Interestingly, the proposed but never realised Standard 8mm optical sound system
also involved stealing a bit of the picture area.Home 9.5 16 Multi-gauge 17.5 28 Pix Miscellany
9.5mm Sound
Click Here for The Lost Chord - my history of trying to improve 9.5 sound.
Click Here for Silent to Sound - about conversion of silent machines to sound. Some sound-on-disc material.
Click Here for Pathé Vox - about my long history with the Vox and Super Vox.
Click Here for Cinegel Royale, an interestingly different approach to 9.5/16 sound.
One problem with 9.5 sound was that the soundtrack stole some of
the picture area. Obsessed as they were with claiming that 9.5 used the maximum
possible percentage
of the total film area, and that its picture size compared well with 16mm,
Pathescope carried this approach thru onto sound films (see pic). The result was
a very square format for 9.5 sound, yet it was not to be that long before the
professional cinema was rapidly disappearing over the horizon in quite the
opposite, letterbox, direction. The French arm of 9.5, however, went for a more
rectangular picture, no doubt as being aesthetically more pleasing, even if it
did "waste" some of the film area above and below the image - an early form of
"black bars"?
Interestingly, the proposed but never realised Standard 8mm optical sound system
also involved stealing a bit of the picture area.
Here is a superb pic of the sound film dimensions from McKee's "Home Cinema".
Some dimensions for other gauges can be found near the end of Big Brother 1 and now in Film Standards.
Here for those interested in such things is a circuit diagram for a Vox amplifier, plus an even more technical thing about valve voltages.
Ugh!
