Posted on 09/14/2012 6:49:33 PM PDT by lowbridge
There is not much of a plot –goldfish in bowl –but the scene and others from the same rolls of film were revealed on Wednesday as the earliest colour moving images ever made in a discovery that does nothing less than "rewrite film history".
The National Media Museum in Bradford said it had found what it contends are truly historic films from 1901/02, pre-dating what had been thought to be the first successful colour process –Kinemacolor –by eight years.
"We believe this will literally rewrite film history," said the museum's head of collections, Paul Goodman. "I don't think it is an overstatement. These are the world's first colour moving images."
The films were made by a young British photographer and inventor called Edward Turner, a pioneer who can now lay claim to being the father of moving colour film, well before the pioneers of Technicolor.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V0Vc5iRoLY
The color is really good in that. Hard to believe it is that old.
The color looks much too good as well as the movement. This looks like the 24fps that became standard later. I can’t say it’s a fake but it does look very good for its time.
Gosh! Look at the hats and ribbon sashes! The boys’ outfits are great, too.
I came across, years ago, of a pic of my uncle when he was really little (1930’s). Little sailor suit, hat, and long, iron-curled locks. It was a HOOT!
TCM got a hold of it?
:p
The reason it’s so good after so long is that the images are black-and-white. Unlike colour images on film that are created using dyes, black-and-white images consist of grains of silver so they’re not subject to fading; properly processed and stored black-and-white images can last for centuries without fading. The colour is reproduced by projecting the film through filters which can be replaced when they fade.
Includes footage of primitive ancestor of NBC peacock. :)
It’s real and was done with filters; costly and considered a waste of time.
Per post #6, the reason it looks so good is that the frames themselves are black-and-white images that are not prone to fading. There was a very popular colour process for still photos from this era called Autochrome that employed the same principle; Autochrome plates were black-and white plates with colour filter "pixels" on the surface that also produced excellent colour rendition.
One of the reasons the colour reproduction was so good was that they used what's known as the additive process which is also used in video screens. The additive process works by mixing varying amounts of red, green and blue light to produce the desired colour. These systems were implemented by taking photos of the same scene through red, green and blue filters, then projecting those images through the same filters. The advantage was near-perfect reproduction of colours as the filters used for the exposures were the same ones used for viewing, but the drawback was that the photographer had to make three separate exposures then align three projectors, or in the case of Autochrome they sacrificed resolution because of the lattice of filters over the image.
Modern colour films (and colour inkjet printers) reproduce colours using what's known as the subtractive process. Instead of combining red, green and blue light to form the image, it works by starting with white light and using dyes to remove varying amounts of red, green and blue light. Yellow dye blocks blue light, magenta dye blocks green light, and cyan dye blocks red light. This is why you cannot print a colour image on black paper with an inkjet printer, because the white light is provided by the paper. The advantage of the subtractive process is that a high-resolution colour image can be created with a single exposure, because the surface of colour film has three layers of these dyes. There are several drawbacks, though, due to the fact that the dyes are not a perfect match to the original colours; the orange-pink background of colour negatives is a very complex and not-quite-perfect workaround for this. Also, because the dyes are organic chemicals formed during processing and are prone to decay, they are subject to fading (filters used in additive systems can be more easily engineered for stability and in some systems can be replaced), and worse still, the different dyes fade at different rates causing the colours to shift as the images fade. This is why most old colour photos look so awful; at the time they were printed they were almost as good as photos taken today on colour film.
In the case of the film in the article here, for cinema they rigged a system where successive frames of the film were alternately exposed through red, green and blue filters then projected through the same filters. Mismatches between the filters and the frames could produce some rather bizarre results.
A lot to take in on a Friday nite, but I’ve copied it for later and thanx.
Can you tell I was a photofinisher in a previous life?
No doubt!!
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks lowbridge. |
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Gloom....I really wanted to see the video.
Leni
BTTT, Thanks!
I particularly loved seeing the period clothes of the participants in the swing scene..
Leni
When I told folks walking up to inquire whether I was doing a photo-documentary they were surprised when I explained the process and couldn't believe the camera was actually black and white and that filters could make a dramatic difference.
The camera is about 2.5” x 4.2” x 7.8”, weighs about six pounds and is separate from the recorder to which the camera is attached using a six-foot video cable. In total, the combination weighs about 20 pounds and was quite a load.
I've gone through about seven subsequent recorder cameras and each produces better results; but, I still remember fondly the early days but still wouldn't want to revert from our era with stick it in your shirt pocket convenience.
Thanks for the wonderful explanation that triggered this memory.
Yep, today’s still and video cameras still use filters on each pixel. The breakthrough came in the 80’s when they managed to place microscopic filter lattices on the video pickup tubes, enabling the production of colour cameras with a single tube- previous cameras had a beamsplitter and three tubes, one for each colour, and were costly and a beast to maintain.
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