Tangible Media: Removable Storage of Image, Sound, Motion and Data
Tangible Media: Removable Storage of Image, Sound, Motion and Data
Tangible Media: Removable Storage of Image, Sound, Motion and Data
Frames
Movie Sound 8

Title:

Wrestling Thrills

Date:

c. 1948

Material:

Vinyl

Dimensions:

12 in. (30 cm)

Company:

Continental Products Corp.

Location:

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Sound-on-disc for 8 mm home movies ("home movies" meaning commercial films purchased or rented for home viewing). Invented by Lloyd Thompson of Continental Products Corp., this was the first technology to add sound to 8 mm films (Thompson 1947, 463–467). Sound was on a 12 inch record synchronized with the projector. The films were reduction prints of 35 or 16 mm films, which were projected at 24 fps. Since 8 mm projectors typically ran at 16 fps, Thompson managed the difference by skipping every third frame when the reduction print was created. When the resulting film was projected at 16 fps (2/3 of the original speed) the timing of the action was preserved. However, the soundtrack had to play at the original speed, so the soundtrack from the original film was recorded separately from the film on a 12 inch disc.

The user aligned a sync mark on the film with the gate of the projector. A 1000 Hertz tone at the beginning of the record started the projector, a Kodascope-8 customized by Eastman Kodak for Continental Products Corp.

The price in 1948 was $295 (Popular Photography 1948, 192). Approximately 1000 units were sold. The system was superseded in the 1950s by magnetic sound tracks for 8 mm. In fact, Lloyd Thompson went on to develop the first commercially released 8mm magnetic sound in 1952 (Hedden and Curtis 1961, 585—586).

The film is threaded with the dot in the projector gate.
A disc for a different movie: Maids and Music from Pictoreels with The Ingenues (the film is missing).
US Patent 2454491
References
⌃  Back to citationHedden, William D. and Kenneth Curtis. 1961. Early 8mm Sound Developments. Journal of the SMPTE 70, no. 8 (August): 585–589.
⌃  Back to citationThompson, Lloyd. 1947. The Movie-Sound 8 Projector. Journal of the SMPTE 45, no. 5 (July): 463–467.
⌃  Back to citationThompson, Lloyd. 1948. Method of reproducing sound motion pictures in synchronism with the picture and sound on separate media. US Patent US2454491, filed Nov. 11, 1945, and issued Oct. 23, 1948.