The Death of Tinting
Lincoln Spector
common practice died with the silent film for technical reasons. The tints
interfered with the soundtrack.
That makes sense, except that a lot of early talkies were released
sound-on-disc, where it wouldn't make a difference. I would guess that in a
situation where the two technologies were competing against each other, the
one that could supply the old, beloved tints would have done so.
A few months ago, I got a kind of confirmation of this. I saw a restoration
of When a Man Loves, a pre-Jazz Singer Vitaphone feature released in early
1927 with a recorded score (but basically a silent movie). There were plenty
of tints.
What I'm wondering is whether any early Vitaphone talkies, including
possibly The Jazz Singer itself, had tints. I've seen it in a new 35mm print
a few years back, and there were none.
On a related subject, I know there was limited use of tints in the late 30's
and into the 40's--The Sea Hawk and Mighty Joe Young had tinted sequences,
and of course the opening of Wizard of Oz was sepia. How did they keep those
tints off of the soundtrack. Did they use something like dye transfer?
--
Lincoln Spector
Journalist, Columnist, Humorist
lin...@dnai.com
www.thelinkinspector.com
norm...@pacbell.net
infrared region. The conventional photocells are very sensitive in that
region. In fact, the el cheapo Apollo 16mm sound projectors use a
barely-glowing nichrome wire as the exciter.
Recall, also, that the cyan soundtracks on the CineColor films are inferior
because the dye is not nearly as opaque to infrared as is the silver
image--which would remain on a tinted print. Although, I suppose the tint
could be restricted to the image area if that were desirable. I think
toning still leaves a metallic image so there would have been to reason to
discontinue that practice, either. In fact there were sepia talkies now
that one thinks of it.
My guess is that the increased realism of talkies made tinting and toning
seem an affectation. The more abstract nature of the silent, monochrome
image gave the added color an atmospheric effect.
Norm Lehfeldt
"Lincoln Spector" <lin...@dnai.com> wrotf:
Peter
>>
On a related subject, I know there was limited use of tints in the late 30's
and into the 40's--The Sea Hawk and Mighty Joe Young had tinted sequences, and
of course the opening of Wizard of Oz was sepia. How did they keep those tints
off of the soundtrack. Did they use something like dye transfer?
>>
Lippert's "Rocketship X-M" (1950) also used tinting, for the "Martian"
sequence. I believe tinted base was used. The remainder of the feature was B&W.
The dreaded "The Angry Red Planet" ... credited as "The New Eastman 5250" ...
simulated tinting using a combination of conventional printing and so-called
"solarization".
Incidentally, Osa Massen, the female lead of "Rocketship X-M", was once a G/F
of my uncle.
Richard Lanham
I have read about the tinting supposedly interfering with the sound all the time, but
what I read about first was the splicing problem.
Each scene that was tinted was an individual section of film. All scenes needing the
same color were tinted together. The different scenes were then spliced together to make
a reel. The splicing was said to be done at the film "exchanges."
This was fine when no sound was on the film, but when that started, there would be a
large noise everytime a scene changed as the splice went across the sound pickup. So it
was irritating as well as laborious.
I could be wrong on this, but I think about that time the duplication methods (printing)
changed (to optical printing?) and so it was probably a lot less work to just duplicate
a full reel and be done with it.
Rick, waiting for corrections
norm...@pacbell.net
the splicing was done at the exchanges.
Norm Lehfeldt
Richard Lanham <lanh...@REMOVEearthlink.net> wrotf:
Richard Lanham
> Hadn't thought of this before. Makes a lot of sense, although I doubt that
> the splicing was done at the exchanges.
I had to look for a while to find where I read about the films being assembled in the
exchanges. It's on page 62 of James Card's book "Seductive Cinema."
"Silent features, before they went to the theatres, were assembled not in Hollywood or
New York, where the pictures had been produced, but rather in film exchanges of the
towns in which they were to be shown.... Each office, or exchange, employed dozens of
women whose job it was to assemble positive prints from the rolls they would receive
from the studio. Those rolls would be separated according to the tints: amber, blue,
red, green and sepia rolls would come into the exchange, and the girls, using cutting
continuities they would get for each different feature, would splice the film according
to the script they received.
"Every film that was projected in a theatre then would be filled with scores of splices
- splices that could not be tolerated once sound tracks became part of the release
prints."
He then, on pages 63-64, lists page 8 of the tinting continuity (19 pages total) for a
Tom Mix film.
Of course, Mr. Card may not be totally correct.
Rick
norm...@pacbell.net
Thanks, Rick.
