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Concept
Optical printer
Summary
An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film. The optical printer is used for making special effects for motion pictures, or for copying and restoring film material.
Common optical effects include fade outs and fade ins, dissolves, slow motion, fast motion, and matte work. More complicated work can involve dozens of elements, all combined into a single scene.
The first commercially available, although not mass produced, optical printer appeared in 1927 and was called the Depue & Vance Daylight Optical Printer. It was mainly used to reduce standard prints to 16mm and allowed for operation without a darkroom except for loading the positive film magazine. In 1918, the cinematographer Carl Gregory came upon a printer made by G. J. Badgley of New York, designed to produce copies of a standard film using domestic size film stock. Realizing the potential for news productions and special effects, he started designing his own optical printer meant for movie effects. Finished in 1928, and built by Fred A. Barber, it could be used in 16 different ways, like alongside fades, superimposition and multiple exposures. Linwood G. Dunn expanded the concept in the 1930s
by creating an optical printer that eliminated the necessity to create optical effects in the camera, and which was used in King Kong. These first optical printers had to be individually developed by each movie studio. During World War II he was commissioned by the United States armed forces' photographic units to design an optical printer that could be ordered as a stock item like a camera. Named the Acme-Dunn optical printer, it had several new features compared to its predecessors, but was not made commercially available for the movie industry after the war.
Development continued well into the 1980s, when the printers were now controlled using minicomputers. Prime examples of optical printing work include the matte work in Star Wars (1977), RoboCop (1987) and The Addams Family (1991).
Official source
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