Max Penner

I met with Max Penner one day in August, in my office in Real D. I first met Max something like 20 years ago, when he was working for Ed DiGiulio at Cinema Products. He was designing special camera equipment for Ed in those days.

Over the years Max has become one of the leading stereoscopic cinematographers and designers of stereoscopic cameras. The term of art that’s used in the field is “rig,” to denote two cameras, or two camera heads, in some kind of a contraption that provides a means for taking stereoscopic moving images. Max makes various kinds of rigs along with other people in the field like Steve Schklair, Jason Goodman, Vince Pace, and Steve Hines. One common type of rig was first designed, or at least first patented, by Floyd Ramsdell, and it’s often called a Ramsdell rig. There’s a drawing of it here to show you how it works. I’ve taken it from Ramsdell’s original patent.

Foundations available for download

My book Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, the original definitive book on the subject, is available for download at the Stereoscopic Virtual Library.  In this book I first enunciated the guiding engineering principal for stereoscopic 3D system design–the principal of binocular symmetries.