Norm
Richard Lanham <lanh...@REMOVEearthlink.net> wrotf:
William Hooper
>It's common knowledge (or common myth; I'm not sure which) that tinting as a
>common practice died with the silent film for technical reasons. The tints
>interfered with the soundtrack.
>
>sound-on-disc, where it wouldn't make a difference. I would guess that in a
>situation where the two technologies were competing against each other, the
>one that could supply the old, beloved tints would have done so.
>
>A few months ago, I got a kind of confirmation of this. I saw a restoration
>of When a Man Loves, a pre-Jazz Singer Vitaphone feature released in early
>1927 with a recorded score (but basically a silent movie). There were plenty
>of tints.
>
>What I'm wondering is whether any early Vitaphone talkies, including
>possibly The Jazz Singer itself, had tints. I've seen it in a new 35mm print
>a few years back, and there were none.
>
>and into the 40's--The Sea Hawk and Mighty Joe Young had tinted sequences,
>and of course the opening of Wizard of Oz was sepia. How did they keep those
>tints off of the soundtrack. Did they use something like dye transfer?
Optical sound didn't kill tinting.
There was a discussion about this not too long ago in alt.movies.silent
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=20010613013141.23716.00004177%
40ng-df1.aol.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26selm%3D20010613013141.23716
.00004177%2540ng-df1.aol.com
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Christopher Snowden
>
> I had to look for a while to find where I read about the films being assembled in the
> exchanges. It's on page 62 of James Card's book "Seductive Cinema."
>
> "Silent features, before they went to the theatres, were assembled not in Hollywood or
> New York, where the pictures had been produced, but rather in film exchanges of the
> towns in which they were to be shown.... Each office, or exchange, employed dozens of
> women whose job it was to assemble positive prints from the rolls they would receive
> from the studio. Those rolls would be separated according to the tints: amber, blue,
> red, green and sepia rolls would come into the exchange, and the girls, using cutting
> continuities they would get for each different feature, would splice the film according
> to the script they received.
>
I wonder if Mr. Card ever got to see that 1925 M-G-M Studio Tour film. It's a
documentary of what all the various departments at the studio did, and it ends with footage
of a clerk making a wooden box and shipping out a feature film in it... complete with a
close-up of the mailing label showing its destination as an M-G-M exchange office. What
he's packing are clearly 1000-foot reels of 35mm in cans.
If you were running a movie company, would you want your films assembled by one squad
of full-time employees at your studio... or by "dozens" of assemblers in *each* of the
forty-or-so exchanges around the country, as Card explains it? The only efficient way to
maintain quality control and to keep costs down would be to do that work at the studio, and
mail out the finished prints to the exchanges, as the Studio Tour seems to show.
Chris Snowden
Unknown Video
http://www.unknownvideo.com
This week: Over the Airwaves
http://www.unknownvideo.com/it.shtml
Stephen Furley
> - splices that could not be tolerated once sound tracks became part of the release
> prints."
>
> He then, on pages 63-64, lists page 8 of the tinting continuity (19 pages total) for a
> Tom Mix film.
>
> Of course, Mr. Card may not be totally correct.
>
> Rick
Not as many splices, and not for reasons of tinting, but the prints of
Schlindler's List had spliced in sections printed on a different
stock, and this film certainly had an optical track on film. Sounds
like a rather expensive process. I seem to remember that there was a
slight, but detectable, change in the sound when the colour sections
ran through.
Scott Dorsey
>It's common knowledge (or common myth; I'm not sure which) that tinting as a
>common practice died with the silent film for technical reasons. The tints
>interfered with the soundtrack.
Not really. Kodak sold print stocks with various tints well into the
sixties, with tints specifically selected so they wouldn't affect the sound
reproduction.
>What I'm wondering is whether any early Vitaphone talkies, including
>possibly The Jazz Singer itself, had tints. I've seen it in a new 35mm print
>a few years back, and there were none.
I wouldn't be surprised. Tinting was standard practice for most movies
at the time.
>On a related subject, I know there was limited use of tints in the late 30's
>and into the 40's--The Sea Hawk and Mighty Joe Young had tinted sequences,
>and of course the opening of Wizard of Oz was sepia. How did they keep those
>tints off of the soundtrack. Did they use something like dye transfer?
They just used the appropriate stocks with tinted bases that didn't have
very strong coloration. This does add to the cost of making up prints,
though, since the tinted sequences have to be spliced in.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Lloyd Fonvielle
Perhaps Card is confusing the early practice of the industry -- when exhibitors and/or
exchanges did indeed often assemble films -- with later studio practice. This mirrored the
decline of the exhibitor as a creative force in designing the shows he or she presented.
