Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Disney Field Sizes

A quick note regarding Disney field sizes: I see so often that someone - e.g. a gallery - notes that a drawing was made on 12 Field Disney paper. This is not the correct way of indicating sizes, as at Disney, until 1984, the standard sizes were 5 Field and (from the mid-30s) 6 1/2 Field, corresponding to ACME sizes 10 1/2 and 14.44 Field, which are 10 1/2 and 14.44 inches wide respectively. Thus, the smaller, standard size used for all earlier drawings should be called a Disney 5 Field, but can be referred to as 10 1/2" (ACME) Field. The larger size is the Disney 6 1/2 Field, or 14.44" (ACME) Field.

Calling something a Disney 12 Field would be very wrong. It would indicate a drawing area that is 28.88 inches wide! For proper conversion, see the converter boxes in the right sidebar!
You can find more info on the sizes used in some of the technical manuals I posted (much) earlier and on my separate page on this.

Suffice to say here that the ACME sizes refer to the width of the drawing area, so a 10 Field is 10 inches wide. The hight is then determined by the aspect ratio chosen. The Disney sizes were not calculated this way. An imaginary Disney 1 Field is 0 (zero) inches wide. They seem to in some way have been determined by the camera stand itself, at a very early stage.

[Addition: the paper size is, of course, somewhat larger than the drawing area it is named for, leaving some space on all sides, and room for the peg holes in the bottom (or top).]

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Robert Cowan says...

An excellent article! I don't know how many times people have incorrectly described the field size in auctions, etc. While they provide some general guidance as to the relative size (newer vs. older 2-hole sheets), there is quite a bit over variance in size. Thanks for putting this into perspective.
--Bob

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 2:59:00 PM PDT  
Anonymous Hans Perk says...

Thanks, Bob - I wanted to also refer to my fields and pegs page, but it is on a server that is down until some time Friday - the reason my private email isn't working either. Check it out after Friday, May 2nd, 2008, though...

Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 3:40:00 AM PDT  

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