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Mitchell Camera ~ 1954 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM); from Industry on Parade
🕑 Added 2020-01-22 03:17:02 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'LIGHTS, ACTION, CAMERA!
Mitchell Camera Corporation, Glendale, California
Assembly and design of Mitchell cameras -- about 200 units per year...'
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Camera
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Mitchell Camera Corporation was founded in 1919 by Americans Henry Boeger and George Alfred Mitchell as the National Motion Picture Repair Co. Their first camera was designed and patented by John E. Leonard in 1917, and from 1920 on, was known as the Mitchell Standard Studio Camera. Features included a planetary gear-driven variable shutter (US Patent No 1,297,703) and a unique rack-over design (US Pat No 1,297,704). George Mitchell perfected and upgraded Leonard's original design, and went on to produce the most beloved and most universally used motion picture cameras of the Golden Age of Hollywood under the name of The Mitchell Camera Company. The company was first headquartered on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, then building a new factory in West Hollywood and moving there in 1930, and finally moving operations to their final factory location in Glendale, California in the 1940s.
Mitchell Camera Corporation was privately and quietly purchased in mid 1929 by William Fox of Fox Film Studios, just before the Great Depression began, though George Mitchell continued working with the company until he retired in the 1950s. Although William Fox had lost control and possession of his own Fox Film Studios and theaters empire in March of 1930, he apparently quietly retained possession of the Mitchell Camera Company, as William Fox's two daughters still owned the Mitchell Camera Company when the company closed operations and ceased in the late 1970s.
Mitchell Camera also supplied camera intermittent movements for Technicolor's Three-Strip camera (1932), and such movements for others' 65mm and VistaVision conversions before later making complete 65mm and VistaVision cameras (normal and high speed).
Mitchell also made a pin-registered background plate projector with a carbon arc lamphouse which was synchronized with the film camera. One of the first MPRPPs (Mitchell Pin Registered Process Projector) was used in Gone with the Wind. Two- and three-headed background projectors evolved for VistaVision effects.
George Mitchell received an Academy Honorary Award in 1952. The Mitchell Camera Company received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1939, 1966 and 1968...
Models
Mitchell Standard 35mm camera - The original Mitchell rackover pin-registered studio camera, introduced in 1920 as a hand-cranked silent film camera. (The rackover device allowed the camera portion with its side-mounted viewfinder to be "racked over" upon its base by turning a handle on the rear of the camera base. By racking to the right, the operator would focus the lens upon a ground glass element seen through the viewfinder. By racking back to the left, the camera with its film would be brought into position to record the view of the now focused lens. This standard model came with a 4-lens turret, a matte box on rails mounted to the front of the camera, and options included a veeder film footage counter, behind the lens iris, 4-way adjustable frame mattes, automatic or hand dissolve, internal matte disk with 9 pre-cut mattes including 1/2 frame, circles, keyhole, binocular, and oval. Various improvements and available options on this model took place over subsequent years, including a frames-per-second film speed meter, addition of a side-view parallax finder with upright view, various electric motors including variable speed, constant speed, and synchronized motors. The talking pictures introduced in 1926 soon required this somewhat noisy camera to run quieter with the so-called "silent" film movements, and soon thereafter a higher-speed "silent" movement and follow-focus devices were made available...