Richard Lanham
Christopher Snowden <unk...@earthlink.net> wrote:
The sentence I left out, where the ... is, notes that the major companies each ran their
own exchanges/offices. So anything going on was still under the company's control.
I don't know, but maybe the wooden box contained not a reel from a complete film, but a
reel of tinted scenes, all the same color?
I was thinking last night that, if Card is correct about the exchanges doing splicing,
maybe they did it because splices came apart frequently and they had to have people
fixing this locally. So then the local people might have said, "You guys in Hollywood
don't have to live with the results of your poor splicing, so just let us do all of it
here, and we'll do a better job." Just speculating.
Rick
Bob Birchard
> The sentence I left out, where the ... is, notes that the major companies each ran their
> own exchanges/offices. So anything going on was still under the company's control.
>
> I don't know, but maybe the wooden box contained not a reel from a complete film, but a
> reel of tinted scenes, all the same color?
>
> I was thinking last night that, if Card is correct about the exchanges doing splicing,
> maybe they did it because splices came apart frequently and they had to have people
> fixing this locally. So then the local people might have said, "You guys in Hollywood
> don't have to live with the results of your poor splicing, so just let us do all of it
> here, and we'll do a better job." Just speculating.
>
> Rick
Exchanges hd people to inspect, patch and repair films. The exchanges may have also
mounted them on reels for exhibition, but the prints would have been built in the lab,
either thew lab in the studio or an independent lab where the work was being contracted.
Typically, a picture negative would be assembled in roughly 1,000' lengths, with all
the scenes for that reel contained in that length; but with the sequences within the reel
cut in tinting order, i.e. all the sepia together, all the blue together, etc. These
sequences were demarcated by a few frames of blank film into which the sequence order number
were scratched, written or punched. So the sepia would be all together in the roll but
might actually be sections 1, 3, and 5, followed by the blue that might be 2 & 4, etc.
So, the M-G-M box in the studio tour (if in fact that film was tinted) would either
have to have been tinted at the exchange as well (not likely) or fully assembled before
shipping (a more likely answer).
The studios, even in the earliest days, would not have sent separate rolls to their
exchanges for positive assembly. There would be no quality control at all, and few of the
exchanges would have been equipped to handle such work on a regular basis.
--
Bob Birchard
bbir...@earthlink.net
http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/Guest/birchard.htm
Bob Birchard
And not all prints received the treatment. Some went out straight B&W.
Peter
>>
... So, the M-G-M box in the studio tour (if in fact that film was tinted)
fully assembled before shipping (a more likely answer).
The studios, even in the earliest days, would not have sent separate rolls to
their exchanges for positive assembly. There would be no quality control at
all, and few of the exchanges would have been equipped to handle such work on a
regular basis.
>>
A combination B&W and Technicolor feature might have be handled in a similar
way.
The amount of Technicolor in "The Women" is precisely timed, and the associated
composite B&W/Technicolor reels are balanced, so that an integral number of
features could be printed from one 1,000 reel of Technicolor blank, and an
integral number of features could be printed from one 1,000 reel of Eastman
release positive, all with little or no waste. The positive assembly must have
been complicated as the Technicolor segment comes in the middle of one reel.
Sfx work was used to transition from the pure B&W to the pure Technicolor, and
back again.
It is my guess that these two transitional segments depended upon Technicolor's
K roll, as that roll could have provided the B&W portion of the transition.
IOW, for the B&W portion of the transitional scenes, that K part would be
printed at 1.0, wheras for the Technicolor portion, that K part would have been
printed at 0.5, as was usual for CMYK printing.
Bruce Calvert
<cc9fa30.01101...@posting.google.com>, Stephen Furley stated
>
>> "Every film that was projected in a theatre then would be filled with scores of splices
>> - splices that could not be tolerated once sound tracks became part of the release
>> prints."
>Not as many splices, and not for reasons of tinting, but the prints of
>Schlindler's List had spliced in sections printed on a different
>stock, and this film certainly had an optical track on film. Sounds
>like a rather expensive process. I seem to remember that there was a
>slight, but detectable, change in the sound when the colour sections
>ran through.
I don't know about every print of SCHINDLER'S LIST, but the film I saw used DTS
which has the film's audio on a compact disc. I'm sure of this because I saw a
sneak preview and the first two minutes of so of the film was out of sync, just
like the old Vitaphone system. I remember that the projectionist stopped the
film momentarily and then restarted it with the picture and audio in sync. This
was at the Northpark I & II in Dallas, TX; which was one of the best theatres in
the area until it was torn down last year to expand the shopping mall.
