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Cinema Products Corporation was an American manufacturer of motion picture camera equipment.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2008) |
Cinema Products Corporation was an American manufacturer of motion picture camera equipment.
The company was formed in 1968 by Ed DiGiulio, a former director and vice-president of the Mitchell Camera Corporation. Their first product was a Silent Pellicle Reflex conversion of the Mitchell BNC 35 mm Motion picture camera.
The company expanded into the 16-millimeter news camera market with the introduction of the CP-16.
The CP16 was based on the film advance mechanism used in the older "Bach-Auricon" sound-on-film cameras, but reconfigured in a lighter, more ergonomic self-blimped body configuration. It became one of the most widely used sound-on-film cameras in the TV news industry until it began to be superseded by the color professional video formats of the late 1970s. (3/4 inch field decks and the early Betacam and M-format component analog tape systems.)
In the 50th Academy Awards, Garrett Brown and the Cinema Products Corporation Engineering Staff under the supervision of John Jurgens received a Scientific or Technical Award, Class I for the invention and development of the Steadicam. [1]
In motion picture equipment, the Mitchell BNC conversion to reflex was followed by the studio quiet XR35. The Cinema Products XR35 had a Mitchell NC camera inside a lightweight housing or blimp. The blimp was so close in size to the original camera, it looked small compared to the blimps made for Mitchell or Arriflex cameras. The XR35 was a crystal-controlled 35mm motion picture camera considerably lighter than the Hollywood studio–owned blimped Mitchells. The X stood for crystal, the R for reflex. The reflex system was based on a spinning mirror shutter. During the mirrors' revolution at one point the film would be exposed, then the operator would view the image in the mirror as the film was advanced to the next frame, at 24 times a second. Cinema Products did their best to buy up all available 35mm Mitchell NC cameras on the market as the XR went into production. Later, Cinema Products sold their remaining Mitchell inventory to a Japanese company [ citation needed ] when the XR35 was challenged by competitors but still selling well.
In 1972 Panavision and Arriflex came to market with their lighter-weight 35mm cameras. Panavision's Panaflex and the German Arriflex 35BL-I. These cameras were not blimped in the sense they had a camera in a housing; these cameras were designed from the ground up to be quiet.
The light and ergonomic Arri 35BL-I gave European film makers (and eventually the American "Brats"), the ability to shoot studio-quality (double system) sync sound movies, but faster, on real locations – and even handheld – and with smaller crews and support equipment. (Due to the limited resources of the 1940s and 1950s the Italian Neo realists and French New Wave had evolved around the approach of shooting wild synch or "Noisy-synch" and then completely post-replacing all sound and dialog.) In America, The Panaflex became the industry standard motion picture camera, displacing the Mitchell legacy.
The studio quiet 16mm Cinema Products GSMO was introduced in the mid-1970s. It had quick loading coaxial magazines, an 'in camera' light meter viewable in the eyepiece and an on-camera battery. The GSMO stood for "gun sight man operated". (Cinema Products would often develop products under government contracts, then adapt them for industry wide marketing.)
The GSMO was popular among documentarians and low-budget independent producers. Jon Jost produced feature films shot with the GSMO. The PBS documentary film Post No Bills was also shot by Clay Walker using Jost's GSMO camera.
The GSMO had crystal speeds of 12, 16, 24, 25, 32, 48, 64 FPS. Besides the standard 400-foot magazine, the GSMO offered a novel and rare 100-foot magazine. The 100-foot mag was the height of the camera, so the camera with mag would be only 5 inches tall. The GSMO did not have video assist, a way of viewing what the cameraman was seeing on a video screen. TV commercial producers and directors wanted video assist, and the GSMO fell behind the competition in that feature. (After-market video assist is now available for the GSMO).
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During pre-production for the 1975 film "Barry Lyndon", director-producer Stanley Kubrick had a requirement for a large aperture "high speed" cine lens to facilitate shooting scenes by candlelight. At the time, the largest aperture "fastest" cine lenses available for reflex 35mm cine cameras had a f1.4 aperture. High Speed (also called "Super Speed") f1.2 prime lenses were not available at the time.
