On 06/08/2018 03:12 PM, `Richard Knoppow wrote:
�� It always amuses me to see some teen age looking "expert" talking
about something done long before his birth.
�� The Technicolor company dates back to the teens. The three founders
beside working on the color process that eventually became Technicolor
also had an engineering consulting company. They advertised, among other
places, in QST, the magazine of the American Radio Relay League,
offering services to custom design equipment for radio amateurs. Kalmus
has written a couple of historical articles published in the Journal of
the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. They had a real
struggle to establish their process in Hollywood. I have trouble
sometimes remembering names and have lost the name of the short subject
they made to introduce the three-color process but the first _feature_
was Becky Sharp.� I have seen the first reel of the original print. At
the time the rest of the movie existed only as a later reprint on an
awful process called Cinecolor. I understand that someone has managed to
find the entire movie in Technicolor.� It was a complex process
requiring great care in ever step. Tech had trouble keeping their prices
competitive.� I was told the reason the dye transfer printing process
was eventually discontinued was the the equipment at the Cole Ave plant
just wore out and it was no longer economical to continue it.� IMO the
quality of later Technicolor prints were much inferior to the process up
to perhaps the 1950s, probably due to increasing the speed of the
machinery and some environmental limits on the dyes used.� BTW the first
process was actually a four color one with a gray key. I have heard
conflicting dates for the discontinuance of the key from Technicolor
executives I spoke with� years ago. I think they have gone when Tech
discontinued the three-strip color separation cameras and began to make
prints from multi-layer color negative film.
�� The dyes used in the old process are less fugitive than those in
multi-layer film and have survived much better. The camera originals
from the three-strip days (up to about 1951) are, of course, silver
black and white and are quite long lived. The problem with both the old
prints and old negatives is that they are on nitrate film base which has
not survived well, plus it shrinks and becomes distorted. Enough. There
is a tremendous amount of history of both the process and company on the
web for those who are interested.
On 5/29/2018 1:23 AM, Richard Lahrson wrote:
Here's a short take on Technicolor and the Wiz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqaobr6w6_I
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