--
Bruce Calvert
"People say I don't take criticism well, but I say, 'What the hell do they
know?'" -- Groucho Marx
Scott Dorsey
>
>I don't know about every print of SCHINDLER'S LIST, but the film I saw used DTS
>which has the film's audio on a compact disc. I'm sure of this because I saw a
>sneak preview and the first two minutes of so of the film was out of sync, just
>like the old Vitaphone system. I remember that the projectionist stopped the
>film momentarily and then restarted it with the picture and audio in sync. This
>was at the Northpark I & II in Dallas, TX; which was one of the best theatres in
>the area until it was torn down last year to expand the shopping mall.
Sneak previews often have somewhat different configurations than final
prints. I have even seen a couple which used double-system analogue sound
with sound track on a portable dubber.
Martin Hart
says...
>
> I wonder if Mr. Card ever got to see that 1925 M-G-M Studio Tour film. It's a
> documentary of what all the various departments at the studio did, and it ends with footage
> of a clerk making a wooden box and shipping out a feature film in it... complete with a
> close-up of the mailing label showing its destination as an M-G-M exchange office. What
> he's packing are clearly 1000-foot reels of 35mm in cans.
>
> If you were running a movie company, would you want your films assembled by one squad
> of full-time employees at your studio... or by "dozens" of assemblers in *each* of the
> forty-or-so exchanges around the country, as Card explains it? The only efficient way to
> maintain quality control and to keep costs down would be to do that work at the studio, and
> mail out the finished prints to the exchanges, as the Studio Tour seems to show.
>
After spending dozens of years studying and researching as much of the
technical aspects of the film industry that I could get my hands on I
long ago came to the conclusion that the people that designed the movie
business were not a bunch of dummies. When a piece of information seems
illogical there's a damned good chance that it's the result someone's
imagination. (The entire body of work by one Herr Doktor Haze is monument
to this concept.)
Since the inception of the film exchange as a means of distributing
prints throughout the world, they have been called upon to do lots of
snipping and splicing for many reasons. However, the assembly of
finished prints does not fall into the realm of logical work assigned to
the exchanges. Trimming prints to reduce running time, replacing damaged
footage, editing in alternate footage to appease a censor, etc. were all
in a day's at the exchanges.
I agree completely with Christopher that building prints at the
exchanges, regardless of what Mr. Card might say, is something that could
have happened only on the rarest of occasions.
Marty
--
The American WideScreen Museum
www.widescreenmuseum.com
Martin Hart
peter...@aol.communicate says...
>
> Incidentally, Osa Massen, the female lead of "Rocketship X-M", was once a G/F
> of my uncle.
>
Did your uncle call her "Irish" or "Iris"? :-)
Precode
That shouldn't be. DTS prints have a digital control track printed on them which
is supposed to keep the disc in synch; i.e., if there's a splice and some frames
missing, the disc should automatically jump to where the picture picks up.
Sounds like something wasn't hooked up properly.
Mike S.
"Heil myself."--Tom Dugan in TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Rodney Sauer
> Christopher Snowden wrote:
>
> > Richard Lanham wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I had to look for a while to find where I read about the films being assembled in the
> > > exchanges. It's on page 62 of James Card's book "Seductive Cinema."
> > >
> > > "Silent features, before they went to the theatres, were assembled not in Hollywood or
> > > New York, where the pictures had been produced, but rather in film exchanges of the
> > > towns in which they were to be shown.... Each office, or exchange, employed dozens of
> > > women whose job it was to assemble positive prints from the rolls they would receive
> > > from the studio. Those rolls would be separated according to the tints: amber, blue,
> > > red, green and sepia rolls would come into the exchange, and the girls, using cutting
> > > continuities they would get for each different feature, would splice the film according
> > > to the script they received.
> > >
>
> Perhaps Card is confusing the early practice of the industry -- when exhibitors and/or
> exchanges did indeed often assemble films -- with later studio practice. This mirrored the
> decline of the exhibitor as a creative force in designing the shows he or she presented.
Early shmearly. Card doesn't give a date for the practice he cites (at least, not in the quote
above), so he may not be confusing it at all. With the huge changes that talkies brought on,
it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of "the silent era" as a unit, when in fact it
changed substantially many times over the years from 1896 to 1929.
