Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Vitaphone System (1926)

This film excerpt shows how the Vitaphone system worked. This is The Voice from the Screen presented by Edward B. Craft from Bell Telephone Laboratories. It was presented for the first time before The New York Electrical Society on October 27, 1926.

From Wikipedia:
Vitaphone was a sound film process used on feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects produced by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the sound-on-disc processes. The soundtrack was not printed on the actual film, but was issued separately on 16 inch (40 cm) and, later, 12 inch (30 cm) phonograph discs recorded at 33 1/3 rpm, a speed first used for this process. The discs would be played on a turntable indirectly coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone process. The name "Vitaphone" was created from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound". It was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical soundtracks and did not use discs.