What does "ACADEMY APERTURE" mean?

deepak srinivasan · February 13, 2011

can some one give a clear explanation about what "ACADEMY APERTURE" is ?

and what is 35mm films default aspect ratio ?

THANKS IN ADVANCE !

CHEERS :)

David Mullen ASC · February 13, 2011

can some one give a clear explanation about what "ACADEMY APERTURE" is ?

and what is 35mm films default aspect ratio ?

THANKS IN ADVANCE !

CHEERS :)

IN THE BEGINNING... Edison picked the 4-perf 35mm format for movies, which had a Full Aperture dimension of about 24mm x 18mm (1.33 : 1). The picture was as large as it could be within the confines of the sprocket holes running up and down the sides, 4-perfs tall, each frame touching the next one with a very small frameline between them.

Then sound came along. With Vitaphone (sound on disc) the film frame was not affected. But with Movietone (sound on film), part of the left side of the print, inside the left row of sprocket holes, there had to be an optical soundtrack.

So this shortened the width of the projected image and a 1.33 : 1 image became a 1.20 : 1 image on the screen. This was called the Movietone Aperture.

Many people thought this looked too close to a square. So Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, controlled at the time by the studios, decided that projector gates/masks would not only mask off the left edge where the optical soundtrack was, it would matte a little of the top & bottom as well, creating a more rectangular shape that was 1.37 : 1, approx. 22mm x 16mm. This was called the Academy Aperture. It was mainly used in projectors as a mask, though cameras had to have their optical center shifted over to account for the soundtrack stripe added to the print. Some cameras actually added the smaller Academy Aperture gate, while others still exposed the old Full Aperture (also called Silent Aperture or Edison Aperture.) See:

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

Brian Pritchard · February 13, 2011

There is an interesting article in the SMPE Journal (Available from the Internet Archive) in Volume 14 (1930) page 108 entitled 'Camera and Projector Apertures in Relation to Sound-on-Film Pictures' by Lester Cowan. There was a lot of argument at the time regarding 'correct' picture ratios. Some argued that the rato should be kept at 4:3 for both silent and sound pictures with much discussion about 'golden cut' a ratio of 8:5. It also seems that all the Hollywood studios used different aperture sizes in their cameras, see Table 2 in the article.

Brian

Simon Wyss · February 13, 2011

Please, not Edison. It was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Edison’s chief engineer and house photographer who entirely devised everything about moving pictures for Edison. Thomas Edison would never have been able to. Same with the Lumière family. It was Charles Moisson, b. 1863; d. 1943, their chief mechanic at the Lyons works who constructed a prototype of the Domitor, as the Cinématographe was called at first. The Lumière machines were built by Jules Carpentier, b. August 30, 1851, Paris; d. June 30, 1921, Joigny. Same with Marey, who’s assistant Georges Emile Joseph Démény, b. June 12, 1850, d. December 26, 1917, invented the beater or “dog” movement. Not Marey.

Hannibal Williston Goodwin, b. April 21, 1822, in Tompkins County, New York; d. December 31, 1900, invented the transparent flexible photographic film. Not George Eastman. Eastman’s a** was saved twice by people who deserve attention: Henry Reichenbach and William Stuber. Without them Eastman would have lost everything still in the 19th century. Same with Jacques Bogopolsky who never designed the Paillard-Bolex H camera.

Cinema screens pertained the 3 to 4 aspect ratio through half a century. A first standard was set at the Paris International Congress of Cinema in 1908. Until the advent of wide screen exhibition in the 1950s everything was projected onto screens three-to-four, also the above-mentioned Movietone pictures. Some feet and heads got cut off then.

The first photographic cinema sound systems involved either a separate and parallel running film (Berglund*) or a wider film such as Triergon’s 42 mm format. There a sound track was placed outside the perforation. American integration won by reducing the image size. An advantage of the Academy aperture is a generously high frameline on which can be set equally generous splices.

* Sven Oscar Fredrik Archadiusson Berglund, b. July 20, 1881, Stockholm; d. May 1937, Berlin. He first presented lip-synchronous motion pictures on February 17, 1921, before public in Stockholm, Sweden.