How Technicolor created Ruby slippers without using color film
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
There were various generations of the Technicolor system over the years, each system comprising special movie cameras (which could only be rented), film, and complicated film processing and printing. The early systems used two color layers, the later ones had three.
By the time "The Wizard of Oz" was made, they were on Process 4, AKA 3 strip Technicolor.
The effective ASA of the system used on that movie (taking into account filters and beam splitters) was 5 ASA, hence the need for very bright lighting.
For a more informative article on the shooting of that movie see this article. https://ascmag.com/articles/beyond-the-frame-wizard-of-oz
As an undergrad in the late 70s, even B&W up to about 1600 ASA/ISO was pushing things and required special chemistry. For color you really wanted to shoot ASA 25 Kodachrome if you could. Could reasonably go up to about ASA 100 Ektachrome in subsequent decades. And could push things to maybe 400/800 with significant compromises.
These days a full-frame DSLR can hit 6400+ without breaking a sweat. Probably higher with the newest equipment.
I was being "filmed" for a documentary a couple of months back and the lighting was just some LED soft boxes.
Also manual focus, when shooting basketball and concerts was challenging as the depth of field is quite small. You quickly realize the price of a lens wasn't soo much the focal length (200mm) but increased rapidly depending on much light it let in.
But back to color. Some of those slide films from the 60s and 70s rendered color quite accurately/vividly. I went to a slide presentation and someone was showing slides and I guess I was a little stunned and you associate certain decades with a "look" that may have been a limitation of print film at the time.
> I went to a slide presentation and someone was showing slides
Different slide emulsions definitely had different looks. I always found Kodachrome very naturalistic and it was my go to until good ISO 100 Ektachromes came out, especially the warmish ones. Many nature photographers really liked Fuji Velvia for its somewhat exaggerated saturation--it and KC25 had about the same working film speed--but I never liked the look of Fuji film myself.
Velvia 50 had, among other properties, a higher Dmax (maximum density / deepest black) than other slide films at the time, which allowed it to be shot differently, at a lower EI. Overexposing slides washes out the colors, so this difference alone accounts for some of Velvia's reputation for rich colors.
There were also differences in the sensitizing dyes. These differences are a bit more complicated than what you can capture in an RGB model, so when people try to replicate Velvia's look by increasing the saturation in an image editor, it generally fails. You can't just create an ICC color profile or Instagram filter for Velvia. Other "vivid color" films often tried to achieve more saturation by adjusting the sensitivity curves instead, which creates a very different look from Velvia 50.
People are also used to seeing films which are specifically designed to give a certain look to lighter skin tones. A lot of work went into making people, specifically white people, look "good" in standard consumer films and certain lines of professional films.
Color is always opinionated. But so is black and white.
The original star wars looks so much better now than the rest of the films because it was real people in real places and you’ll find that theme all over. Green screen looks bad because you just can’t believably light people in many environments any more without painstakingly painting every frame but very talented artists. (gollum in lotr was done quite well most of the time)
Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops.
It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.
I'm pretty sure it's the exact opposite.
Watch old films and the nighttime scenes are... almost cartoonishly lit. Like there are hidden floodlights everywhere, or just filmed in straight-out daytime but underexposed.
Whereas modern film and TV looks far closer to reality. I don't know what you mean at all that the "state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques". If you've been on the set of a modern film or TV production, the state of the art is, well, state of the art. The lighting would be unrecognizable to someone from 30 years ago.
Can you give an example of a scene in a new movie you consider to be badly lit because of old "habits and techniques"?
Green-screen is a totally different situation, because it didn't exist before. But even there I think you're making a mistake with comparison to Star Wars. Have you watched The Mandalorian? Because that's current state of the art, and it's stunning. The environmental lighting is real, and the technology they use to achieve it is utterly amazing.
I just learned about what they're doing at the Mandalorean (and it seems they're the first to do this?) and it really is stunning.
So I think it's fair to say that physical lighting has gotten much better (not worse), but that digital composition allows us to create scenes that were never even attempted in a previous era, but that introduces new lighting problems... but that we're making progress on fixing those too, for the best of all worlds!
I think that's what the issue is, newer films especially HDR, high frame rate... the actors don't seem immersed, everything is being done to hide the fact that it isn't reality and "everything" doesn't work very well. Like mediocre practical effects would lead to a better experience than advanced CGI.
Contrast this with the first few minutes of Netflix's Godless, which has possibly the best example of HDR capability I've seen, imho. The scene is extremely low lit, but visible, and intermittently gets fully illuminated by lightning.
