Talk:Multiplane camera

Japanese Multiplane Camera
I just finished a research paper on the premiere of 'Snow White' and the invention of the Multiplanar Camera, and I had assumed that it was purely an American idea. But check out this video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyGvGMa2RFg

Amazing, isn't it? A Japanese cartoon with a 3D background! That was 1933, the same time that Ub Iwerks was apparently using his nifty camera. Does anyone know any background about this? It would be neat to add an international element to the article, even just to show that not all cartoons of the time were Fleischer, Disney, or Schlesinger. I feel the information might be imbedded in Japanese language websites, which I can't venture into.

Response? It would be sad if this were overlooked, especially with such knowledgeable people out there. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 137.22.100.185 (talk) 23:37, 27 March 2007 (UTC).

I had a look - it doesn't look like a multiplane shot, rather just cel overlays, where parts of the forest are panned at a different speed. To be true multiplane, the cels need to be spatially separated, and I couldn't see that (in the admittedly blurry video). --Janke | Talk 18:09, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed (very belatedly!) - this is multiple planes of artwork overlaid on a flat surface with the animation cels sandwiched between. Still pretty ambitious and technically complex for its day, but not true 3d. Lee M (talk) 03:15, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

stereoscopic
Multiplane cameras do produce a stereoscopic image, but -- as Norma Desmond might say -- it's the camera that's not stereoscopic. This sentence needs to be rephrased, but I can't think of how to do it at the moment. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 21:03, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Unless you use a 3-D camera, the result is not stereoscopic; for that, you need separate, different images for left & right eye. --Janke | Talk 06:09, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Complexity
The article does not address the technical complexity of the multiplane camera. Not only does the motion of every single plane need to be calculated for each shot, but in most cases one or two of the planes also has animation cels overlaid on top which must be inserted, located in place and subsequently removed without jiggling any of the planes out of alignment. In order to maintain the maximum depth of field (not a consideration with flat animation boards) the camera aperture would have needed to be stopped down, necessitating longer exposure times which could cause the cels to warp under the hot lights. This would have been exacerbated by the successive-exposure technique, by which each frame would have been shot three times, once each through red, green and blue filters, for Technicolor.

There is, for example, a shot in the Fantasia outtake Claire de Lune which lasts approximately 80 seconds, or over 1,900 frames. It includes cel animation, on approximately the third plane from the camera, of a walking and flying crane, complete with ripple and reflection effects in the early part of the shot. The multiplane effects encompass complex 3-dimensional camera movement with changing speeds and angles as the camera tracks the bird's movement. I don't know how long it took to achieve that one shot, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took weeks. Lee M (talk) 03:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Lee, you could yourself add a bit more concise version of the above text in the first paragraph to the page! Best regards, --Janke | Talk 06:36, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Who "invented" the multiplane?
I reverted a couple of edits, Reiniger's camera was not a proper multiplane with individual control of the levels, just glass layers, which were not movable. This method had been used before, e.g. by Norman Dawn, and even earlier... --Janke | Talk 11:52, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Why is the movability of the layers necessary to qualify? Just because the Disney studio's and later cameras had this feature doesn't necessarily make it a defining characteristic. Unless there's some sort of authoritative definition, it seems like any camera using images on multiple planes ought to qualify as a "multiplane camera". Magic9Ball (talk) 01:53, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
 * The problem is that it is impossible to know who first used two or more sheets of glass in front of (or below) a camera. Iwerks and Fleischer built controllable planes, while the Disney studio camera was the first that was actually named "Multiplane". --Janke | Talk 05:22, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

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