[Antti Näyhä]

Just to add that there was a different product called Technicolor Monopack, which was reversal.

[Dominic Case]

Quote

Was Technicolor reversal?

No. Three mono camera negatives, effectively separations, were later printed to three strips of dye transfer stock which were later combined onto a positive colour print.

The significant difference with Technicolor printing was that it wasn't a photographic process. The three dye transfer strips carried yellow, magenta and cyan dyes which were transferred by contact onto clear film base. More like printing newspapers.

So the dyes chosen were a lot more stable and fade-resistant (as well as being more true in colour).

After Kodak Eastmancolor negative captured the camera original business in the early 1950s, Technicolor continued making prints using the dye transfer process, even from Eastman negatives, unitl the early 1970s.

[Jim Carlile]

Is there any truth to the story that the original Technicolor monopack was just modified Kodachrome?

[Dominic Case]

In the 1940 Technicolor Annual Report (on the Widescreen Museum website" Hertbert T Kalmus reported:

"Your company's research engineers have also been engaged in cooperation with Eastman Kodak Company on a process of photography employing a single negative or monopack instead of the three strips, and on which three emulsions are superimposed on a single support. "

Lassie Come Home (1943) apparently used this stock: but it was a very unwieldy process to make prints: according to Martin Hart here, Technicolor had to "slide each of the three Kodachrome emulsions off the original base and place them on individual blank stocks for the production of matrices. "

[Keneu Luca]

I found this on vimeo.
Color 16mm reversal test footage. Very recent:
http://vimeo.com/9362699

[Charles MacDonald]

Mark Dunn, on Feb 16 2010, 03:19 PM, said:

No. Three mono camera negatives, effectively separations, were later printed to three strips of dye transfer stock which were later combined onto a positive colour print.

ONE version did apparently use Kodachrome as the original. The lab them made Separation B&W negatives and went on from there. Only used where the three strip cameras would not work for some reeason.

[John Sprung]

Mark Dunn, on Feb 16 2010, 12:19 PM, said:

No. Three mono camera negatives, effectively separations, were later printed to three strips of dye transfer stock which were later combined onto a positive colour print.

The camera originals were indeed separation negatives. Two of them were a bi-pack, so they must have had to print at least one of the three optically to the matrix stock, to get the image the right way around. The matrices were positives, so the dye transfer part of the printing operation was in effect positive to positive. Kinda like how an old fashioned rubber stamp with ink on it is a mirror image positive of what you get when you print with it.





-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

Charles MacDonald, on Feb 19 2010, 07:58 PM, said:

ONE version did apparently use Kodachrome as the original. The lab them made Separation B&W negatives and went on from there. Only used where the three strip cameras would not work for some reeason.

That was called Monopack, it was a sort of ancestor of Ektachrome Commercial, aka ECO.




-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

Jim Carlile, on Feb 17 2010, 09:34 PM, said:

Is there any truth to the story that the original Technicolor monopack was just modified Kodachrome?

Ektachrome Commercial was modified Monopack. Monopack came first. Then Ektachrome, and finally Kodachrome.




-- J.S.

[Charles MacDonald]

John Sprung, on Feb 20 2010, 01:44 AM, said:

Ektachrome Commercial was modified Monopack. Monopack came first. Then Ektachrome, and finally Kodachrome.

I would have to look it up My understanding was the Ektachrome family was created so that colour reversal film could be field developed for Aerial reconnaissance. Kodachrome was up and running in the 1930's

[Dominic Case]

Monopack was a low contrast version of Kodachrome. It was processed by Kodak in the Kodachrome process, where the dyes are added in the developer solutions.

Some people are comparing it to Ektachrome commercial purely because EKC was also a low contrast product, also designed for duplication and printing (whereas Kodachrome and Ektachrome both come with projection contrast in the original film. But the Ektachrome processes (low contrast Commercial ECO2 and ECO3, and normal contrast ME4) are entirely diferent from the Kodachrome process.