Not sure I've got a point here, other than as impressive as the new technology is, there's something culturally special about the nighttime horse riding scenes, visible clouds and all.
the process used three color dye transfer printing process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9S76vtk4Ro
incredible how complicated the machinery had to be to achieve that
Summary: Technicolor filmed simultaneously on three B&W films after passing through color filters. Each film strip was dyed red, green, blue, and the three were overlaid for the final film. Set lighting had to be extra bright. The ruby slippers were actually silver in the books.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=color&st=grid&co=prok
Kind of a fun fact is that in a sense we use this same idea today for digital photography - modern camera sensors are almost entirely[0] monochrome, so we put a tiled color filter in front of the sensor, which makes each pixel pick up a different color (like the 3 colors of the film strip), and then we digitally reconstruct full color at all pixels from the individual colored-monochrome pixels. So it's basically just a 3-strip image, but shot on the same image and digitally reconstructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_filter_array
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
[0] the exception is Foveon sensors which actually do have three sensors at each "pixel", stacked on top of each other. The problem is this generally has lower resolution than an equivalent Bayer filter-based sensor - however somewhat offset by a relative lack of moire due to the higher color resolution. Most (but not all) Bayer sensor cameras use an antialiasing filter (optical low pass filter) over the sensor to combat this - which costs some resolution (eg Sony A7 vs A7r - the base model has the moire filter and the R doesn't, but the R model gets almost twice as much resolution).
If you have a knife, you can scrape off the color layers in order. Starting from the emulsion side (the side which is less shiny), you'll scrape of the magenta layer first, then the yellow, and you'll be left with cyan on the bottom.
It's always in this order, due to the physics of how film works.
Although fun fact some of the early Minolta digital SLRs (“RD-100”?) actually did have three separate sensors, and also interestingly they used telecompressors to “resize” the image down to the smaller sensor so that the lenses effective focal length didn’t get super long on the tiny sensors they could cost-effectively produce in 1993. And this also somewhat mitigated the loss of light from having to split the light across multiple sensors.
Interpreted this way, the yellow brick road is the gold standard, the silver shoes are the Silverite 16-to-1 exchange ratio of silver to gold, and Oz? Abbreviation for ounce.
Evidence that this was Baum's intention is... thin, but I've always liked it. For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...
[0] http://www.digital-intermediate.co.uk/examples/3strip/techni...
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor#/media/File:Techni...
This is not exactly right. Because of the human eye's varying sensitivity to different wavelengths, the actual number is somewhat smaller. It is estimated that a color picture is in fact worth 2,780 words.
https://ceciliavision.github.io/graphics/a6/images/human_vis...
That's kind of semantics. It used a mechanism for capturing 3 color channels, red green and blue. The fact that this wasn't fully integrated into the film itself, via chemistry, is really irrelevant.
The technology was fairly crude and unwieldy compared to using color film, which itself is pretty unwieldy compared to filming digitally. But saying it wasn't "filmed in color" is, to me, simply false.
[1] Other than the minuscule # of Foveon sensor cameras.
A common example (also having to do with color) is "the color magenta doesn't exist." Yes it does, it is simply a non-spectral hue. "Magenta lasers don't exist" would be true, but less attention getting.
I never found technicolor (The Wizard of Oz, in particular) to be terribly unnatural or hard to watch due to bad coloring. Is this a common perception?
The colors in the film are quite vibrant and I wish I could have been in a theater for the original release to experience the big reveal from black and white to color. That must have been amazing for those that were experiencing color film for the first time. (this wasn't the first color film, but it was an early color film)
I've seen the film in a theater, but I don't know how close modern prints are to the original release, maybe they've fixed up the color.
Many regulars on The Wizard of Oz complained of eye damage from the studio lights, that lasted years.
This is wrong. Technicolor looked unrealistic because of insufficient technological development, not a weakness inherent to the method. The camera in your smartphone uses a very similar color-filtering technique to produce accurate colors.
[edit]
Reading more about how Process 4 technicolor worked, the exposures caused varying thicknesses of gelatin, for each primary color, and the dyes were then transferred onto film via a mechanical process. This is different than the e.g. the Kodachrome process where the developer reacts with the exposed silver to form an insoluble dye.
Youtube unlisted video purge strikes again?
Probably just best to stick to Cinerama and be done with it.
While "clapping" is still sometimes legitimately used when there is separate audio recording, terms like "Speed," "B-roll," etc. are definitely rooted in film stock.
Right. This is Cinerama.[1] Widescreen the hard way. Three 35mm cameras, three projectors, and a lot of alignment.
Or was that debunking debunked? Hard to keep up.
Well, it was technically color...
;-) I'll see myself out.