Television scanning of wide frame motion picture films

Method of television scanning in television format of wide-field format motion picture films, in which digitalized television signals are produced line by line by means of an array of sensors on which the entire width of the film frames are projected with compression of the frames in width, comprising the steps of:

• expanding every motion picture frame horizontally by a first factor by writing said signals for each frame successively into a first intermediate store and reading correspondingly selected portions of each line of said frame out of said store at a slower picture point rate than the writing-in rate without change of line rate;
• writing said portions of lines of each frame, read out from said first intermediate store, into a film frame store;
• reading a set of lines of said frame store constituting a first of two television interlaced fields out of said film frame store and then performing the same step for the set of the remaining lines of said frame store constituting the second of said two interlaced fields out of said frame store each said set of lines thereby constituting a half-picture field of the same frame;
• expanding each said half-picture field horizontally by a second factor after storage of signals in said film frame store by selecting corresponding portions of all lines of each said field and reading said selected line portions of each said field out into an external circuit, and
• during repeated performance of the foregoing steps, varying from time to time the line portions selected in one or both of the steps in which portions of lines are selected, at intervals not shorter than the frame transfer interval for the first expansion step and at intervals not shorter than the field transfer interval in the case of the second expansion step, for horizontal shift of the picture portion to be reproduced after subsequent readout into said external circuit.