portion of the image was being used and magnification was increased, excessive grain and soft images plagued early widescreen presentations. Some studios sought to compensate for this by shooting its color pictures with a full aperture gate (rather than the academy aperture), and then reducing the image in Technicolor's optical printer. This process is a predecessor of today's Super 35 format which also uses a 1.85:1 ratio, but uses one-third more frame area than a standard 1.85:1 matted into a 4:3. Paramount took this concept a step further, using old Stein cameras from the 1930s which used a two-frame color format that was itself adopted from a 1902 three-frame color film process developed by Edward Raymond Turner. For the aborted early 1930s color process, instead of an image four perforations high, the camera exposed eight perforations (essentially two frames) consisting of one 4-perf image through a red filter and one 4-perf image through a green filter. In shooting VistaVision, the film was run horizontally rather than vertically, and instead of exposing two simultaneous 4-perf frames, the entire eight perforations were used for one image. This format is identical to the 135 film format used by 35 mm still cameras. Because of its peculiar horizontal orientation on the negative, VistaVision was sometimes called Lazy 8 by film professionals. This gave a wider aspect ratio of 1.5:1 versus the conventional 1.37:1 Academy ratio, and a much larger image area. In order to satisfy all theaters with all screen sizes, VistaVision films were shot in such a way that they could be shown in one of three recommended aspect ratios: 1.66:1, 1.85:1 and 2.00:1. The negative was "scribed" with a new form of cue mark, made at the start of each 2000-foot (610 m) reel. Similar in shape to an F, the cue mark contained staffs that directed the projectionist to the top of the frame for the three recommended aspect ratios. The projectionist racked their framing so that the staff touched the top of the screen (at the appropriate ratio) and the framing was set for the rest of the reel. On many home video releases these cue marks have been digitally erased. While most competing widescreen film systems used magnetic audio and true stereophonic sound, early VistaVision carried only Perspecta Stereo, encoded in the optical track. Loren L. Ryder, chief engineer at Paramount, expressed four general reasons he thought Paramount's VistaVision