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Why were Full-Frame film stocks never developed/used for cinema? (At least that's what I gathered)


Asker Mammadov

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I decided to check out the history of film stocks and their different formats, and I realized that there are no actual full-frame movie stocks that were ever developed or used for cinema back in those days.

Full-frame as we cinema people interpret it today, from what I understand, came from digital manufacturers making sensors based on the 135mm film stock dimensions made for Photography:

-Which are ~35mm wide in its negative and ~24mm tall negative(which is approximately the actual width of negatives on Super35mm film stocks, so basically it's like someone rotated Super35mm stocks 90 degrees)

-Pulled along horizontally rather than vertically, which is actually what allows the ~35mm width negative

Unless I'm missing something, why was there no Full-Frame( not the full-gate 35mm but the actual negative 36 x 24) ever used? It was quite surprising to see that cinema film stock developers decided to just jump straight into Medium Format from Super35. The only thing that might come close to it is VistaVision, but I'm not 100% sure if that actually qualifies as full frame . Thanks

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I mean film is film, doesn't matter if it's pulled vertically or horizontally, the stock is the same. 

There are two mass produced, widely used horizontal formats. VistaVision (technirama) on 35mm and IMAX/IWERKS for 65mm. 

VistaVision was developed during the 50's wide screen wars, as a 1.85:1 format, but it shoots the same width and height as standard full frame 35mm still images. The Techniarma variant used the full frame width and height, but anamorphic lenses to give a wide screen image for blow up to 70mm. Both formats were widely used until 35mm anamorphic got really good with new film stocks. Same can be said for 5 perf 65mm (70mm projection) which also died for the same reason. 

IMAX/IWERKS formats were developed in the 60's, mostly as special venue/ride films, but of course IMAX survived and moved into theatrical until they went digital. These formats are very similar in frame size to medium format. 

Where there haven't been many modern movies shot entirely on VistaVision, the format has stuck around for visual effects shots due to the much larger negative and is still rentable from a few houses including Panavision. IMAX of course, is still widely used for capture, tho very few theaters can project the 15 perf 70mm format anymore. Tenet was the last major film to be finished and distributed on the format with over 90% of it, captured using IMAX cameras. 

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VistaVision is the same as what we now call full frame. You don't need a different film stock to 35mm film. 

Historically, 35mm film was used for cine before still photography. In fact the first commercially successful 35mm "full frame" camera (they called it miniature photography back then) was developed from a testing apparatus designed by a Leitz engineer named Oskar Barnack to test the exposure of cine film. He simply ran the film horizontally instead of vertically to create a 24mm x 36mm frame (8 perfs across) rather than the traditional 16mm x 24mm cine frame (4 perfs high). He realized the potential of the apparatus as a much more compact still photography camera compared to the cameras of the day, and it was developed into the Leica. 

In the 50s VistaVision was developed as another widescreen or large format cinema alternative to lure viewers back from television. VistaVision cameras ran the film through horizontally, just like 35mm still cameras.

All well before digital cameras..

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3 minutes ago, Asker Mammadov said:

Interesting. I wonder why we never ended up using VistaVision to refer to cinema cameras with Full-Frame/Large Format sensors and just adopted the photography term instead. Anyway, thanks for your answers.

Just marketing, and the generation who started using full frame digital cameras for filming had probably never heard of VistaVision. 

You can trace the resurgence of "full frame" large format cinematography to the introduction of the video-capable Canon 5D MkII DSLR, which took off in the late 2000s. Full frame was the recent term used to differentiate standard 35mm stills sized sensors from the smaller APS-C sensors (which are closer to S35). Most seasoned cinematographers would probably have called it VistaVision, but since it was a digital extension of the stills world,  and mainly used by young videographers rather than for feature films or TV,  "full frame" stuck. It took a good ten years before cinema camera manufacturers like Red, Sony, Arri and Canon began releasing "full frame" cinema cameras.

It's the same reason "crop factors" use the still photography frame as a reference for cinematography, when most actual cinematographers would be more familiar with S35 focal lengths. 

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Marketers gotta market…

Hence now “large format” is being used to describe a full-frame format which isn’t even medium format…

As mentioned, the vertical 4-perf 35mm format was invented first and dominated cinema until recently. The horizontal 8-perf 35mm format was invented later for stills and though there was some talk about doing something similar in the early 1930s for movies, the Depression killed attempts at larger formats until the 1950s. VistaVision was invented in 1954 by Paramount but the projection version never got off the ground, requiring 8-perf 35mm to be optically converted to some other print format, first 4-perf 35mm and then 5-perf 70mm. And most of those larger formats were dead by the early 1960s.

