Re: how much of what we see is black?

From: Tom B Whiteside (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Oct 31 2007 - 12:27:35 PDT


Here is one reason a thread can last a bit longer than necessary - take a
simple mistake as "proof" and there you are, Debunk City!

>which after all, is not completely black: there's always an amount of
light coming through the celluloid.
>Another excellent point that debunks (or at least removes a leg
from) the fallacy that video is somehow different because "it is always
on."

If light was always coming through the celluloid then all films would look
like sections of Tom Tom the Piper's Son, the Ken Jacobs version. I call
that "image slip" but maybe there is a more widely used term - in essence,
the shutter is open when the film is being pulled down. (Camera or
projector, same thing - you can shoot "image slip" with an optical
printer.) This is not motion pictures as we know them. You do see motion,
but you can also see motion on the screen by having 50 people wave laser
pointers at it.

Is it not true that video projection (in all its many flavors) is "always
on," that light is continually coming through the lens?

It IS true that the film projector shutter cuts the light off and leaves
us in the dark for (roughly) half the time. Not just somehow different,
but fundamentally different.

        - Whiteside

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