Site created 12/15/97.		page created: 6/6/02 Home Theater: An Archaeology Part Two by Robert Harris, special to The Digital Bits Back to Part One Robert A. Harris - Main Page There was a moment - more than a moment actually - when there was great concern that the concept of the DVD might join other potentially viable, but unsuccessful home video mechanisms as just another piece of home video garbage. Not that the concept was flawed. Everything seemed to come together properly, even acknowledging growing pains. But then DIVX was announced. The moment the word was uttered, there was a fear from many quarters that unless all of the studios and publishers of software got aboard, that DVD would fail. And DIVX, for the uninitiated, was a product being offered via Circuit City. Rather than allowing the public to simply purchase a DVD like videotapes and laserdiscs, it forced the consumer to be part of a pay-per-view system. Via different "memberships" one might either be able to take their DIVX disc to a friend's home and play it - or not. Once you played your disc for the first time, you had free play for 48 hours before the pay-per-view cut in, actuated and recorded via a telephone line connected to your DIVX machine. Those of you with children will immediately identify a potential problem (not for DIVX, of course) as the disc is played ad nauseum, thereby slowly causing you to lose control of those hard to earn dollars being put away for a college education -- all of it being sent directly to the folks at DIVX instead. Fortunately, the majority of the studios did not adopt the DIVX route and the discs are now a rather unfortunate footnote in home video history. Elegant coasters. But it could have gone differently. It seemed early on that many people believed it would take ten years or more for DVD to make inroads on VHS. But in less than 24 months, the new discs were supplanting videotape on shelves everywhere. Sales crept up at first, until the DIVX threat and confusion ended. Then E-tailers formed new companies and went online with older ones to push the DVD software. Vying for e-mail addresses and customers, companies like Reel.Com, Buy.Com, 800.Com, DVDExpress, DVD Planet, DVD Empire and Deep Discount DVD all fought it out with the likes of major bookstores and the newly minted Amazon.com. The beneficiary of all this was the consumer. With a wholesale cost of about 40% off, 40% discounted pre-orders were the norm. Deals were everywhere as DVDs slowly made their way to the public. Offers like three DVDs for $1, 40-50% discounts, hundreds of coupons and other interrelated deals (which had consumers scouring the websites, picking up DVDs for little or no final investment) were the norm during the first 18 months. As the number of hardware units grew, so did the studios' willingness to release greater numbers of DVDs and finally... to prepare new anamorphic digital transfers for a new audience. If one were to have asked industry executives for guesses relating to how many DVD players would have been out there on an annualized basis, few would have foretold that after just four years, we would be closing in on THIRTY FIVE MILLION in North America alone, with many households containing multiples. Quality remains a major issue. Consumer awareness was an issue - and still is. Questions of aspect ratios, anamorphic, pan & scan, good and bad color and horrific use of edge enhancement quickly became the fodder of reviews and both information and misinformation for consumers. Which leads us to the tip of the technical iceberg and several different subjects: Film emulsions and printing elements, inclusive of black & white and color. Aspect ratios and their importance to us. Film-to-tape and digital-to-tape masters and transfers. What I'd like to do, is allow us to meander through these subjects, interrelating them as necessary and hitting bits of history as we go. This is a great time for DVD releases, as the studios slowly bring out vault titles in addition to recent theatrical releases. A wonderful means of starting this off can be based upon the recent release of one of the classic RKO titles from Warner Home Video. Released in 1948, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and much of the Ford stock company, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon remains a high point not only in filmmaking in general, but more specifically one of the penultimate productions shot in the original three-strip Technicolor dye transfer process. The aspect ratio is proper for the period at 1.37:1. To understand just how intricate these productions were, and why She Wore a Yellow Ribbon looks as good as it does on DVD, we'll have to go into a bit of back history. From the earliest creations on film in the 1890s, color was used to add another dimension. Color might be added via hand painting frame by frame, hand tinting, stenciling or via the use of overall tinted stock or a combination of tinted and toned scenes. Even in later films, tinting was used to add a greater dimensionality. Son of Kong was originally released in a sepia tinted version. The Sea Hawk had tinted sequences, as did Portrait of Jenny. There were a number of early full-color processes, which attempted to replicate the colors of the world on film, but none worked terribly well or were representative of reality. It was not until Technicolor was developed that real photographic color made its first strides toward perfection, and became available at a reasonable price for high quality, multiple release prints and with some semblance of reality. In 1917, The Gulf Between was photographed in Technicolor's earliest incarnation of two-strip Technicolor. This was an experimental process. As a rather simplistic explanation, a camera was created which photographed a scene on two black and white strips of negative. Using filters, the photographed image was separated into blue/green and red. Sequences of Griffith's Way Down East were also photographed via this methodology. The first fully functional Technicolor release was in a two-color cemented format, in which two strips, each having been printed in a separate color, via matrices, had literally been cemented together to create the color effect. The process was photographed as two frames in sequence on the same strip of film - a red record followed by a green record, which was inverted. This process was in use from 1920 through 1927, and was used mostly for color sequences in black and white productions. Titles ranged from The Ten Commandments, The Big Parade, The Merry Widow, Phantom of the Opera, Seven Chances, Ben-Hur and others. It was used in its entirety for Douglas Fairbanks' 1926 The Black Pirate (available on DVD from Kino Home Video). The greatest problem with the cemented prints was that they would come apart, and new technology was needed if the process was to be a success. This occurred in 1928, with the advent of imbibition printing for which a blank strip of film would first receive one color and then the second, printed over it in perfect registration. Although generally still used for color sequences within the likes of Howard Hughes' Hells Angels (1930), it was used selectively for two-color films shot entirely in color. Examples are Universal's King of Jazz (1930), and Warner's Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and