Cinerama in your home Cinema

[Ed Gordon]

My friend Greg Kimble, a special effects technician and Cinerama enthusiast, helped create Smilebox!

I will send him the link to your video. He will be so happy!

Smilebox is a great inovation. There is a nice article on 70mm about the process.

Showing Cinerama film clips in this documentary was a challenging task. First a way to telecine from the original 3 panel - 6 perforation camera negatives had to be developed. Special effects expert and Cinerama buff Greg Kimble labored for several weeks with the top engineers at Pacific Ocean Post and Digital Magic in Los Angeles to perfect a technique to do this.

By using a Rank Ursa Gold Telecine with custom modifications, each panel was separately converted into digital video. Once control of all three images was in the digital domain the color between panels was corrected from the faded negatives. Using two D-1 decks and a modified Kaleidoscope, the images were combined and blended together into a letterbox image that matched the Cinerama aspect ratio (2.59:1).

Source: https://www.in70mm.com/library/archi...ebox/index.htm

[Ed Gordon]

There was also John Mitchell (1941-2020) in Sydney, Australia, who had a 3-strip Cinerama theatre in his back-yard for about 35 years. He had a large collection of equipment and films, had all the Cinerama features in his collection and screened films regularly to his friends. He also contributed picture and sound elements to several restoration projects.

Here some information and tributes...
https://splicehere.website/blog/2017/6/18/mr-cinerama
https://www.in70mm.com/news/2012/mitchell/uk/index.htm
https://www.in70mm.com/news/2020/mitchell/index.htm

And a slide show about him...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6KppeILjkM&t=236s

Juergen, I never heard of John Mitchell. The video was fascinating. John Harvey and John Mitchell certainly contributed a lot to keeping film alive.