-- Rodney
Scott Dorsey
>>which has the film's audio on a compact disc. I'm sure of this because I saw a
>>sneak preview and the first two minutes of so of the film was out of sync, just
>>like the old Vitaphone system. I remember that the projectionist stopped the
>>film momentarily and then restarted it with the picture and audio in sync. This
>>was at the Northpark I & II in Dallas, TX; which was one of the best theatres in
>>the area until it was torn down last year to expand the shopping mall.
>>
>
>That shouldn't be. DTS prints have a digital control track printed on them which
>is supposed to keep the disc in synch; i.e., if there's a splice and some frames
>missing, the disc should automatically jump to where the picture picks up.
>Sounds like something wasn't hooked up properly.
If you make the loop horribly large, you can screw the synch up somewhat
because the number of frames between the DTS reader and the gate is too
great. Any mildly competent projectionist should not do this, though.
And most incompetent multiplex projectionists wouldn't stop and fix it.
Scott Norwood
In article <i5Gy7.29985$ev2....@www.newsranger.com>,
Precode <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote:
>
>That shouldn't be. DTS prints have a digital control track printed on them which
>is supposed to keep the disc in synch; i.e., if there's a splice and some frames
>missing, the disc should automatically jump to where the picture picks up.
>Sounds like something wasn't hooked up properly.
Or, another possibility, maybe multiple penthouses were installed
on the projector and the projectionist accidentally threaded several
of them.
I'll admit to having done this once myself: I threaded an SDDS
penthouse and a DTS reader mounted below it even though the film
was supposed to be played only in SDDS. The extra film between
the penthouse and the gate threw the sync off horribly. Rather
than stop the film, I did the quick fix and ran the show in Dolby
SR (analog).
--
Scott Norwood: snor...@nyx.net, snor...@redballoon.net
Cool Home Page: http://www.redballoon.net/
Lame Quote: Penguins? In Snack Canyon?
Frank Wylie
<bbir...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> And not all prints received the treatment. Some went out straight B&W.
>
Yes, b&w printed on color stock, not b&w stock, or as I like to call
it, "green and white".
yeech
Frank
Bill Vermillion
Scott Dorsey <klu...@panix.com> wrote:
>If you make the loop horribly large, you can screw the synch up
>somewhat because the number of frames between the DTS reader and
>the gate is too great. Any mildly competent projectionist should
>not do this, though. And most incompetent multiplex projectionists
>wouldn't stop and fix it.
Year ago a projectionist was fired because of a complaint I made.
I was more po'ed at the audience members at the back of theatre
since I went from the front to lobby to tell them that the
picture was upside down, backwards, and the optical soundtrack
was being shown on the screen. I had waited about 20 seconds
before deciding that no one else was going to do a thing.
Shows that no one looked out of the booth to see what was on the
screen. I hadn't intended for a person to be fired because of that.
--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
Precode
Don't beat yourself up. He was completely neglecting his job and deserved to be
canned, and if it hadn't been you, it would've been somebody else. You wanna get
into a cab with a driver who's not watching the road?
Mike S.
"Osama bin Laden is reportedly hiding out in a remote, barren place with no
chance of human contact. The FBI has begun searching theatres showing the movie
GLITTER."--Tina Fey on SNL
eric stott
Nothing to do with film, but I used to work in a business with a Muzak
system. Every so often a manager would forget and put a regular cassette
into the deck. The first side would play through fine, but muzak decks
don't rewind- they switch to the second track and the tape will reverse
direction. This means that a regular tape will start playing backwards.
I learned two things- I learned what Barbara Streisand sounds like
singing backwards, and I learned that she sounds better that way.
Sometimes she sounds like a Tardis taking off.
Eric Stott
Jeffry L. Johnson
> Stephen Furley wrote:
> > Not as many splices, and not for reasons of tinting, but the prints of
> > Schlindler's List had spliced in sections printed on a different
> > stock, and this film certainly had an optical track on film. Sounds
> > like a rather expensive process. I seem to remember that there was a
> > slight, but detectable, change in the sound when the colour sections
> > ran through.
>
> And not all prints received the treatment. Some went out straight B&W.
I think it was just the opposite. Instead of a black-and-white reel
with a color sequence spliced into the reel, the entire print was
printed on color stock.
This was early in the transition to polyester release prints and there
was great concern about the focus shift between the b&w and color stock.
There were even instructions to make a loop of PA-35 projector alignment
film with half b/w stock and half magenta on color stock. Then one
could focus to the "happy medium" between the two stocks.
Bill Vermillion
eric stott <est...@localnet.com> wrote:
>
>
>Bill Vermillion wrote:
>>
>> In article <9qfbef$84d$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
>> Scott Dorsey <klu...@panix.com> wrote:
>> >If you make the loop horribly large, you can screw the synch up
>> >somewhat because the number of frames between the DTS reader and
>> >the gate is too great. Any mildly competent projectionist should
>> >not do this, though. And most incompetent multiplex projectionists
>> >wouldn't stop and fix it.