Doctor X (1932). But the quality of the color was still far from lifelike. In 1932, Technicolor had an experiment for the grand design. They went to Walt Disney, who already had a short film (Flowers and Trees) in production in black and white. Technicolor worked out a methodology to film the short with their new three strip Technicolor camera and a new process was born. Those of you who have added the Disney Silly Symphony discs to your collections have a superb representation of these early three strip films. The very earliest Disney cartoons continued to be photographed with the three strip camera into 1937, when approximately concurrent with the production of Disney's classic Snow White, they switched to a new process - Sequential Exposure or S/E. Shot on a single strip of black and white negative, with each frame photographed three times - successive exposures breaking down the spectrum of light into yellow, cyan and magenta information. After production, matrices (another strip of black & white film with a high relief silver image) were produced. Each of the matrices was exposed to every third frame, thereby imaging the entire short film with separate matrix rolls for yellow, cyan and magenta information, on three printing matrices. These matrices were then run through a bath of dyes, the excess dye washed away, and the information (dye) pressed or printed, one matrix at a time to the clear blank. Thus, yellow, then cyan and then magenta were imbibed on top of one another to a clear piece of black and white film on which the only photographic image was the silver sound track. It was this process which was used for virtually all feature and short animation in Technicolor until the early 1970s. As an archival aside, S/E works wonders as there is no discernable problem of registration of one image upon the other due to shrinkage of the three separate rolls of negative in the three strip process. For live action subjects, the three strip camera proved to be perfection. With three-strip Technicolor, not only could the reality of life be replicated, but with the brilliant yellow, cyan and magenta metal dyes, filmmakers could create hyper-realities that, imbibed to a totally clear and colorless nitrate blank, could bring to the screen brilliant yellow brick roads, sunsets redder and more beautiful than anyone had seen, ruby red slippers, brilliant red lipsticked lips and true Technicolor blues, greens and every other color in the rainbow. And these colors would never fade. Further, since the original negatives were black & white, there was no fade problem there either. The early three strip productions - films like Becky Sharp, Wings of the Morning, Adventures of Robin Hood, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Dodge City, Drums Along the Mohawk, Gone with the Wind, Jesse James, The Wizard of Oz, Thief of Bagdad, Blood and Sand, Reap the Wild Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Gang's All Here, Cover Girl, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, National Velvet, The Harvey Girls, The Jolson Story, Song of the South, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, Duel in the Sun, Forever Amber, The Red Shoes, The Adventures of Don Juan and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - were the epitome of the cinematographer's and production designer's art. Look at the Criterion releases of any of the color work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, photographed by Jack Cardiff, and you'll see the brilliance of these filmmakers. For anyone who truly loves film, Technicolor is "the stuff that dreams are made of." Fewer than 300 nitrate three-strip Technicolor features were produced. Possibly 50 might be considered as important. Less than half that might be considered "art." This was followed in the early 1950s with another 400 or so three-strip safety features. Far fewer of these fit into the "art" category. But for a brief period between 1932 and 1950 - just eighteen years - something very special came out of Hollywood. Three-strip Technicolor. Bringing this back to DVD, one must understand that you cannot see Technicolor on video. The system just doesn't work. In order to even create a proper looking transfer, one first must go back to the original black and white elements (if they survive) and recombine them to an Eastman color interpositive or internegative, and then transfer that resultant element. What one loses in most cases is the brilliance and depth of the color, shadow detail and true blacks. Because optics today are better than in the past, those resultant interpositives (an extremely fine grain positive image with a flat compressed contrast range and printed on negative orange base stock) are sharper than they ever were in the past. Combine this with exigencies both originally part of the Technicolor process and newer problems, and you end up in many cases with fringing (as the three records misalign), which brings with it a perceived lack of focus. The first problem that must be worked around (by laboratories other than Technicolor) takes into consideration the fact that each Technicolor camera was set up slightly differently for alignment. Technicolor knew this and designed optical printer shifts into the process, thereby aligning records, which, without the information and technology, would not align. Add to this the higher resolution of today's stock and these shifts and misalignments become more apparent. When it all comes together properly, we see things that audiences sixty years ago did not - like the freckles on Dorothy's face in The Wizard of Oz. For original negatives, unshrunken preservation materials or masters to have survived in pristine condition all these years is a minor miracle, especially on the problematic nitrate stock. But for a couple of examples to recently make their way to DVD, it all had to come together... from original photography, to preservation, to newly created elements and conversion to Eastman color, to a good eye and knowledge of cinema in the transfer and compression process. The Harvey Girls from Warner is a superb example of the mid-1940s Hollywood musical in Technicolor, properly brought to DVD. But for the full art of it - from great story, acting, direction, production design and one of the greatest uses of three-strip Technicolor technology - one need look no further than Warner's new DVD based upon preservation and restoration done by Robert Gitt and the UCLA Film Archive: John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, winner of the Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography by Winton Hoch in 1949. While the concept of this column is not to do formal revues, I will suggest titles for purchase when appropriate. This is one such title. Robert Harris --- Don't forget - you can CLICK HERE to discuss this article with Robert and other home theater enthusiasts online right now at The Home Theater Forum. Coming soon: More on aspect ratios, film grain and a look at the new Vault Disney Collection, which includes a wonderful supplemental piece on the Pollyanna: Special Edition by Disney's Scott MacQueen regarding Eastman yellow layer fading and one way to restore and preserve it. Robert A. Harris - Main Page
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