Imperfect Spectrum - A Brief History of Cinecolor (2022)

[@peliculasperdidasyencontra5059]

Excellent film about the early days of color cinema. Many of Monogram Studios films utilized this unique process. Thank you for all your hard work in making this film!!!

[@DaveTexas]

This is fascinating! I didn’t know much about CineColor, so thanks for making this video. Super CineColor films really do look great. The process was just so complicated, though, and the eventual use of single-film processes made these old multi-film processes unnecessary and more expensive, I suppose. I got my undergraduate degree in TV/Film production and went on to get a Master’s degree in photography - all back in the days of film. I learned quite a lot about the invention and early development of color film processes, but I never learned much about CineColor. My film history courses pretty much only talked about Technicolor. It’s so interesting to learn about Technicolor’s competitors.

[@russarnold8737]

Great job, Jack!

[@sf-jim8885]

I have several 35mm Cinecolor™ films in my collection. Color has remained reasonably good, considering their age. The main issue I had is that before I acquired them, they had been tightly wound on 2" plastic cores, for probably over 20 years. This made the last 50-100ft of each reel almost impossible to focus, since the inner and outer layers of emulsion had been subjected to a slightly different radius from being stored on the small cores. My solution to the problem was to store them in a "reverse wrap' condition, on the same plastic cores, which reversed the orientation of the 'inner' and 'outer' emulsions. It took about 7 years, but this eventually got the emulsions 'bent' back into registration enough to make the last few minutes of each reel watchable. They are now stored 'tails out' on 4" lab cores, which you can get on special order. The cyan colored sound-tracks do reproduce better on some sound readers than others - - but my experience has been that most of the newer laser diode sound heads handle it well.

[@hectormanuel8360]

Great documentary

[@unigonfilms99]

Some of the clips you showed were amazing! I'd love to see "Prehistoric Women" and "Riders to the Stars" looking as good as they do in these clips on Blu-ray or DVD.

[@thephotoplayer]

Stay tuned!

[@jeffmissinne3866]

THIS. IS. JUST. PLAIN. WONDERFUL. THANK YOU!!!

[@etpadgett3266]

I hope more CineColor films get released on Blu-Ray!

[@Sludge73]

Very well put together. Thanks for sharing.

[@PogieJoe]

Very informative! Thank you!

[@emilsuda4101]

Oh Jack! Great documentary on all accounts. Would be great to go back into time and see a actual feature in the theatre in the Cinecolor process. By the way, I do have your JACK AND THE BEANSTALK.

[@joshgalka9414]

Nice!

[@johnjdevlin2610]

Informative and entertaining. Fantastic! Thanks for the enjoyable walk down memory lane.

[@elietedarce1266]

I would like to see two things in a documentary: 1-How orthochromatic film was treated to get sensible to red for create color experiments before 1922 (introduction of panchromatic stock). I heard about expose the film to hidrogen and also heard of use dyes. But how can dyes help if it can only filter light? If the orthochromatic film was 8% sensible to red, compared to panchromatic, it would take a lot of ligh to expose the film using dyes to compensate the low sensibility to red. If it have some few sensibility to red, the technicolor (3 color) camera could not get very pure color separation records. 2-Explanation how George Melies could do dissolves on camera, if the camera was so primitive. He count how many hand moviments he did with the cranck, and revolve the film, covering the lenses, to expose it again, but for dissolves he need to gradually increase and decrease exposure, and both exposures needs to match. Even Hubrick did dissolves on camera, but even for moderm camera sound difficult, and the takes can't fail, since if one of both fail, the other need to be redone.

[@antoniod]

Note TOR JOHNSON in "The Lady in the Iron Mask".

[@srfurley]

I didn’t know that there had been a three colour version. I have handled a few Cinecolor 35 mm and 16 mm prints, and wondered about the soundtrack and how it was able to use a dye image rather than the silver of Technicolor or the dye plus redeveloped silver of Eastmancolor. I read somewhere that the blue/cyan toning was done using an iron compound which absorbed strongly in the infrared, and so could be read with conventional incandescent exciter lamps and infrared sensitive photocells unlike the cyan dye tracks introduced in recent years which required projectors to be converted to red light readers.

[@davidwesley2525]

Fun Fact " Poor Cinderella " Starring Cartoon Icon Betty Boop "1934 " Was Betty Boop's Only Color Cartoon Produced by the Fleischer Brothers Max & Dave Produced in Cinecolor. 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

[@aaendi6661]

"Pride of the Blue Grass" was the sequel to "Pride of the Green Sky" in 2-strip Technicolor.

[@spookylemon4947]

Fabulous

[@elietedarce1266]

The Prince of Thieves 1948 was shot on Cinecolor, but there is some footage that was colorized by WestWing Studios, to look like the rest of the film. I wonder why? Was the camera negative missing one reel?

[@thephotoplayer]

@@elietedarce1266 That is exactly what happened.

[@elietedarce1266]

@@thephotoplayer So, just a B&W print survived for this reell... No original cinecolor print left, I presume. Despute be cinecolor, We can see the skin tones looks much better in the cinecolor than in the colorized reel. I wonder if is possible go use computer colorization to make 2 color cinecolor looks like 3 color technicolor. Instead of fully colorize, they could just add the extra color channel. This Gobin Hood film would be perfect, getting the greens to the Sherwood forest.

[@elietedarce1266]

This nice documentary missed the chance to show how cartooms for supercinecolor was shot. The camera needed to have red, green, blue film strips, to avoid use Eastman color negative and so avoid overduplication. How was this camera??? It could not be a technicolor, due copyrights.

[@thephotoplayer]

@@elietedarce1266 Sequential exposure through filters on one strip of black and white film.

[@elietedarce1266]

@@thephotoplayer Like Disney did for technicolor. But the first few Disney technicolor cartoons used the live action technicolor camera with prism & filters and 3 film strips, and later was replaced for a single strip sucessive exposure by filters. Wonder if the cinecolor 3 color cartoon camera version was a exact copy or just based on the same principle.

[@elietedarce1266]

How the red negative side, after developed ant toned, can be re-sesitize???

[@thephotoplayer]

@@elietedarce1266 The silver ferrocyanide that is left over after the cyan pass is converted to silver bromide. The silver bromide layer is not particularly sensitive to light, except when surrounded by ferric ferrocyanide (Prussian blue), which is what the toner for the cyan has developed. When pre-flashed, in conjunction with the blue toner, and extra photosensitive pass is possible.

[@elietedarce1266]

@@thephotoplayer Amazing... the film strip became a lab and a production facility. So mang strps. That's why the final priing got quite some dirt, monochrome and color dirt after so many steps. The Eastman dupes, dissolves and fades, was so pooor in early versions, that we get impression the duplication stocks was really worse than shooting and print stocks for grain, sharpness and contrast. For other side, B&W fine grain duplication stocks was getting good at 1950's.

[@jeffkreines2737]

Loved it. Beautifully explained. More, please!