The Lumière brothers were the first to project moving photographic pic- tures to a paying audience in 1895. Their first film, no less inspired than

Dickson’s, was the spine-tingling Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.The

motion picture industry was born and began to steadily improve the tech- nology and the content. Projection speeds varied from 15 to 24 frames per

5_{The story goes that Muybridge was hired by a former governor of California in an attempt to}

win a bet that all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground during a gallop. Muybridge’s success left the governor $25,000 richer, although he may have paid Muybridge more than that to develop the experiments.

second,6 _{with 16 frames per second being the typical speed, requiring a}

three-bladed shutter to flash the picture 48 times per second to sufficiently reduce flicker. Films at first were silent, although phonographs were used with film projectors even before the 1900s. Many methods of adding sound were tried, some less dismal than others, and by 1927, Warner Bros. (one of the modern-day contributors to the development of DVD) and Fox had developed a practical synchronized sound technology. Within two short years, most films had soundtracks. By this time the industry had settled on a film speed of 24 frames per second, with a two-bladed shutter to flash each frame twice. After the limited success of two-color film in the 1920s, three-color film was introduced by Technicolor in 1932, although it took another 25 years before most films were shot in color. At about the same time, in an effort to improve the movie theater experience and battle the threat of television, movies were made almost twice as wide. Cinemascope

was introduced in 1953 with the biblical epic The Robe.Some widescreen

systems used more than one projector, but the most successful early widescreen systems were based on anamorphic lenses that had been invented by Dr. Henri Chretien for tank periscopes in World War I. These lenses squeezed the image sideways to fit in a standard film frame and then unsqueezed it during projection. The same technique is still used occasion- ally for movies and is now used by DVD for widescreen video; the squeezing and unsqueezing are done by computers rather than glass lenses.

Less successful improvements to movies were attempted, such as Smell- O-Vision in the 1960s and many variations of three-dimensional images. Another failure, Sensurround, reappeared in a new form as a niche home theater product: motion transducers that attach to the frame of your couch to add extra kick to explosions and low-frequency sounds.

More recent advances in motion picture film technology include stereo audio and 70-mm film—twice the width of standard 35-mm film. Prestige formats such as IMAX and OmniMax use 70-mm film with large square frames to achieve presentations of breathtaking impact.

In 1976, Dolby Laboratories made an affordable surround-sound system using standard film soundtracks, and in 1992, it released multichannel

Dolby Digital (AC-3) for the movie Batman Returns.In 1993,Jurassic Park

debuted the sonic realism of Digital Theater Systems(DTS) Digital Sound,

Chapter 2

28

6_{Since there were no firm standards for film speed in cameras or projectors, films came with a}

cue sheet telling the projectionist the speed, in feet per second, at which to run the film. Unscrupulous theater owners would speed the films up to squeeze in more showings, even to the point of cutting the running time in half!

which uses an optical synchronization track on the film coupled with multi- channel digital audio from a CD. The primary multichannel audio system of DVD-Video is Dolby Digital. DTS optionally can be placed on the disc in addition to the primary Dolby Digital or PCM audio track. In 1999, Dolby and Lucasfilm THX added a new rear center channel option to Dolby Digi-

tal. The new Surround EX format first appeared on Star Wars: Episode 1—

The Phantom Menace.Not to be outdone, DTS came out with an Extended Surround(DTS-ES) rear center channel decoder that could decode Surround EX. DTS also released a new discrete 6.1-channel format, which provided a separate center surround channel instead of relying on matrix encoding.

Movie production has now entered the era where entire scenes or entire movies are generated inside a computer, never being touched by light to

trace the images in silver halide crystals on a film negative. Pixar’s A Bug’s

Lifewas the first motion picture feature to be transferred directly to DVD

without being printed to film. The resulting picture quality was astounding, especially on a progressive-scan digital playback system such as a com-

puter.A Bug’s Lifealso pioneered the concept of reframing scenes and repo-

sitioning characters and objects to create a full-screen 4:3 version of the film. Digital movie projection, or d-cinema, has been surprisingly successful in early tests, many of which used DVD-ROM to distribute the electronic movie files to theaters around the world. As the waves of digital conver- gence lap higher onto the shores of Hollywood, the digital nature of DVD will become increasingly important for best-quality distribution of movies.