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CinemaScope 55 debuts at the Regent Theatre Melbourne with Carousel in 1955

What is a CinemaScope 55 – Big Negative High-Rez image

Cin­e­maS­cope 55 was a large-for­mat version of Cin­e­maS­cope introduced by Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Fox in 1955, which used a film width of 55.625 mm.

Fox had introduced the original 35 mm version of Cin­e­maS­cope in 1953 and it had proved to be commercially successful. But the additional image enlargement needed to fill the new wider screens, which had been installed in the­atres for Cin­e­maS­cope, resulted in visible film grain. A larger film was used to reduce the need for such enlargement. Cin­e­maS­cope 55 was developed to satisfy this need and was one of three “high-de­f­i­n­i­tion” film systems introduced in the mid-1950s, the other two being Para­mount’s Vis­taVi­sion and the Todd-AO 70 mm film system.

Fox determined that a system that produced a frame area approximately 4 times that of the 35mm Cin­e­maS­cope frame would be the optimal trade-off be­tween performance and cost, and it chose the 55.625 mm film width as satisfyingly that. Camera negative film had larger grain than the film stocks used for prints, so there was a consistent approach in using a larger frame on the film negative than on prints. Since the image area of a print has to allow for a sound­ track, a camera negative does not. Cin­e­maS­cope 55 had different frame dimensions for the cam­era negative and struck prints.

The negative film had the perforations (of the CS “Fox-hole” type) close to the edge of the film and the camera aperture was 1.824" by 1.430" (ap­prox. 46 mm x 36 mm), giving an image area of 2.61 sq. inch. This compares to the 0.866" by 0.732" (ap­prox. 22 mm x 18.6 mm) frame of a modern anamor­phic 35 mm negative, which provides a frame area of 0.64 sq. inch. On the print film, however, there was a smaller frame size of approximately 1.34" x 1.06" (34 mm x 27 mm) to allow space for the 6 magnetic sound tracks. Four of these sound ­tracks (two each side) were outside the perforations, which were further from the edges of the print film than in the negative film; the other two sound tracks were between the perforations and the image. The pull-down for the negative was 8 perforations, while for the smaller frame on the print film, it was 6 per­fo­ra­tions. In both cases, however, the frame had an aspect ratio of 1.275:1, which when expanded by a 2:1 anamor­phic lens resulted in an image of 2.55:1 – Contributed by Greg Lynch –