>>
>> Year ago a projectionist was fired because of a complaint I made.
>> I was more po'ed at the audience members at the back of theatre
>> since I went from the front to lobby to tell them that the
>> picture was upside down, backwards, and the optical soundtrack
>> was being shown on the screen. I had waited about 20 seconds
>> before deciding that no one else was going to do a thing.
>> Shows that no one looked out of the booth to see what was on the
>> screen. I hadn't intended for a person to be fired because of that.
>>
>Nothing to do with film, but I used to work in a business with
>a Muzak system. Every so often a manager would forget and put a
>regular cassette into the deck. The first side would play through
>fine, but muzak decks don't rewind- they switch to the second track
>and the tape will reverse direction. This means that a regular tape
>will start playing backwards. I learned two things- I learned what
>Barbara Streisand sounds like singing backwards, and I learned that
>she sounds better that way. Sometimes she sounds like a Tardis
>taking off.
And some systems used the old cartritape/audiotape format and
the 1/2 hour [at design of 7.5ips] tape were run at 3.75 [maybe
less] and had the cartriges spliced in a Mobius loop with
dual-coated tape. I remember an old Pentron reel-reel that was
modified for the background music in that way.
Scott Dorsey
>Bob Birchard <bbir...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Stephen Furley wrote:
>> > Not as many splices, and not for reasons of tinting, but the prints of
>> > Schlindler's List had spliced in sections printed on a different
>> > stock, and this film certainly had an optical track on film. Sounds
>> > like a rather expensive process. I seem to remember that there was a
>> > slight, but detectable, change in the sound when the colour sections
>> > ran through.
>>
>> And not all prints received the treatment. Some went out straight B&W.
>
>I think it was just the opposite. Instead of a black-and-white reel
>with a color sequence spliced into the reel, the entire print was
>printed on color stock.
Right. Only a few prints were made on B&W stock with the color sequence
added in, the rest were B&W on color stock. The difference was very
obvious, with much more shadow detail on the B&W prints. I don't know
who did the lab work for the B&W stuff but they did a great job.
>This was early in the transition to polyester release prints and there
>was great concern about the focus shift between the b&w and color stock.
>There were even instructions to make a loop of PA-35 projector alignment
>film with half b/w stock and half magenta on color stock. Then one
>could focus to the "happy medium" between the two stocks.
Huh? Polyester print stock has been around since the 70s. It wasn't
quite as popular as it was at the point this film was made, true.
Peter
klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) commented ...
>>
Huh? Polyester print stock has been around since the 70s. It wasn't quite as
popular as it was at the point this film was made, true.
>>
It's been around since the early 1950's as DuPont's Cronar(R).
But, DuPont got out of the business after Technicolor and Kodak "kissed and
made up" and Tech agreed to give all its domestic blank receiver business to
Kodak.
Estar(R) and Cronar(R) are essentially the same material ... they are both
polyesters.
Christopher Jacobs
Jeffry L. Johnson <j...@apk.net> wrote in message
news:1f1fh03.1ckw3z1136agluN%j...@apk.net...
------------------
The print I opened was one of the B&W prints with color inserts spliced in.
It looked gorgeous. When we expanded to two screens, they sent prints on
color stock that looked pretty mediocre if not downright bad.
--Christopher Jacobs
Stephen Furley
>
> The print I opened was one of the B&W prints with color inserts spliced in.
> It looked gorgeous. When we expanded to two screens, they sent prints on
> color stock that looked pretty mediocre if not downright bad.
>
> --Christopher Jacobs
I saw the film at the Empire Leicester Square in London, this was
black and white with DTS. Some time later I saw the film at a small
cinema which at that time had only mono, it has since installed stereo
with a Dolby CP-65. This is where I noticed a difference in the sound
in the colour sections.
The all colour sections at the start and end of the film looked ok,
but the monochrome scenes with the spot colour on the girl's dress
looked nothing like as good as the black and white stock.
This film was shot on Eastman stock, 5222 I think, but I seem to
remember that the print was on Agfa stock; this is certainly the case
with a copy of the trailer which I have. Soon after this Agfa stopped
making motion picture stocks, pity. I cannot remember if this print
was triacetate or polyester.
In the can of the first part of the film there was a letter from the
producers, asking that, wherever possible, the film be shown without
an interval. Sadly, this was not possible at this cinema, as they now
have only one 35mm projector, with a tower which cannot take this
length of film.
