I totally agree that 4-perf pulldown for 35mm widescreen is a total waste
of film stock and that by departing from that standard you can vastly
increase the picture quality.  This has been tried before.  If you look at
John Belton's book 'Widescreen Cinema' you'll find details of two or three
such systems which reduced the pulldown in order to increase the frame
area.  And of course there was also VistaVision, with horizontal frames and
an 8-perf advance - to all intents and purposes, a 35mm version of
Imax.  Getting back to vertical frame advance systems, the only one to be
used on any significant scale was Techniscope.  It achieved a 1:2.0 ratio
with a 2-perf pulldown in the camera, with release prints being made on
conventional 4-perf 'scope. The results were very impressive; I've seen
several features shot using this system that looked almost as good as
70mm.  The only Techniscope blow-up to 70mm I've seen is 'Chronicle of a
Death Foretold' (Francesco Rosi, 1988), and you would never guess that it
wasn't originated on 65mm negatives.

So I agree totally - departing from the W.K.L. Dickson standard but
sticking with 35mm film can achieve a vast improvement in picture quality
for a fraction of the cost of Imax.  The holy grail of conventional
projector design would be a variable intermittent mechanism - i.e. you can
set the number of perfs you want to advance the film on each
movement.  You'd also need a shutter system that could take account of
this.  Then you could have projectors that would pull down 4 perfs for
Academy and 'scope, 3 for 1:1.66 and 2 for 1:1.85, and no film stock would
ever be wasted.  But no-one has ever come up with such a system and I
suspect they never will because all the R & D money these days is going
into video projectors (oops, sorry, 'digital cinema').

But, however technically elegant MaxiVision is, you won't just be able to
distribute these prints to normal cinemas as is.  If MaxiVision have their
own projectors for hire and ready to go that's fine, but you'll have to
budget for that $280 per auditorium per night.

I tried looking at the page you linked to but their server seems to be
down.  As for labs, this might not be as big an issue as you seem to
think.  Continuous printers are just that - they don't care where the frame
line is.  Just as long as your film is 35mm wide and the perfs are in the
right place, any lab should be able to make simple contact dupes from a neg
to a pos.  Of course, optical effects which require the use of a step
printer (in which the film is advanced intermittently) would be more tricky
as that printer would need to be modified to cope with the non-standard
pulldown.  Why not ask your MaxiVision contact who he would recommend?

Point taken about quality of movement with 48fps, though.  When I advocated
going back to 16fps I was thinking purely in terms of persistence of vision
as generated by the projector, not the detail of motion as defined by the
length of time elapsed between the exposure of each frame in the camera.

Leo

Dr. Leo Enticknap
Director, Northern Region Film and Television Archive
School of Arts and Media
University of Teesside
Middlesbrough  TS1 3BA
United Kingdom
Tel. +44-(0)1642 384022
Fax. +44-(0)1642 384099
Brainfryer: +44-(0)7710 417383

----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite