Multi-image

[1] Others, such as L. Frank Baum had a traveling show (1908) that included slides, film, and actors describing the Land of Oz.

Creating and presenting multi-image productions involved a relatively large number of specialized skills, equipment, and facilities to produce.

During the height of multi-image, a number of types of businesses were directly engaged in the industry which employed thousands of specialists that ranged from producers and designers, writers, artists, typesetters, photographers, photo lab technicians, audio technicians, programmers, staging specialists as well as others associated with these disciplines.

A professional organization, the Association for Multi-image International (AMI),[4] was created and had numerous active chapters around the world.

These roles generally involved the activities similar to those found in other media industries, such as creative, visual, and technical directors, producers, production managers, and writers.

Multi Image systems equipment were developed by Arion, Audio Visual Laboratories, Clear Light, Dataton, Electronics, Multivision, and Spindler and Sauppé.

Phototypesetting was done by a variety of means including the Visual Graphics Corporation PhotoTypositor[8] and the Compugraphic EditWriter[9] at companies that specialized in providing typography.

The audio track of a multi-image show provided a framework for the timing of the presentation and for the sequencing and animations of the slides.

These were produced generally on 1⁄4-inch audio tape on multi-track tape recorders such as models by Crown, Fostex, Otari, Sony, Tascam and TEAC, which allowed for having two tracks or channels for stereo sound and one for the synchronization or click track which was used to encode and playback the signals for the dissolve units.

The synchronization signals could be as simple as multiple pulse tones, each with a unique corresponding command, to digital telemetry, directly addressing a programming computer such as an AVL ShowPro V or a Spindler & Sauppe Director 24Z.

Sometimes the guard track would be a third audio channel, such as sound effects or mix-minus narration, to permit flexibility of mixing on-site.

In such situations, the tape might be processed with Dolby or dBx noise reduction to help prevent audible spill from the synchronization track.

In early productions, audio editing of the music or voice-over was done manually to create a scratch track, usually with a cutting block and tape.

With MIDI, the audio portion of the productions could be designed around the requirements of the project, made quickly, and allowed for more complex media integrations.

Completed artwork was copied under top lights on a pin-registered camera on a high contrast film such as Kodaline or Kodalith to create 35mm mattes used in the optical slide printing process.

A compound could move left to right (horizontal) X-axis and top to bottom (vertical) Y-axis movement as well as rotate (theta-axis).

Control strips were run with the film and read on a densitometer to determine their variation from a standard so that corrections could be made The use of computer graphics replaced much of the manual activity in creating the artwork and converting the art into slides.

Service bureaus offering production work from large workstations such as Dicomed and Genigraphics[13] dominated larger markets.

With these tools, the programmer would then place the trays on the corresponding projectors and listen to the sound track and program the designed action for each slide to create a final show.

Depending on the number of projectors, slides and length of the show, the programming process could take from a few hours to days, weeks and sometimes months to complete.

Programming of a multi-projector multi-image show was generally done on one of several systems such as Arion, Audio-Visual Laboratories (AVL), Electrosonic, Clearlight,[15] Dataton,[16] UAV, Spindler-Sauppe and Multivision.

Completed multi-image productions were presented in a variety of venues ranging from temporary one-on-one settings to semi-permanent world's fair pavilions and museum exhibitions.