Technicolor vs modern color

[Osi Osgood]

I always thought that "The Godfather" was the last feature shot in the dye transfer process.

[Ed Gordon]

Close enough to get a cigar Osi!

And while dye-transfer printing yielded superior color printing, the number of high speed prints that could be struck in labs all over the country outweighed the fewer, slower number of prints that could only be had in Technicolor's labs. One of the last American films printed by Technicolor was The Godfather Part II (1974).

In 1975, the US dye transfer plant was closed and Technicolor became an Eastman-only processor. In 1977, the final dye-transfer printer left in Rome was used by Dario Argento to make prints for his horror film Suspiria. In 1980, the Italian Technicolor plant ceased printing dye transfer.

The British line was shut down in 1978 and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab which shipped the equipment to China. A great many films from China and Hong Kong were made in the Technicolor dye transfer process, including Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou (1990) and even one American film, Space Avenger (1989), directed by Richard W. Haines. The Beijing line was shut down in 1993 for a number of reasons, including inferior processing.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor

[Rob Young]

This is interesting and I'm sure Disney are not the only ones to archive using the technicolor principle of 3 B&W exposures for each colour.

Preserving Our Movies | Disney Digital Studio Services

What is nice in this digital age is that a digital master can be created from old 3 strip technicolor originals with, arguably, greater registration than was ever possible using optical process.

[Osi Osgood]

I agree Rob. We see a lot of that sort of technology used in modern releases, as, since the film element is out of the equation, grain is largely gone, (sigh), and enhancement of the color spectrum is literally a given. The only issue I have with this is when they will rerelease a classic film, and it becomes obvious that they have really messed with the color spectrum to fit with modern tastes.

[Brian Fretwell]

I also imagine that with polyester film the three strips will not shrink at different rates as with the original 3-strip Technicolor negatives, which has been the spur to produce better software to recombine scans of them.