Background Information and Techniques - Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques - page 490

Table B.5 Film Formats
Film Width Notes

8 mm An old format, introduced in 1932, 8 mm is used for inexpensive home movies. Cameras for

regular 8 mm are no longer manufactured. Regular 8 mm uses 16 mm stock, which is recorded
on both sides after flipping the film in the camera. This allows the 16 mm film stock to be split
down the middle to produce two 8 mm reels. The frame is 0.192 0.145 00 . Super-8 was
introduced in 1965 as an improvement over regular 8 mm. The perforations (the holes in the film
stock used to advance and register the film) were made smaller and the frame size was
increased to 0.224 0.163 00 . The film was placed into cassettes instead of on the reels of
regular 8 mm film.

16 mm 16 mm is used for television and low-budget theatrical productions. It was introduced in 1923

and has a frame size of 0.404 0.295 00 .

35 mm 35 mm has been a standard film size since the turn of the twentieth century [ 19 ]. It first became

popular because it could be derived from the original 70 mm film made by Kodak. It is the
standard for theatrical work as well as television. The standard academy frame, the most
popular of several 35 mm formats, is 0.864 0.630 00 .

65 mm 65 mmwas the standard format for large-format cinematography. It is now gaining in popularity

in special-venue and “ride” films.

70 mm 70 mm film is often a blow-up print of 35 mm film, produced for improved audio, better

registration, and less grain of the release print. With better sound technology (e.g., digital) and
the advent of multiplex theaters with smaller screen sizes, there is less demand for this type of
70 mm film. However, IMAX uses 70 mm film (69.6 48.5 mm) that is run at 24 fps.

Some of the film sizes (widths) are listed in Table B.5 . Note that there are often several formats for
each film size. Only the most popular film formats are listed here. See the Web pages of Norwood [ 15 ]
and Rogge [ 19 ] for more information. With the rise of desktop video production, film is less of an issue
for home-brew computer animation, although it remains useful for conventional animation and, of
course, is still the standard medium for display of feature-length films in theaters, although even this
is starting to change.

Broadcast video standard
In 1941, the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) established 525-line, 60.00 Hz field
rate, 2:1 interlaced monochrome television in the United States. In 1953, 525-line, 59.94 Hz field rate,
2:1 interlaced, composite color television signals were established as a standard. The image is dis-
played top to bottom, with each scanline displayed left to right. 2:1 interlaced refers to the scanning
pattern, with the information on the odd scanlines followed by the information on the even scanlines.
Each set of scanlines is referred to as a field ; there are two fields per frame . This standard is typically
referred to by the initials of the committee—NTSC. Broadcast video in the United States must corre-
spond to this standard. The standard sets a specific duration for a horizontal scanline, a frame time, the
amplitude and duration of the various sync pulses, and so on. Home video recording units typically
generate much sloppier signals and would not qualify for broadcast. There are encoders that can strip
old sync signals off a video signal and re-encode it so that it conforms to broadcast quality standards.
There are a total of 525 scanline times per frame time in the NTSC format. The number of frames
transmitted per second is 29.97. There is a 2:1 interlace of the scanlines in alternate fields. Of the 525
total scanline times, approximately 480 contain picture information. The remainder of the scanline
times are occupied by the overhead involved in the scanning pattern: the time it takes the beam to