I guess Cinerama had to continue on some how...

[Ed Gordon]

Yes, I did. Screen material is drapery blackout fabric, it's vinyl on one side with a fabric backing and a great 1.0 gain screen surface. Frame was constructed from 1x3 and 1x2 poplar, with the drapery fabric wrapped around it. Here's a photo showing the basics:

Vern, I used the same material to build my flat scope screen. Your curved screen looks more impressive than mine. Time for me to rebuild my setup. Getting the optimal curve into the the build would seem to be the greatest challenge.

[Vern Dias]

While my first experience with Cinerama was around 1956 or so (it took a while making it to Hawaii, where I grew up) at age 13 or so, my Dad was a theatre manager and I was no stranger to a projection booth. Most of the Consolidated Amusements theatres were equipped to the nines with 3 projector booths.

Waikiki Projection Room.jpg

As a side gig to my full time career (IBM) I did relief projectionist duty at three Cinerama theatres (Cinerama in Honolulu, Cooper in Denver and Minneapolis), all after the end of 3 strip and I suppose that curved screen experience never left my bloodstream. At 81 years of age, I still use my HT a lot and I still HATE black bars above and below the image. It's really nice to be able to show Ultra Panavision titles without those bars. In fact, the only two titles I have that require a slight side crop are "How The West Was Won" and "The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm" both of which on BD have an AR of 2.85:1. The lens stays in place and scaling to handle the various AR's (1.78:1, 2.00:1, 2.20:1, 2.40:1, 2.55:1, 2.76:1, and 2.85:1) are all done with PC's. I also still enjoy all the 3D titles I have.

[Ed Gordon]

...As a high school kid I sent a letter to the D-150 UA Corp in LA about buying the whole D-150 set up. D-150 had a local supply place in San Francisco on Golden Gate Ave. I guess they thought I was a movie theatre owner and they sent me a very nice ad cut out press kit with photos and literature. . I still have kept the cover letter and the D-150 install kit. My parents got mad at me ordering all these movie theatre information brochures. One of my first magazines I sent away for was BoxOffice Magazine It arrived every week and featured the 'Modern Theatre' section once a month. I still have many of these 1950/60 issues. They had a cut out post card you could send in for more information. I got a ton of things in the mail when I put 'Terry Theatres' in place of my name. My family thought I was crazy and they were worried movie theatre sales people would be ringing our doorbell. I should have gotten a PO Box. ...

Terry, your story reminds me of my youth. One day while riding my bike around downtown Seattle, I discovered "Film Row". On one city block there were all the major studios, theatre equipment vendors, and National Screen Service. From that point on I constantly bugged the adults with cars to take me there so I could bring there "garbage" back home. Posters, stills, film clips galore! My major score was three reels of the John Wayne movie, Jet Pilot..

When I talked my Boy Scout troop into showing movies in the auditorium of our school sponsor, I wrote a letter to National Screen Service and got a letter from them authorizing me to buy any advertising material I wanted. I still have those materials.

[Vern Dias]

Vern, I used the same material to build my flat scope screen. Your curved screen looks more impressive than mine. Time for me to rebuild my setup. Getting the optimal curve into the the build would seem to be the greatest challenge.

Yes, the key is to do the lens / PJ setup first. However, this really only works with a horizontal expansion anamorphic, and at shorter throws. Vertical compression anamorphics introduce a vertical bow.

However.... with the wonder of computers and open source software like warping shaders or products like the MadVR Envy ($$$) you could could actually conform the image to a curved screen without a lens.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

John Harvey had a very similar strip screen.in his home in Dayton. The difference was he had a complete Cinerama projection system and the films...

[Ed Gordon]

The only D-150 theatre I attended was at the UA 70/150 theatre in Seattle were they ran the Seattle premier of Star Wars:

This twin screen theater, which opened in 1969, was originally outfitted with the Dimension 150 process in the main auditorium and mono sound and a flat screen in the Cinema 70 auditorium. The original idea by United artists was that Cinema 150 would show Dimension 150 films and the Cinema 70 would be equipped for 70mm films. In point of fact, the Dimension 150 process used 70mm film but had amazing asymmetrical lenses for the left and right projectors, which were each over 2ft long. The lenses were manufactured by the Kollmorgen Company of Northampton, MA. The UA 150 was well known locally as the main theater that showed "Star Wars" for a year in 1977/78. The interior of the main auditorium was a large wooden framed roof with an equally massive screen.

