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.

[Vern Dias]

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



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

While it's been a while (08/2010) since my last post here, I was browsing the site the other day and felt compelled to respond, (after re-enrolling to access the new forum), regarding this subject.

First, a disclaimer: the following info is just my $.02 and, as always YMMV.

Actually I find the opposite to be true. There is far more distortion at the sides of the image in the smilebox version.

Smilebox has always bugged me as it just doesn't play well for those of us that use screen with as aspect ratio greater than 1.77:1, resulting in a smaller less enveloping image.

Using a couple of screen shots from "Brothers Grimm" to illustrate:

Compare these two captures:



Notice how the people near the edges of the image grow progressively taller and skinnier. Also, the image in the center only uses half the resolution of the display.

Having a 12' wide x 13' deep HT, a JVC RS3100 projector, and a 1.5X ISCO Cinema DLP anamorphic lens, I'll take the flat version, projected on a 52" x 144" 2.76:1 10" curve depth screen with an 8' viewing distance for my prime seating location any day.


Here are a couple of photos (Pixel 7 phone) of my solution (the image you see is completely filling the screen) :





Vern

[Ed Gordon]

Vern, I have run Cinerama films with and without Smilebox on my un-curved 12' 2.35 screen and there are trade-offs. I like both, but prefer Smilebox for my setup. The worst presentation I have run was a 16mm Scope copy. This was the infamous scope version used in theaters after the initial Cinerama run. There were no issues with the image on the left and right sides because they had cut them off to fit Cinerama on to a 2.35 scope screen.

When I upgraded my HT screen I settled on 2.35 because my room was too narrow to go wider. I think the best implementation of Cinerama in a small room is the Tom March's screening room in Calgary, Canada as shown in the video in Post #1.

Cinerama was problematic from the beginning. Impressive for travelogues but problematic for other films.

...Cinerama captures a much wider view than traditional movie cameras, which pioneering filmmaker John Ford struggled to adapt to. Hathaway also had a hard time with the format, famously stating, "That damned Cinerama. Do you know a waist-shot is as close as you can get with that thing?"

In addition to the lack of close-ups, one of the biggest problems of using Cinerama came in the performances. Rather than interact with each other as most dramatic scenarios require, the actors had to be placed out of position, often out of the frame and away from the emotional context of the scene. Only when the three strips were projected simultaneously on the big screen in Cinerama, did it appear as if the interactions were synchronized. If projected without Cinerama, the synchronization ceased, creating a major problem when transferring the film to TV in later years. The process was incredibly difficult for the actors, who took a more theatrical approach to avoid mistakes.

Source: https://movieweb.com/how-the-west-wa...ographers-used

Now that cinema is primarily digital, I wonder if they will be able to produce something as immersive as Cinerama, but without the trade-offs inherent in the three camera process?