VistaVision got taken up by the VFX industry but unlike with 5-perf 65mm, there weren’t any decent self-blimped VistaVision cameras designed for modern sound shooting.

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You have to understand that until digital projection came along, the primary release print format was 4-perf 35mm and any other format required an optical printer and dupes to convert it to 4-perf 35mm. The second release print option was 5-perf 70mm release prints after 1956 or so. A few odd formats lasted for a decade or so, like 2-perf 35mm Techniscope, because the cost savings offset the expense of the conversion, plus Technicolor still had the dye transfer process which made it easier to deal with 2-perf conversions. But for the most part, it was always easiest to shoot in a format that allowed contact printing, so a 4-perf 35mm negative was the easiest way to get to 4-perf 35mm release prints.

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A brief point of order; VistaVision, at least the 1954 original, wasn't quite the same size and shape as a 135 stills frame. Stills frames are supposed to be 36 by 24mm (though digital cameras vary slightly, just as "super-35mm" digital cinema cameras do) which yields a 1.5:1 image; VistaVision was specified for ratios between 1.66 and 2, so it would have had to have been a different active frame area.

In practice much of this was probably eaten up in screen and projector masking, but theoretically it's not precisely the same format.

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Historically you are looking at this backward.

As David Mullen points out, the standards for 35mm framing were established by cinema, not by still photography. 

Leica and other 35mm cameras were developed to use cinema film well after the 35mm Silent Aperture was established  and eventually went on to formalize the 36 x 24mm frame size for still photography.  Even this was subject to some variations, as both Leica and Japanese still camera manufacturers initially used 4:3 aspect ratio frames, but quickly thereafter adopted the 3:2 aspect ratio for 36 x 24 (nominal).

Silent Aperture cinema,  the image 4 perforations high with an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.33:1, IS the historically accurate, original "Full Frame" specification.

Don't confuse Cinematic "Full Frame" with Still Photography "Full Frame";  the latter being co opted by marketing types to hawk DSLRs with sensors more closely sized to typical 35mm still camera frames .

 

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8 hours ago, David Mullen ASC said:

You have to understand that until digital projection came along, the primary release print format was 4-perf 35mm and any other format required an optical printer and dupes to convert it to 4-perf 35mm. The second release print option was 5-perf 70mm release prints after 1956 or so. A few odd formats lasted for a decade or so, like 2-perf 35mm Techniscope, because the cost savings offset the expense of the conversion, plus Technicolor still had the dye transfer process which made it easier to deal with 2-perf conversions. But for the most part, it was always easiest to shoot in a format that allowed contact printing, so a 4-perf 35mm negative was the easiest way to get to 4-perf 35mm release prints.

I see. So basically, it was all restricted by the popular print format available at the time. And in order to avoid all the hassle of converting from 1 format to another so it's ready for projection in 4 perf 35mm, they just stuck with shooting in 4 perf 35mm.

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59 minutes ago, Asker Mammadov said:

I see. So basically, it was all restricted by the popular print format available at the time. And in order to avoid all the hassle of converting from 1 format to another so it's ready for projection in 4 perf 35mm, they just stuck with shooting in 4 perf 35mm.

When Vistavision was introduced, it was in part a measure to try to bring back cinema audiences to motion picture theaters due to the encroachment of Television on their revenue streams. 

Being that 35mm 4 perf had been a standard for about 60 years, the amount of physical infrastructure in place around the World made it economically unreasonable to adopt a totally new standard that would require total retooling of the entire process from inception to projection.

There were many other large format systems before and after the establishment of 35mm, 4 perforation as the standard;  American Biograph shot and projected in 68mm in the late 1890's and there were several larger format systems developed in Europe about the same time, but Edison's format won-out for some non-obvious reasons.

Edison failed to secure patents for his system in Europe, thinking it was a toy/fad that would soon pass and that it simply wasn't worth the effort and expense to establish these "foreign" patents.  This left the field open in Europe for entrepreneurs who wanted to enter the moving image business to dodge the royalties and costs of universally adopting any other format which would have encumbered them with said payments. 

So, it was legal and profitable to copy the machinery and format of Edison as a standard to open both kinescope and theatrical parlors, as well as devise new projection and cameras systems based on that format.

