Super Panavision 70

Super Panavision was a film recording process for 70 mm wide screen films introduced in 1959 .

background

Super Panavision was largely identical to Todd-AO . The picture was taken on a 65 mm film negative with a spherical lens . The frame rate was 24 frames per second. A 70 mm film copy with six magnetic sound strips and a 35 mm film copy could be made from the negative . The aspect ratio was 2.21: 1 for the 70mm film and 2.35: 1 for the 35mm film. In addition to the impressive image width in 70 mm roadshow presentations, the reduction to the 35 mm film with a high image quality awaited.

Super Panavision was introduced by Panavision as a direct competitor to Todd-AO . Panavision already had some experience in manufacturing camera lenses. With its own anamorphic lens, the 35 mm Cinemascope recording process was practically replaced by 20th Century Fox and MGM developed its own anamorphic 70 mm film with the Camera 65 . Since 20th Century Fox only claimed the Todd-AO format for itself, Panavision wanted to rent its own spherical process to other film studios from the start. United Artists , Columbia , Warner Bros. and MGM used Super Panavision several times. Some productions in Super Panavision were also presented in 70 mm Cinerama such as " Grand Prix ", " Ice Station Zebra ", " 2001: A Space Odyssey ", " Krakatoa - The Greatest Adventure of the Last Century " and " Song of Norway ". Here the picture format 1: 2.2 was cached to 1: 2.6 in order to be able to show it Cinerama-like.

Since 1963, films that were anamorphically recorded on 35 mm Panavision or 35 mm Cinemascope have increasingly been enlarged to the 70 mm film format. Although the 35 mm film copy from Super Panavision still provided a far better image quality than a blow up , the 65 mm negative film made production much more expensive than a normal 35 mm film negative. Super Panavision with its cumbersome cameras was limited to large-scale productions. The last films made entirely in Super Panavision were The Master by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2012 and Murder on the Orient Express by Kenneth Branagh in 2017.