[photo-3d] Old 3D movies/Spacehunter

[ers <ers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure what print John R was talking about re Spacehunter, but I was 
working as a projectionist when this came out, and took a close look at the 
print and hardware in the projection booth (a rival theater had the film, 
because they had the small silver screen in a modified triplex for the 
polarized projection.) Essentially, the StereoVision (and there were other 
similar processes) took a 35mm frame and split it horizontally. This creates 
the illusion of a scope aspect film on the screen, but it's put up there with 
half the visual information (e.g. this is all that each eye can see when 
polarized and projected). There's no way this will equal the appearance of a 
real anamorphic print when projected. I've run 16mm prints thru an arc 
projector to fill a large screen, and Spacehunter had that grainy, soft, over 
enlarged look... It *is* like projecting a really wide 16mm movie (I realize 
I'm being a little imprecise re image-on-film sizes, but the analogy is very 
close). If there are surviving masters to convert Spacehunter to a dual 
anamorphic, it would definitely be fun to see. I'd always assumed that a lot 
of the non-SPFX footage was shot with a single camera using this split frame 
format, and that the SPFX shots were converted to the StereoVision split 
frame, but just a conjecture based on the economics of building the movie...