[HN Gopher] How Technicolor created Ruby slippers without using ...
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How Technicolor created Ruby slippers without using color film
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-08-05 10:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| ballenf wrote:
| Article references the debunked claim that the Wizard of Oz was
| an allegory about the gold standard.
|
| Or was that debunking debunked? Hard to keep up.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| There is a depressingly large body of technology attached to
| movie film and we'll be living with it for some time (especially
| aspect ratios).
|
| Probably just best to stick to Cinerama and be done with it.
| ghaff wrote:
| To say nothing of terminology.
|
| 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.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| In addition to the whole rigamarole of terms for film
| editing.
|
| Product idea of the day: Telecine for Cinerama.
|
| Now that I think of it, I wonder if the Cineon people ever
| thought about Cinerama.
| Animats wrote:
| _Probably just best to stick to Cinerama and be done with it._
|
| Right. This is Cinerama.[1] Widescreen the hard way. Three 35mm
| cameras, three projectors, and a lot of alignment.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/vrzjdlyZCD8
| khazhoux wrote:
| Article is a bit disappointing.
|
| 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.
| readbeard wrote:
| It seems Gizmodo might have gotten even that wrong. According
| to this (much more informative) page [0], I think they were
| dyed cyan (so dark areas absorb red), magenta (dark areas
| absorb green), and yellow (dark areas absorb blue). The Italian
| Wikipedia article also contains a helpful illustration [1]
| (missing on the English one unfortunately).
|
| [0] http://www.digital-
| intermediate.co.uk/examples/3strip/techni...
|
| [1]
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor#/media/File:Techni...
| paulmd wrote:
| Yup, it's largely similar to the technique used by Prokuin-
| Gorskii for his photographic survey of Russia around 1900. He
| was using wet plates for still images rather than film for
| movies - but same idea. Take three monocrhome images, one of
| each primary color, and project them back together and you'll
| have a full-color image.
|
| 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).
| klodolph wrote:
| Color film works the same way, actually. Color film is "just"
| made up of three layers of monochromatic film, stacked on top
| of each other. There are color filters between each layer to
| filter the light. With color positive film, these layers are
| removed during processing.
|
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| Why is this the order it must be in? The order of
| wavelengths of light passing would be: green -> blue -> red
| ? Doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Can you explain?
| klodolph wrote:
| Yeah, sorry, I mixed it up. It's been a while since I've
| actually done this. You scrape off yellow first (leaving
| blue), then magenta (leaving cyan), and finally cyan.
| Finnucane wrote:
| According to 'Making Kodak Film' by Robert Shanebrook,
| the blue emulsion layers were on top, the red layers on
| the bottom (the acetate side), and the green in the
| middle. There was a yellow filter layer under the blue
| emulsion. All of the various layers of chemistry were
| applied to the acetate backing in one pass.
| titzer wrote:
| Perfect summary.
| samatman wrote:
| As an aside, the silver color of the slippers was load-bearing,
| if we accept Littlefield's theory about Baum slipping some sly
| allegory into the story.
|
| 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...
| crooked-v wrote:
| Stage and film lighting even with improvements today is
| blazingly hot. I can only imagine what a nightmare it must have
| been to work under equipment of the time with triple the normal
| lighting.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| "Technicolor cameras didn't film in color. Instead they filmed in
| black and white, with different filters."
|
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Ehh, they recorded onto three film strips at once, each a
| grayscale representation of one color, then dyed each one and
| combined them. I totally get what you're saying, but I feel
| like the sentence you quoted is a reasonable interpretation of
| that. At least they explained what they meant by it.
| sib wrote:
| I guess... But it's sort of like saying "digital cameras[1]
| don't record in color, they record in greyscale," which is
| technically true, but also misses the point. By the
| definition they are using, even color film doesn't really
| record in color.
|
| [1] Other than the minuscule # of Foveon sensor cameras.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _As anyone who has seen an old Technicolor film knows, it looks
| weird. Blue eyes look like they glow. Pink faces look like they
| 've been painted peach. Red looks scary. It all looks dyed, not
| recorded... It's also why most early films nearly cause eyestrain
| -- especially the famous film The Wizard of Oz_
|
| 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.
| rrauenza wrote:
| I believe they meant eyestrain for the actors - not the
| audience. I think the paragraph got kind of mixed up.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| That's not how I read it since they mentioned actual eye
| damage for those on the set a bit later:
|
| _Many regulars on The Wizard of Oz complained of eye damage
| from the studio lights, that lasted years._
| tablespoon wrote:
| > This video is unavailable
|
| Youtube unlisted video purge strikes again?
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970?hl=en
| sxp wrote:
| This is a horrible article since it talks about color and images
| but lacks illustrations. I suggest something like
| https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-technicolor-defini...
| or YouTube videos on the topic since a color picture is worth 3 *
| 1000 words.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > a color picture is worth 3 * 1000 words
|
| 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...
| w0mbat wrote:
| Article confuses "filter" with "lens".
|
| 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
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I found this short 8-minute video to be a good explanation of
| that era:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EG7kfllFEI
| ghaff wrote:
| One of the probably underappreciated aspects of digital is that
| it makes what would have been considered extremely low light
| photography and film-making a few decades ago almost
| effortless. See what Kubrick did for Barry Lyndon candlelit
| scenes.
|
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This progress is also why new films look so badly lit. The
| state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques
| built for times when you had to do a whole lot to get your
| vision across. The same things with cameras that have much
| better dynamic range and low light performance and you can
| easily notice (and not unsee) "oh look it's a bunch of actors
| on a soundstage in front of a green screen" or "where is that
| light coming from".
|
| 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)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _This progress is also why new films look so badly lit._
|
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I found the lighting in the Hobbit to be particularly bad
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJciz3dneaA (there is
| another clip I thought was a little more clear, but the
| lighting in this one is just cartoonish)
|
| 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.
| extrapickles wrote:
| The tech were the actor is surrounded by bright LED
| displays showing the virtual set works much better than
| green screen as the actor now gets somewhat correct
| lighting. It also allows for shinny clothing to have the
| scene correctly displayed on the costume.
| crooked-v wrote:
| This video has a lot of examples:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk
|
| 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'.
| acomjean wrote:
| Still photography too. In the Early 90s I did some college
| newspaper photography. We'd push our "400iso" film to 1600 by
| changing the processing, which worked but made it grainy.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| My personal experience is almost entirely with stills.
|
| > 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| I think it's interesting what people consider to be
| "naturalistic" color representation--the sensitometry and
| psychovisuals behind why Velvia 50 is considered to have
| exaggerated colors, while something like Kodachrome 64 is
| considered to be more natural, is a bit complicated.
|
| 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.
| brudgers wrote:
| My semi uninformed understanding is that Velvia's color
| is biased for the rather overcast conditions often
| occurring in Japan.
|
| Color is always opinionated. But so is black and white.
| chiph wrote:
| For those that grew up the 70's, the Land of Oz theme park still
| exists, but is only open once a year, coming up in mid-September:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSnco3K0K7o
|
| https://www.landofoznc.com/
| Causality1 wrote:
| _It all looks dyed, not recorded -- and that 's because it was._
|
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And plenty of color processes add dyes during development (most
| famously Kodachrome), yet I don't think people would call
| kodachrome "not color film" or claim that it "doesn't record
| color"
|
| [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.
| one_off_comment wrote:
| > _Technicolor film was not color film_
|
| Well, it was _technically_ color...
|
| ;-) I'll see myself out.
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