Cinerama™

Cinerama™ is the trademarked name for a widescreen theatrical film process developed in the 1950s that simultaneously displays images from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen. It was created in the same era as CinemaScope™ as competition for television viewers. Commercially developed by Fred Waller and Merian C. Cooper, Cinerama used three interlocked 35mm cameras to each photograph one third of a widescreen picture by shooting in a crisscross pattern. When projected in theaters, three projection booths are arranged in the same crisscross pattern as the cameras so that their three images are displayed as a single 2.65:1 widescreen picture.

Cinerama was one of the first theatrical processes to use multi-track magnetic sound; the picture was designed to be accompanied by a separate seven track stereophonic sound mag that played in sync with the three prints at either 135 or 146 1/4 feet per minute, instead of the 90 feet per minute of standard magnetic film.

Unlike the CinemaScope process, Cinerama did not have to be shot or projected through an anamorphic lens to achieve its widescreen aspect ratio and hence did not suffer from the image stretching inherent in the CinemaScope process. Cinerama, however, was an unwieldy and costly system to use, and most films produced using the Cinerama process were travelogues or collections of short subjects. Only two feature films with a traditional narrative story line were made, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won.

This definition/image is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html . It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinerama.

This illustration describes the projector configuration for theaters equipped to display Cinerama™ films. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The huge sound reels being recorded for Cinerama.