 

 

Edited by Frank Wylie
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2 hours ago, Frank Wylie said:

..both Leica and Japanese still camera manufacturers initially used 4:3 aspect ratio frames, but quickly thereafter adopted the 3:2 aspect ratio for 36 x 24 (nominal).

Everything I’ve read not to mention photos from early Leica users suggests 36 x 24 was the camera aperture from the start. 4:3 would be cropping the sides of the aperture quite substantially for no practical reason. Do you have any sources on this Frank?

4 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

A brief point of order; VistaVision, at least the 1954 original, wasn't quite the same size and shape as a 135 stills frame. Stills frames are supposed to be 36 by 24mm (though digital cameras vary slightly, just as "super-35mm" digital cinema cameras do) which yields a 1.5:1 image; VistaVision was specified for ratios between 1.66 and 2, so it would have had to have been a different active frame area.

In practice much of this was probably eaten up in screen and projector masking, but theoretically it's not precisely the same format.

Here’s the original Paramount VistaVision technical drawing:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/vvdims1.gif
 

The actual camera aperture and recorded image was pretty close to 36 x 24mm, even a bit larger, with an aspect ratio of 1.47:1, but yes the printer apertures for contact or reduction prints were smaller, around 35.5 x 21mm with aspect ratios of around 1.7:1 which were further matted down in projection. 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/vvspecs.htm

There’s never a simple single dimension with cine capture, printing and projection.

 

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2 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

Everything I’ve read not to mention photos from early Leica users suggests 36 x 24 was the camera aperture from the start. 4:3 would be cropping the sides of the aperture quite substantially for no practical reason. Do you have any sources on this Frank?

 

Not avoiding your question, Dom, just trying to dig the source of this information out of my rusty mind.  I may be totally off base here, but I seem to recall it being conveyed to me by a Dr. Robert Wagner of the Ohio State University Department of Photography and Cinema back in the early 1990's.  As I vaguely recall, he indicated that Barnack had experimented with cine frame sized camera frames and was dissatisfied with the results, therefore he formulated the new 36 x 24 frame format in response.  Barnack then proceeded to design lenses to cover the added width and developed the famous lenses everyone knows so well.

That's totally anecdotal, I understand, but that's probably where that came from...

 

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6 hours ago, Frank Wylie said:

As I vaguely recall, he indicated that Barnack had experimented with cine frame sized camera frames and was dissatisfied with the results, therefore he formulated the new 36 x 24 frame format in response.  Barnack then proceeded to design lenses to cover the added width and developed the famous lenses everyone knows so well.

That's totally anecdotal, I understand, but that's probably where that came from...

Thanks Frank. The anecdote I have read was that Barnack was working on some sort of cine design and needed a way to test the exposure rating of cine film batches, which were rather variable at the time. Finding the standard cine frame too small for his testing requirements, he devised an apparatus that exposed a larger frame, by moving the film horizontally. This is all in the prototype period leading up to the first Ur-Leica, back around 1913 (and maybe what you recall of the story). Barnack immediately recognised the potential for his device to be a new type of photographic camera, although it took until 1925 for the first fixed lens model to be released. There were actually many other photographic cameras developed around this time using 35mm film, but the Leica was the first to really achieve commercial success. 

The first lens Barnack used in his prototypes was a medium format lens, since the cine lenses of the day didn’t cover the new 24 x 36mm frame, but Leitz soon developed their own lens specifically designed for the format based off a Cooke triplet, and other lenses followed. The lens designer was Max Berek, whose first name, along with the names of his dogs Hektor and Rex, would be incorporated into some of the Leica lens names.

The Wiki page on Leica is quite informative and matches other sources I’ve read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Camera
 

I did a lens service course at the Leitz factory in Wetzlar a few years ago and the Leica Museum there is fantastic, for anyone interested in Leica history. I wish I could afford to collect them! 

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To  add to the above:  From "The Complete Nikon System" by Peter Braczko :

The first Nikon production camera Nikon I (Industry) had a 24x32 format yielding 40 exposures per 36 exposure roll. Made from March 1948 to August 1949... 739 bodies with only 400 delivered.

Nikon M  24x34 format form 8/49 to 12/50.

Nikon L 24x35 format  (only two handmades in 1950)

Nikon S  24x34  format  from 1/51 to 1/55

Nikon S2  24x36 format from 12/54 to 6/58

Nikon S3M  18x24 format  (half frame)  from 4/60 to 4/61

In 1959 Nikon introduced an 24x36 format  SLR Nikon F model... I wonder what happened with that?   (Grin).

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