Jeffry L. Johnson
If I thought about this a little more, I would have realized that the
type of film base doesn't matter, there would still be a focus shift at
the change from b/w to color because of the difference in thickness of
the two emulsions.
Polyester film base has been available since the 1955. But it wasn't
until the mid-1990's that 35mm release prints converted from triacetate
to polyester.
A 1997 March 20 Eastman Kodak SMPTE seminar, The Nature of Film,
presented the following information.
Polyester Film Base
Increasing Use for 35mm Theatrical Prints
- Mostly triacetate prior to 1993
- Warner Bros. first major user of polyester
- Polyester use dramatically increased in 1995
- Over 50% of prints on ESTAR base in 1996
- Approaching 100% of prints on ESTAR base in 1997
Christopher Jacobs
Stephen Furley <fur...@mail.croydon.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:cc9fa30.01101...@posting.google.com...
> > ------------------
>
> In the can of the first part of the film there was a letter from the
> producers, asking that, wherever possible, the film be shown without
> an interval. Sadly, this was not possible at this cinema, as they now
> have only one 35mm projector, with a tower which cannot take this
> length of film.
There was a letter in the can with our B&W print of SHINDLER'S LIST
notifying the projectionist to check the focus between the B&W and color
sections, with a warning that it might need to be refocussed. As it happened
the entire print stayed sharp in our situation, but it might have been more
critical with certain lenses/screen sizes. The auditorium that played it in
B&W had a bigger screen, but was unfortunately mono sound. The auditorium
with the print on all color stock was smaller although it had stereo, but
before DTS was installed.
--Christopher Jacobs
Eric Grayson
It's weird, though. It looks like B/W stock that has one layer of emulsion
on it (red) in addition to the B/W layer, almost like Tech. The print
plays like dead-on black and white but with red lettering when necessary.
The only prints of SL that I saw had the color sequences spliced in
manually. Many were haphazardly done and it was OBVIOUS when color was
coming up, because the image quality went way down.
Eric
Eric Grayson
wrote:
>Polyester film base has been available since the 1955. But it wasn't
>until the mid-1990's that 35mm release prints converted from triacetate
>to polyester.
ESTAR--clogging your projector with suspicious white powder since 1955!
Accept no substitutes! You'll love this new stock that scratches so easily
that new prints look old in 3 days! What's that hum in the sound head?
It's ESTAR dust piling up on the sound roller so that the film rocks out of
the sound reader!
Be the first on your block to ruin a projector with new ESTAR film!
Eric
Bob Birchard
There are other disadvantages as well.
Several years back I was one of the sound editors on "Friday the
13th--Part IV." The picture was interesting from a sound editing perspective
because we were delivered a 17 reel cut and had ten days to edit the dialogue
and sound effects, and we knew that at the end of the ten days the picture
would be trimmed down to 10 reels. It was decided to walk Foley (the process
of creating footsteps and other sound effects in real time to picture on a
recording stage) to the 17 reel version, pre dub the Foley tracks, preview code
the 35mm Foley predubs to match the preview code on the 17 reel cut of the
picture and then conform to the cut-down work picture just before the final dub
(re-recording).
Well anyway, I was in the change room conforming predubs, and I was
rolling up one of the longer trims on the motorized take-up flange on the side
of the Moviola editing machine.
Unbeknownst to me I was standing on the end of the film, and as the high
speed flange took up the film it nearly took me with it. The damned Estar
stock does not break and as it got to the end it pulled my foot out from under
me. I managed to grab the editing bench and save myself from a swan dive, but
I've never been a big fan of Estar since then.
JohnW248
Johnson) writes:
>If I thought about this a little more, I would have realized that the
>type of film base doesn't matter, there would still be a focus shift at
>the change from b/w to color because of the difference in thickness of
>the two emulsions.
There is also the thermal difference between placing dyes in the light path and
silver. This causes a different about of heat in the film base and changes it's
focus plane characteristics.
This was discussed at an SMPTE Local Hollywood meeting many years ago when SL
was released by both Deluxe and Optical Radiation.
John
Stephen Cooke
On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Richard Lanham wrote:
> In article <3bca3581...@news.sf.sbcglobal.net>, norm...@pacbell.net wrote:
>
> > Hadn't thought of this before. Makes a lot of sense, although I doubt that
> > the splicing was done at the exchanges.
>
> I had to look for a while to find where I read about the films being assembled in the
> exchanges. It's on page 62 of James Card's book "Seductive Cinema."
