Cinema Products Corporation was an American manufacturer of motion picture camera equipment.
History
The company was formed in 1968 by Ed DiGiulio, a former director and vice-president of the Mitchell Camera Corporation. Their first product was a Silent Pellicle Reflex conversion of the Mitchell BNC 35 mm Motion picture camera.
The company expanded into the 16-millimeter news camera market with the introduction of the CP-16. The CP16 was based on the film advance mechanism used in the older "Bach-Auricon" sound-on-film cameras, but reconfigured in a lighter, more ergonomic self-blimped body configuration. It became one of the most widely used sound-on-film cameras in the TV news industry until it began to be superseded by the color professional video formats of the late 1970s. (3/4 inch field decks and the early Betacam and M-format component analog tape systems.)
Academy Award
In the 50th Academy Awards, Garrett Brown and the Cinema Products Corporation Engineering Staff under the supervision of John Jurgens received a Scientific or Technical Award, Class I for the invention and development of the Steadicam.
Products
XR35
In motion picture equipment, the Mitchell BNC conversion to reflex was followed by the studio quiet XR35. The Cinema Products XR35 had a Mitchell NC camera inside a lightweight housing or blimp. The blimp was so close in size to the original camera, it looked small compared to the blimps made for Mitchell or Arriflex cameras. The XR35 was a crystal-controlled 35mm motion picture camera considerably lighter than the Hollywood studio–owned blimped Mitchells. The X stood for crystal, the R for reflex. The reflex system was based on a spinning mirror shutter. During the mirrors' revolution at one point the film would be exposed, then the operator would view the image in the mirror as the film was advanced to the next frame, at 24 times a second. Cinema Products did their best to buy up all available 35mm Mitchell NC cameras on the market as the XR went into production. Later, Cinema Products sold their remaining Mitchell inventory to a Japanese company when the XR35 was challenged by competitors but still selling well.
In 1972 Panavision and Arriflex came to market with their lighter-weight 35mm cameras. Panavision's Panaflex and the German Arriflex 35BL-I. These cameras were not blimped in the sense they had a camera in a housing; these cameras were designed from the ground up to be quiet.
The light and ergonomic Arri 35BL-I gave European film makers (and eventually the American "Brats"), the ability to shoot studio-quality (double system) sync sound movies, but faster, on real locations – and even handheld – and with smaller crews and support equipment. (Due to the limited resources of the 1940s and 1950s the Italian Neo realists and French New Wave had evolved around the approach of shooting wild synch or "Noisy-synch" and then completely post-replacing all sound and dialog.) In America, The Panaflex became the industry standard motion picture camera, displacing the Mitchell legacy.
GSMO
The studio quiet 16mm Cinema Products GSMO was introduced in the mid-1970s. It had quick loading coaxial magazines, an 'in camera' light meter viewable in the eyepiece and an on-camera battery. The GSMO stood for "gun sight man operated". (Cinema Products would often develop products under government contracts, then adapt them for industry wide marketing.)
The GSMO was popular among documentarians and low-budget independent producers. Jon Jost produced feature films shot with the GSMO. The PBS documentary film Post No Bills was also shot by Clay Walker using Jost's GSMO camera.
The GSMO had crystal speeds of 12, 16, 24, 25, 32, 48, 64 FPS. Besides the standard 400-foot magazine, the GSMO offered a novel and rare 100-foot magazine. The 100-foot mag was the height of the camera, so the camera with mag would be only 5 inches tall. The GSMO did not have video assist, a way of viewing what the cameraman was seeing on a video screen. TV commercial producers and directors wanted video assist, and the GSMO fell behind the competition in that feature. (After-market video assist is now available for the GSMO).
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Rare lens
During pre-production for the 1975 film "Barry Lyndon", director-producer Stanley Kubrick had a requirement for a large aperture "high speed" cine lens to facilitate shooting scenes by candlelight. At the time, the largest aperture "fastest" cine lenses available for reflex 35mm cine cameras had a f1.4 aperture. High Speed (also called "Super Speed") f1.2 prime lenses were not available at the time.