Film format

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of...

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, most films were silent before the...

35 mm film is the basic film gauge most commonly used for both still photography and motion pictures, and remains relatively unchanged since its introduction in 1892 by William Dickson and Thomas Edison, using film stock supplied by George Eastman. The photographic...

VistaVision is a variant of the 35 mm motion picture film format created by Paramount Pictures in 1954 based on the Glamorama and Superama widescreen systems. Paramount, who did not buy into the anamorphic systems available, such as CinemaScope, looked for a more...

70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge, of superior quality to standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in camera, the film is 65 mm wide; for projection 2.5 mm are added along each outer side of the perforations for magnetic strips...

16 mm film refers to a popular, economical gauge of film used for motion pictures. Other common film gauges include 8 mm and 35 mm. 16 mm refers to the width of the negative. 16 mm film was introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1923 as an inexpensive amateur alternative to...

8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the filmstrip is eight millimeter wide. It exists in two main versions: the original standard 8mm film, also known as regular 8mm or double 8mm, and Super 8. There are also two other varieties of Super 8 which require...

Super 8 mm film, also simply called Super 8, is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older 8 mm home movie format, and the Cine 8 Format. The film is 8 mm wide, exactly the same as the older standard 8 mm film, and...

Digital film is a cinema production and performance system that works by using a digital representation of the brightness and colour of each pixel of the image. This allows much more flexible post-production in the digital domain than would be possible using analogue...

9.5 mm film is an amateur film format introduced by Pathé Frères in 1922 as part of the Pathé Baby amateur film system. It was conceived initially as an inexpensive format to provide copies of commercially-made films to home users, although a simple camera was released...

IMAX (short for Image Maximum) is a film format created by Canada's IMAX Corporation that has the capacity to display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film display systems. A standard IMAX screen is 22 m wide and 16.1 m high (72.6 ft x 52.8...

Single-8 is a motion picture film format introduced by Fujifilm of Japan in 1965 as an alternative to the Kodak Super 8 format. The company Konan (that developed the Konan-16 subminiature camera) claims in its history page to have developed the Single-8 system in 1959....

CinemaScope was a widescreen movie format used from 1953 to 1967. Anamorphic lens allowed the process to project film up to a 2.66:1 aspect ratio, twice as wide as the conventional format of 1.33:1. Although CinemaScope was shortly made obsolete by new technological...

Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146° of arc, and for the corporation which was formed to market it. It was...

In film, the term 3-D (or 3D) is used to describe any visual presentation system that attempts to maintain or recreate moving images of the third dimension, the illusion of depth as seen by the viewer. The technique usually involves filming two image simultaneously,...

Anamorphic widescreen is a video technique that utilizes rectangular (wide) pixels to store a widescreen picture into standard 4:3 aspect ratio. In its current understanding as a video term, it was originally devised for widescreen television sets with a 16:9 aspect...

Negative pulldown is a characteristic of motion picture film formats. It refers to the number of film perforations that each film frame occupies, as well as whether they are pulled horizontally or vertically. The most common film pulldowns are 4-perf and 3-perf, the...

Todd-AO is an extremely high definition widescreen film format developed in the mid 1950s. It was co-developed by Mike Todd, a Broadway producer, with American Optical Company in Rochester, New York. It was memorably characterized by its creator as "Cinerama outa one...

Kinemacolor was the first successful color motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith of Brighton, England in 1906, and launched by Charles Urban's Urban Trading Co. of London in 1908. From 1909 on, the process...

Circle-Vision 360° is a film technique, refined by The Walt Disney Company, that uses nine cameras for nine huge screens arranged in a circle. The cameras are usually mounted on top of an automobile for scenes through cities and highways, while films such as The...

High-definition (HD) video generally refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition (SD) video, most commonly at display resolutions of 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080i or 1080p). This article discusses the general concepts of high...

Techniscope or 2-Perf is a 35mm motion picture camera film format introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1963. The Techniscope format uses a two film-perforation negative pulldown per frame, instead of the standard four-perforation frame usually exposed in 35mm film...

Super 35 (originally known as Superscope 235) is a motion picture film format that uses exactly the same film stock as standard 35 mm film, but puts a larger image frame on that stock by using the negative space normally reserved for the optical analog sound track. ...

70 mm Grandeur film was a widescreen film format developed by the Fox Film Corporation and used commercially on a small scale in 1929-1931. It is technically very similar to the Todd-AO 70mm system, marketed from 1955 and still in limited use (albeit with significant...

Technirama is a screen process that was used by some film production houses as an alternative to CinemaScope. It was first used in 1957 but fell into disuse in the mid 1960s. The process was invented by Technicolor and is an anamorphic process with a screen ratio the...

Cinemiracle was a widescreen cinema format competing with Cinerama developed in the 1950s. It was ultimately unsuccessful, with only a single film produced and released in the format. Like Cinerama it used 3 cameras to capture a 2.59:1 image. Cinemiracle used two...

Univisium (Latin: "unity of images") is a proposed universal film format created by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC and his son, Fabrizio, to unify all future theatrical and television movies into one respective aspect ratio of 2.00:1. The proposed format...

Super Technirama 70 was the marketing name for films which were photographed in the 35 mm 8-perf Technirama process and optically enlarged to 70 mm 5-perf prints for deluxe exhibition. A few of the Super Technirama 70 films (including Circus World and Custer of the...

Super Panavision 70 was the marketing brand name used to identify movies photographed with Panavision 70 mm spherical optics between 1959 and 1983. During the late 1950s the Hollywood filmmaking community decided that changing from filming in the commonly accepted 35...

Polyvision was the name given to a specialized widescreen film format devised exclusively for the filming and projection of Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoleon. It involved the simultaneous projection of three reels of silent film arrayed in a horizontal row, making for a...