I don't know about the rest of the continent, but here in Atlantic Canada,
we still have one film exchange for the entire region, in Saint John, New
Brunswick (home of Louis B. Mayer and Walter Pidgeon, among others).
Victoria Film Exchange has been in business since at least the 20s
(possibly since Queen Victoria was alive...:) ) and while they don't
splice prints, they do ship them (along with posters, etc.) to various
theatres around the East Coast. I got to tour their warehouse once, and
took note of some strange orphaned titles that have been sitting there on
their shelves for decades (a lot of Columbia shorts, mostly Stooges,
softcore drive-in stuff...and four copies of The Bushido Blade!). We tried
to rent a lot of these titles for our own amusement at the rep cinema I
worked at, but they would rarely let us have 'em, even if they weren't
going to be public screenings.
Stephen
And don't get me started about the poster room...which they wouldn't let
me get near.
Stephen Cooke
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Bob Birchard wrote:
> Several years back I was one of the sound editors on "Friday the
> 13th--Part IV." The picture was interesting from a sound editing perspective
> because we were delivered a 17 reel cut and had ten days to edit the dialogue
> and sound effects, and we knew that at the end of the ten days the picture
> would be trimmed down to 10 reels. It was decided to walk Foley (the process
> of creating footsteps and other sound effects in real time to picture on a
> recording stage) to the 17 reel version, pre dub the Foley tracks, preview code
> the 35mm Foley predubs to match the preview code on the 17 reel cut of the
> picture and then conform to the cut-down work picture just before the final dub
> (re-recording).
>
> Well anyway, I was in the change room conforming predubs, and I was
> rolling up one of the longer trims on the motorized take-up flange on the side
> of the Moviola editing machine.
>
> Unbeknownst to me I was standing on the end of the film, and as the high
> speed flange took up the film it nearly took me with it. The damned Estar
> stock does not break and as it got to the end it pulled my foot out from under
> me. I managed to grab the editing bench and save myself from a swan dive, but
> I've never been a big fan of Estar since then.
Sounds like the unkindest cut of all.
Stephen
Can't get the Hudson Brothers' So You Are Estar out of my head.
Precode
<Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.101...@halifax.chebucto.ns.ca>, Stephen
Cooke says...
You'll be relieved to know that most of the Columbia shorts (including
non-Stooge two-reelers and serials) were retrieved by yours truly prior to a
massive junking; some of this material has popped up at Cinecon over the past
few years, including the much-beloved first chapter of ROAR OF THE IRON HORSE.
Mike S.
Shutterghost
release stock, with color segments hot spliced in by DeLuxe Hollywood. Black
and white releases stock would change the signal to noise ratio of the
optical sound track from the color stock, however, many theatres played the
show in DTS and the stocks made no difference. There were a lot of problems
with the black and white print stock of caking of emulsion on the film trap
rails. The prints were then treated by Benke Film with TomOcoat.
The regular US theatrical release prints were printed in Canada, black and
white on color stock, as DeLuxe Toronto wasn't equipped to make a large run
of black and white stock release prints.
I never saw a print that was on all black and white, however, it is possible
some existed. They would have had to come from Deluxe Hollywood.
The splicing of magenta and black and white RP-40 is an invalid test for
focus of showprints due to the fact that both of the stocks to make those
test films are custom made and will may not focus like release stock. RP40
is valid as an image quality performance of a projection system and not as a
focus leader for a specific feature.
NJM
"Jeffry L. Johnson" <j...@apk.net> wrote in message
news:1f1fh03.1ckw3z1136agluN%j...@apk.net...
Shutterghost
the feature "OH GOD!" with half the prints Polyestar. It was a disaster.
Theatres found that damaged or worn film needed to break, it simply ripped
up the projector gears and didnt tear. The film had severe static
electricity buildup and created impossible situations on platters, dirt on
the film images and uneven winds on reels. Estar prints in the '90's
started out with similar problems, however, with anti static additives and
reducing the strength of the base so sprockets would rip in cases of severe
tension, estar is now the main base for release prints. It took a few years
for Kodak to fine tune these problems.
Previously, Estar had been used mostly for 16mm non theatrical prints, only
for the sake of the prints surviving the abuse of the school and college
audio visual departments that often trashed the prints. Even in 16mm,
polyestar had a reputation of damaging and causing excessive wear to the
projectors. It did hold up better and resisted sprocket damage, which was a
leading cause of junking 16mm prints. Estar prints cost more than the
acetate counterpart, however, now they are the staus quo.
njm
"Jeffry L. Johnson" <j...@apk.net> wrote in message
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