History of film technology

The development of technologies for capturing, recording, editing, distributing, and exhibiting motion pictures, from optical devices and photographic film to digital cinema.

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Chronophotography: A photographic method that records successive phases of movement, often as multiple images on one plate. It turned motion into analyzable photographic sequences before cinema emerged.
Camera obscura: An optical device that projects an external scene through a small opening onto a surface. Its image-forming principle helped shape the history of photographic cameras.
Eadweard Muybridge: A British photographer known for sequential images that analyzed animal and human locomotion. His motion studies helped establish photography as a tool for recording movement.
CinemaScope: A widescreen motion-picture process that uses anamorphic lenses to record and project a wide image. It shows how studios used new image formats to compete with television.
Digital cinematography: The capture of moving images with electronic image sensors rather than photographic film. Its rise challenged film's role as the default recording medium.
Kinetoscope: A peephole viewing device that showed a moving-image film loop to one viewer at a time. It made motion pictures commercially viewable before shared projection became dominant.
Magic lantern: An optical projector that displayed images painted or printed on transparent slides. Its public image shows prepared audiences for projected visual entertainment.
Étienne-Jules Marey: A French physiologist and inventor who developed photographic methods for analyzing movement. His chronophotographic cameras advanced the recording of successive phases of motion.
IMAX: A motion-picture format using large film frames or digital systems for high-resolution, large-screen presentation. Its cameras and theaters pushed film capture and exhibition toward greater scale.
Photochemical film: A light-sensitive material that records images through chemical changes in an emulsion. It is the analog medium that digital capture largely displaced in production.