The development of motion-picture technology during the silent-feature era was largely incremental. Increasing standardization and quality control brought filmmakers' tools up to a professional level undreamed of in the short-film era. Yet this very standardization acted as a brake on the introduction of radical technical innovations. The intermittent surges of mechanical progress that mark the early cinema were hardly in evidence. The major exception to this trend, the development and introduction of the sound film, would eventually bring the silent cinema to an abrupt halt. But this work was carried on far from the silent stages and was of small consequence at the time to practitioners of silent filmmaking. Thus, in a 1926 paper for the American Academy of Political and Social Science, P. M. Abbott, vice-president of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, divided motion-picture technology into five distinct process areas: manufacture of raw stock, studio machinery, laboratory equipment, material required for film exchange operations, and theater apparatus. Sound films had no place in his picture of cinema technology. 1
In Abbott's view, raw-film manufacture was a straightforward situation that could "be dismissed in one paragraph," since it essentially duplicated the process involved for still photography.
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