Kubrick sourced a Carl Zeiss Planar f0.7/50mm lens, an aperture two f-stops larger than f1.4. This was a still camera lens originally developed by Carl Zeiss for NASA's Apollo program. Ed DiGulio reluctantly agreed to take on the very difficult process of adapting this lens to a cine camera, which required modifying the lens and permanently modifying a Mitchell BNC camera to work with this lens. [2]
Director of photography John Alcott was honored at the 48th Academy Awards with the Best Cinematography award for his work on Barry Lyndon. One of the modified Mitchell BNC cameras, and two of the modified f0.7 lenses are on display with the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition. [3]
In the early 1980s, Cinema Products introduced the CP35, a nonquiet 35mm camera. With a BNCR lens mount, it was to partner with the studio quiet XR35 that had the same BNCR mount. The CP35 had video assist, but it was not as integrally designed as the competition's. The CP35 had multiple crystal speeds like the GSMO ranging from 6 to 120FPS.
The FX35 was introduced in 1987. It had a wider body but resembled the CP35. They shared magazines. The FX35 had integral video assist. It used the PL lens mount Arriflex had introduced. The camera's electronics were cutting edge for the day with special effects and motion control underlining the electronics design. From the switch-mode power supply to the 36-pin computer interface, the FX35 offered features unavailable on cameras at that time. The speeds were thumb-wheel selected in .01 increments. A CRT computer monitor with 72.06 hertz could be filmed with no roll bar, the black bar visible when a 24 or 25 FPS camera records a TV or computer monitor due to the difference in refresh rates. The FX35 was originally designed for a motion picture and video camera rental company in Great Britain. The production rights and remaining inventory of the CP35 and FX35 were sold to Redicam in 1992.
In its last years, Cinema Products was still innovative. A film to HD video transfer machine was introduced, novel in that the HD camera was not part of the transfer machine but mounted on it. An upgrade would be easy, just change the HD camera, the film transport deck stayed the same. A fiber optic–based 35 mm ground glass to video chip reducer was patented and sold to a competitor. A consumer-oriented Steadicam unit designed for small mini DV cameras was added to the Steadicam line. The Steadicam Jr. incorporated an 8-layer non-glare LCD video monitor comparable to the professional Steadicam rigs. The Steadicam line became the company's leading marketable product. Tiffen Filter bought the rights to make the Steadicam when Cinema Products Corporation went out of business in 2000.
A camera is an optical instrument that captures a visual image. At a basic level, cameras consist of sealed boxes, with a small hole that allows light through to capture an image on a light-sensitive surface. Cameras have various mechanisms to control how the light falls onto the light-sensitive surface. Lenses focus the light entering the camera. The aperture can be narrowed or widened. A shutter mechanism determines the amount of time the photosensitive surface is exposed to light.
Steadicam is a brand of camera stabilizer mounts for motion picture cameras invented by Garrett Brown and introduced in 1975 by Cinema Products Corporation. It mechanically isolates the camera from the operator's movement, allowing for a smooth shot, even when the operator moves over an irregular surface.
Panavision is an American motion picture equipment company founded in 1953 specializing in cameras and lenses, based in Woodland Hills, California. Formed by Robert Gottschalk as a small partnership to create anamorphic projection lenses during the widescreen boom in the 1950s, Panavision expanded its product lines to meet the demands of modern filmmakers. The company introduced its first products in 1954. Originally a provider of CinemaScope accessories, the company's line of anamorphic widescreen lenses soon became the industry leader. In 1972, Panavision helped revolutionize filmmaking with the lightweight Panaflex 35 mm movie camera. The company has introduced other cameras such as the Millennium XL (1999) and the digital video Genesis (2004).
The Arri Group is a German manufacturer of motion picture film equipment. Based in Munich, the company was founded in 1917. It produces professional motion picture cameras, lenses, lighting and post-production equipment. Hermann Simon mentioned this company in his book Hidden Champions of the 21st Century as an example of a "hidden champion". The Arri Alexa camera system was used to film Academy Award winners for Best Cinematography including Hugo, Life of Pi, Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant and 1917.
Techniscope or 2-perf is a 35 mm motion picture camera film format introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1960. The Techniscope format uses a two film-perforation negative pulldown per frame, instead of the standard four-perforation frame usually exposed in 35 mm film photography. Techniscope's 2.33:1 aspect ratio is easily cropped to the 2.39:1 widescreen ratio, because it uses half the amount of 35 mm film stock and standard spherical lenses. Thus, Techniscope release prints are made by anamorphosizing and enlarging each frame by a factor of two.
The Arriflex D-20 is a film-style digital motion picture camera made by Arri first introduced in November 2005. The camera's attributes are its optical viewfinder, modularity, and 35mm-width CMOS sensor. The camera was discontinued in 2008 when its successor, the Arriflex D-21, was introduced.
Mitchell Camera Corporation was a motion picture camera manufacturing company established in Los Angeles in 1919. It was a primary supplier of newsreel and movie cameras for decades, until its closure in 1979.
BNCR is a lens mount developed by Mitchell for use with their REFLEX 35 mm movie cameras. It was an update of the BNC mount done to accommodate the reflex viewer in the later cameras. BNC mount lenses cannot be used in reflex Mitchell cameras as their shorter back-focus will hit and damage the reflex viewer, which, in various versions, was a pellicle mirror or a rotating mirror. The abbreviation stands for "Blimped Newsreel Camera Reflex", which meant that it is a 35 mm camera originally intended for news reporting but included a blimp housing for sound stage shooting plus a reflex viewer to allow the camera operator to view the action through the lens while filming. The reflex option was only added in 1967, while the blimp option was available at the camera's introduction in 1934, but only a few BNC examples were made before the onset of WW-II, during which manufacture of "production" cameras was suspended.
Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow greater freedom of motion during filming. Newsreel camera operators frequently gathered images using a hand-held camera. Virtually all modern video cameras are small enough for hand-held use, but many professional video cameras are designed specifically for hand-held use such as for electronic news-gathering (ENG), and electronic field production (EFP).
The CP-16, CP-16A, CP-16R, CP-16R/A and CP-16R/DS cameras are 16mm motion picture cameras manufactured by the Cinema Products Corporation of Hollywood, California. A range of cameras of Auricon ancestry. They were primarily intended for television news filming and were quite popular with local and national news agencies before the advent of portable videotape Electronic News Gathering, (ENG) formats, as well as documentary and drama production.
This article summarized the comparison of movie cameras.
The Arriflex 35, released by Arri in 1937, was the first reflex 35mm production motion picture camera.
Randall Robinson is an American cinematographer. He is a former president of the Society of Operating Cameramen and the founding publisher and editor of the Operating Cameraman Magazine. As a freelance cameraman he enjoyed a long successful career working for the major motion picture studios in Hollywood on feature films, television and commercials.
Panavision has been a manufacturer of cameras for the motion picture industry since the 1950s, beginning with anamorphic widescreen lenses. The lightweight Panaflex is credited with revolutionizing filmmaking. Other influential cameras include the Millennium XL and the digital video Genesis.
Auricon cameras were 16 mm film Single System sound-on-film motion picture cameras manufactured in the 1940s through the early 1980s. Auricon cameras are notable because they record sound directly onto an optical or magnetic track on the same film as the image is photographed on, thus eliminating the need for a separate audio recorder. The camera preceded ENG video cameras as the main AV tool of television news gathering due to its portability–and relatively quick production turn-around–where processed negative film image could be broadcast by electronically creating a positive image. Additionally, the Auricon found studio use as a 'kinescope' camera of live video off of a TV screen, but only on early pre-NTSC line-locked monochrome systems.
The Arriflex 16ST, also Arriflex 16S, is a 16mm MOS production motion picture camera released in 1952 by ARRI. The camera utilizes a voltage of 8.4 volts DC
The Arriflex 235 is a lightweight 35mm MOS movie camera released in 2003 by ARRI.
The Arriflex 16BL is ARRI's first silent 16mm production motion picture camera, released in 1965.
The Arriflex 35BL is a 35mm motion picture camera released by ARRI in 1972.
Edmund DiGiulio was an American technical innovator who founded Cinema Products Corporation that developed the Steadicam, CP-16, and won multiple Academy Scientific and Technical Awards as well as the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his contributions to motion picture technology in 2001.