Viewing - Text 10
As a “table for editing or inspecting ... which free[d] every editor or inspector from the need to use a projector to view the film,”[1] the Lyta “advantageously replace[d] the ordinary projector, being both faster and easier to handle.”[2] It also made it possible to avoid the necessary loading and rewinding of the film inherent to portable projectors. At first the Lyta was an optical instrument, equipped with a magnifying glass “which magnified the image three times,”[3] and which made it possible to place the images upright on the editing table, level with the polished glass illuminated by the lamp and passing across the device horizontally. “As soon as the device [was] running, the inspector [saw] through the Kinoscope an image inclined at a forty-five degree angle, considerably enlarged and brightly lit.”[4]
As with the Moviola, the speed at which the film was transported could vary, right down to viewing it frame by frame or backwards as well as forwards. This variability was controlled either by two lateral cranks, which activated two reels attached to the table, or by a motor. The Lyta was thus highly dependent on the table on which it was installed. Nevertheless, the German manufacturer quickly produced a model directly incorporated into a table equipped with a stand on which the assembly sheets could be placed. This stand was also equipped with a panel of illuminated glass, positioned perpendicularly, on which pieces of film could be hung to see the images in them immediately.
Each of these two materially different devices was designed as a viewing system: the film was seen on them directly, illuminated and enlarged, without a shutter in the case of the Moviola, which gave the impression of seeing a kind of “streaming” effect, and, in the case of the Lyta, with “a shutter with slits [which] produce[d] a stroboscopic effect.”[5] The Moviola, apart from its great mobility, which the Lyta did not share – although the Moviola also quickly found itself “nailed down” in the cutting room –, had the advantage of freeing up the user’s hands by means of its electric pedal. The Lyta, on the other hand, had to be activated with a crank in order to set the reels in motion. [6] The Moviola also made it possible to take notes on the editing, but it was less practical than the Lyta when it came to immediately making a cut and a join.
Unlike portable projectors, these two devices were designed for solitary consultation of a film, fully in keeping with how editing was practised at the time. Nor were the Moviola or the Lyta content to serve only for monitoring and inspecting films, because the relative ease with which they made it possible to manipulate the film also facilitated the action of cutting and joining it, or at least the linking (in one sense or the other) of the three stages of editing: joining, cutting and viewing.