In the mid-1990’s it was a second run house that had revival screenings on weekend midnights. UA let the theater get very run down and ultimately closed the doors in early-1992. It reopened on January 10, 1992 as 6th Avenue Cinedome. On February 5, 1995 UA reopened the theater as a discount house named Discount Cinema 150.

The theater was demolished in 2002 and the only thing remaining was the marquee (which has now also gone). An apartment complex is now on the site. “It’s a shame Paul Allen couldn’t have also saved this theater and restored it to it’s glory. Ironically it was just a few blocks from the restored Cinerama”.

Source: https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/4370

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[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The funny thing about my first post comparing the twin domes to the Get Smart thing is that the twin domes in my picture were privately owned and located just south of Ogden, Utah. They were called Cinedome 70 Theaters. I have more photos of that place to post. That property is now a car dealership. But I did get two of the 35/70 Westrex projectors out of there. Another Westrex ended up in the Cinema 6 lobby. Last operator there was Cineplex.

[Ed Gordon]

Yes, the key is to do the lens / PJ setup first. However, this really only works with a horizontal expansion anamorphic, and at shorter throws. Vertical compression anamorphics introduce a vertical bow.

However.... with the wonder of computers and open source software like warping shaders or products like the MadVR Envy ($$$) you could could actually conform the image to a curved screen without a lens.

Vern, I am a JRiver user and found this on there forum:

Projector Anamorphic Lens Support

Over the years there appears to have been several requests for flexible anamorphic lens support in the JRiver forums.

This has been partially addressed, however IMHO, it still could use some additional flexibility.

As JRiver has become an outstanding video media player with great 3D and 4K HDR support, I would hope this can be evaluated once more. Addressing this would mean I could use JRiver media player exclusively and eliminate my existing collection of media players.

Here is my situation where the current support falls short:

I have a home theatre projection setup that uses an anamorphic lens with a 1.5x expansion factor, rather than the more common 1.33x. My curved screen has a 2.70:1 aspect ratio. Before anyone mentions it, the lens is a commercial Isco DLP lens with a diameter is 8", the depth is 6" and it weighs a good 25 pounds. So a sled is out of the question.

In addition, I maintain a constant image height for all the common aspect ratio standard's that have been used over the years.
(1.77:1 (TV), 1.85:1 (Academy Flat), 2.00:1 (VistaVision), 2.20:1 (Todd-AO), 2.40:1 (CinemaScope), 2.55:1 (Early CinemaScope), 2.65:1 (Cinerama), and 2.76:1 (Ultra Panavision).

MPC-HC, VLC, PotPlayer, and Zoom player all support the ability to create custom aspect ratios for all the above formats to maintain a constant height and the corresponding width to restore the original square pixels which eliminates any distortion on the screen.

JRiver is the single exception.

JRiver comes close, with it's advanced aspect ratio correction options, except for the omission of an additional option that could look like this:

Desired Aspect Ratio Correction ratio x.xxx : x.xxx (fill in the blanks with your desired values).

This would eliminate this issue forever, no matter what anamorphic lens expansion ratio or monitor was being used.

Alternately, although not the perfect solution, you could possibly add one more choice to the existing options: 1.78 (Widescreen 16x9) to 2.70 Display.

Ideally, if I could ask for the moon, 8) I would really really really like the ability to create multiple zoom presets accessible from keyboard hot keys with independent X and Y scaling values as is done in the other software mentioned above.

However, I think the i and o keyboard zoom options would be a totally acceptable solution to the issue once the proper anamorphic lens correction has been applied.

Thanks in advance for any consideration.

TV Dias AKA movieman

Source: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/ind...topic=124128.0

[Vern Dias]

Vern, I am a JRiver user and found this on there forum:



Source: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/ind...topic=124128.0

Yep, that's my post. AFAIK, no action ever from JRiver on it, however.

Last I checked, JRiver allows you to only specify the zoom amount by percentages, whereas ZoomPlayer allows you to specify it by pixels.
JRiver also maintains a fixed relationship between amount of zoom in the x and y axis, Note, however that this is somewhat alleviated when using MadVR as it does have a parameter to specify the amount of horizontal expansion provided by the anamorphic lens.
Zoomplayer allows you to specify the amount of zoom in both the x and y axis independently.
MPV also allows separate x and y zoom parameters to be supplied. Although it also uses percentages, at least the percentages are not limited to integer values like in JRiver.

While I also have JRiver on my HTPC's I currently only use it when I need menu playback support. Zoomplayer is my daily use media player for playing physical media, mounted ISO files and MKV files.

I do use the MadVR beta with JRiver as MadVR is still state of the art for tone mapping with a much more configurable set of parameters, at least for my requirements. While JRVR, which uses the open source libplacebo code is close, MadVR is still noticeably more accurate, at least in my environment.

MPV is very flexible, but it is also tied the libplacebo for tone mapping. Although I have tested it extensively in the past, I currently only use it to play still photos in a slide show format.

I haven't tested VLC recently as it is also tied to libplacebo for tone mapping.

[Terry Monohan]

I have a D-150 lens question. I noticed some people on E Bay from time to time have a D-150 Kollmorgan Curvulon lens up for sale. It says It's for 70mm D-150 projection on the lens has no front extension cover tube. . I have seen other photos of a larger longer type D-150 lens that has a blue front wide cover that says in large letters D-150. Were there four types of lens made for D-150? 35mm flat, 35mm scope, 70mm and D-150 ?

Many people say the D-150 lens with the front long scope wide cover in blue weighed allot. The 70mm one on E Bay says It weight is 4 pounds.

. I hope to find for my movie collection the long heavy one with the blue ending tube one of these days. I only have 16mm Kodak projectors and a CinemaScope lens but still would like to have the D-150 type. I wonder if I can ever trace from the number printed on the lens what theatre it was used in.

[Ed Gordon]

Yep, that's my post. AFAIK, no action ever from JRiver on it, however....

Vern, I like JRiver, but they tend to ignore posts that they have no interest in.

My current projector has the ability to store lens positions so I have just two set up to execute at the push of a button. One is scope and the other flat. It works fine most of the time, but they are so many aspect ratios on discs these day. There is always some adjusting to do. The worst are the IMAX releases that switch between scope and flat several times during the movie. Oppenheimer and Top Gun for example.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have one of the Blue Super Curvulon lenses, and it's at least 25 pounds if not more. And yes, all the lenses were provided in sets for a given theater. Both 35 and 70mm. Pretty sure Kolmorgen made them. I actually tried projecting 70mm on a 50 foot wide screen some years ago using the lens. The prime lens was the wrong focal length, but you could see the way it distorted the image to compensated for the deep curve.

[Vern Dias]

Vern, I like JRiver, but they tend to ignore posts that they have no interest in.

My current projector has the ability to store lens positions so I have just two set up to execute at the push of a button. One is scope and the other flat. It works fine most of the time, but they are so many aspect ratios on discs these day. There is always some adjusting to do. The worst are the IMAX releases that switch between scope and flat several times during the movie. Oppenheimer and Top Gun for example.

The repeatability issues of the lens mechanical zoom / shift along with the fact the the screen illumination is different for flat vs scope and requires separate calibrations has always made this approach a non-starter for me.

The IMAX releases are all shot Scope-safe since the majority of theatres in the world are not IMAX capable and they run them at 2.40:1. I also run them at 2.40:1. Oppenheimer and Top Gun look fine in this mode as the top and bottom of the image are superfluous.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

To me, Scope inside of Imax makes as much sense as mixing orange juice in to your coffee! A total waste...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have a D-150 lens question. I noticed some people on E Bay from time to time have a D-150 Kollmorgan Curvulon lens up for sale. It says It's for 70mm D-150 projection on the lens has no front extension cover tube. . I have seen other photos of a larger longer type D-150 lens that has a blue front wide cover that says in large letters D-150. Were there four types of lens made for D-150? 35mm flat, 35mm scope, 70mm and D-150 ?

Many people say the D-150 lens with the front long scope wide cover in blue weighed allot. The 70mm one on E Bay says It weight is 4 pounds.

. I hope to find for my movie collection the long heavy one with the blue ending tube one of these days. I only have 16mm Kodak projectors and a CinemaScope lens but still would like to have the D-150 type. I wonder if I can ever trace from the number printed on the lens what theatre it was used in.

Terry,
That is the lens they provided for Standard 70mm projection. It says Curvalon, not Super Curvalon like the big lens does. It still looks brand new, so doubt this lens got used much, if at all, as it just looks like a regular spherical lens and it would offer no correction for the deep curved screen unlike the Super Curvalon lens does. I had a 70mm reel from Patton, and the film itself had no correction on it like Todd-AO tried to do. In D-150's case, the Super Curvalon lens did the deep curve correction.