Monopack was introduced (I believe rather reluctantly) by Technicolor, to try to produce a single film colour process (hence the name Monopack), which could, in their words "run though a normal black and white camera" instead of the enormous machine that was a Technicolor bipack camera.

It's unusual these days to think of a film camera as a "black and white camera" or a "colour camera". That distinction seems to be more appropriate to early video or TV cameras.

[Karl Borowski]

Dominic Case, on Feb 21 2010, 06:59 AM, said:

It's unusual these days to think of a film camera as a "black and white camera" or a "colour camera". That distinction seems to be more appropriate to early video or TV cameras.

Well if you REALLY want to go back, "true color" was referring to panchromatic black and white film, and then there were cameras that could only use the original blue-sensitive (or was it ortho that worked too?) stock because the cameramen were actually LOOKING THROUGH THE FILM during the exposure to frame in the days before beam-splitters.

I think there was also a reference to this with amateur still and movie cameras due to the speed of the lens necessitated by the low low speed of early Kodachrome.



Sloshing emulsions off one by one? That was probably NOT a fun job. "Jee, sorry, you're going to have to re-shoot that scene because we tore the magenta layer for forty frames."

I still don't really get Technicolor, Dominic, especially its latest short-lived reincarnation. Who MADE this dye transfer film? You made three RGB panchro negatives, with, what, a soundtrack or B&W lab stock? Then did you coat THOSE with dye and press them onto blank 35mm film?


I remember reading somewhere that there was a photographic print process, on paper, that was made under the same principle, and the people still doing that had to stockpile their remaining supply when Kodak discontinued it. . . in the 1980s.

So, the dye'd be easy to obtain, but where on Earth would you get these specialized 35mm stocks? It's too bad I never got a chance (I think) to see one of the Technicolor revival prints. Maybe there is still one in circulation in the second-run arthouse market.

[John Sprung]

Karl Borowski, on Feb 21 2010, 08:58 AM, said:

Who MADE this dye transfer film? You made three RGB panchro negatives, with, what, a soundtrack or B&W lab stock? Then did you coat THOSE with dye and press them onto blank 35mm film?

In the very early two color days, Technicolor did a little emulsion coating. But by the three strip days, they were buying all their raw stock from Kodak. There were three different special B&W camera stocks for red, green, and blue. Then there was another special lab stock to make the printing matrices. It was printed from the camera negs, and when developed, produced a surface that was physically higher and lower depending on how much of the given color there was. This is what was coated with dyes and pressed into contact with yet another special clear stock coated to accept them.

According to Lynn Trimble, who was there at the time, the terms Ektachrome and Kodachrome weren't used all that logically in the very early days. What happened is that Leonard Troland in 1941 finally got an ominbus patent that covered pretty much every multi-layer idea that had a chance of working. Meanwhile, over in the basement at Kodak, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowski had a multi-layer reversal process working.

But Technicolor owned the patent. So, the deal they made was that Kodak could sell a 16mm home movie reversal product (gamma about 1.4), but for professional 35mm, they would make Monopack (gamma about 1.0) exclusively for Technicolor. Initially, the term Kodachrome meant a projection contrast home movie stock, and the term Ektachrome was the same process at unity gamma for printing. Later, they started using Ektachrome as the name for a new process at both gammas.




-- J.S.

[Dominic Case]

Quote

This is what was coated with dyes and pressed into contact with yet another special clear stock coated to accept them.

The clear stock was in fact a conventional black and white positive stock, which was initially exposed with the optical soundtrack (from a separate negative, as now), and in one version of Technicolor, also with a light black and white image similar to the black ink or "K" separation of CMYK four-colour printing on paper. This improves contrast and black density.

Leo Enticknap describes this well in his "Moving Image Technology, from Zoetrope to Digital", and there is a reliable entry in the Focal Encyclopedia of Film & Television. I say reliable because the editor, and author of that entry was Bernard Happe, who was for may years Technical Manager of Technicolor London, and also installed the Technicolor plant in China in the early 1970s.

I never worked at Technicolor nor saw an imbibition printer, but I have worked with a number of ex-Technicolor people. It sounded like a stupendously difficult process to manage successfully, but brilliant when it worked.

Of course all this is in regard to Techicolor printing, and nothing to do with their brief essay into reversal.

[John Sprung]

Dominic Case, on Feb 21 2010, 01:20 PM, said:

... and also installed the Technicolor plant in China in the early 1970s.

What ever became of that? Is it still up and running?




-- J.S.

[Daniel Joseph Lee]

John Sprung, on Feb 22 2010, 03:58 PM, said:

What ever became of that? Is it still up and running?




-- J.S.

AFAIK 5285/7285 (Ektachrome 100D) is Ektachrome E100VS.

The high saturation version of the film.

You'd use it for the colour contrast.

[Brian Pritchard]

Dominic Case, on Feb 21 2010, 09:20 PM, said:

The clear stock was in fact a conventional black and white positive stock, which was initially exposed with the optical soundtrack (from a separate negative, as now), and in one version of Technicolor, also with a light black and white image similar to the black ink or "K" separation of CMYK four-colour printing on paper. This improves contrast and black density.

The stock was 5305 known as IB blank, it was normal B/W release positive with an extra overcoat of gelatine to absorb the dyes. 3M's also made IB blank. One of the advantages of the process was that if anything went wrong in the dye transfer the blank could be washed off and re-transfered. At the take-off end of the processing machines the operator viewed the print coming through and had control of three water taps which allowed him to change the colour balance by altering the wash off of each dye.

I spent a couple of days at the London Technicolor plant when I worked at Kodak. The batch of IB blank in use had over-exposed 'Kodak Safety Film' legend. There was no more stock in the country so we had to dip test every roll to check the edge print before the roll could be released for sound track printing. The process was running constantly so we worked very hard to prevent the process having to be shut down.

Technicolor ran an IB plant in Hollywood in the 90's, I saw some of the reels from it; it was wonderful. We were able to compare to Eastmancolor prints. I believe the film was the remake of King Kong. I think that they made 100 copies by IB.
Brian

[Karl Borowski]

"The Family Man" (2000) and "Pearl Harbor" (2001" also had Technicolor releases.

I saw the former in theatres, really wish I'd had the chance though to see it in Technicolor though.

[Dominic Case]

Daniel Joseph Lee, on Feb 23 2010, 12:14 AM, said:

QUOTE (John Sprung @ Feb 22 2010, 03:58 PM)
What ever became of that? Is it still up and running?

AFAIK 5285/7285 (Ektachrome 100D) is Ektachrome E100VS.

The high saturation version of the film.

You'd use it for the colour contrast.

I think John was asking abut the Technicolor plant in China.

I believe it closed in the early 1990s.

It opened around the time that Technicolor London closed its IB plant (late 970s). But I was told they built all new equipment for China, they didn't recycle the old machines. Although IIRC it was about the time of Nixon's ping-pong diplomacy with China, the deal was done entirely through Tech London, as there was still an embargo on US-China trade.

I found some pictures and a good account of Technicolor in China here:
http://www.in70mm.co...color/index.htm

[Leo Anthony Vale]

John Sprung, on Feb 20 2010, 01:37 AM, said:

The camera originals were indeed separation negatives. Two of them were a bi-pack, so they must have had to print at least one of the three optically to the matrix stock, to get the image the right way around. The matrices were positives, so the dye transfer part of the printing operation was in effect positive to positive. Kinda like how an old fashioned rubber stamp with ink on it is a mirror image positive of what you get when you print with it.

the matrix stock had to be exposed through the base & it had to be B-wind.
Thus all of the negs were printed optically.