World's First Color Moving Pictures Discovered
BoxRec writes "The BBC is reporting newly-discovered films made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London, who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899." When Turner invented his process, though, existing projection systems weren't up to it; to see the discovered footage, British archivists digitized the film for computer playback. When you're used to old films being both black and white and jerky, it's amazing to see it in color and (relatively) smooth.
1899? That'd be even earlier than Colin McKenzie's film, which I believe was 1911 ... I'd have to rewatch Forgotten Silver to confirm it, though.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
...it's jarring to see a still image stamped with "this content is not currently available for your device". Nice illustration of 113 years of progress, BBC.
That's amazing. It's so amazing that I almost think the National Media museum is the victim of some kind of hoax. Reading about color in motion picture films, Wikipedia says hand colored films began in 1895 with Thomas Edison. This isn't hand painted though. Anyone with photography knowledge have an explanation?
They have digitized it for the computer. They might have also fixed the transition and jerkiness. They should digitize the old black and white footage and apply the same techniques to see if the (relative) smoothness is a side effect of the digitization or not.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
YouTube has a much better video than the one linked in the article that contains the process they went through and talks about the capture and projection intended by the inventor.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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Wait its only been 113 years? Can I view that content without worrying about being sued by MPAA?
if this had been in 2012, he wouldn't have patented a film process but instead followed Apple (and others) by patenting "The idea of colour moving pictures displayed to an audience" and his descendents would now be suing Hollywood for 15 gazillion dollars.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who noticed his last name, but the temporal color strobing would be tough to emulate if hand-coloring.
Often silent movies look "jerky" because of how they are shown ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film#Projection_speed ). In particular, video for TV has a fixed frame rate, and transferring the movies to a different frame rate while maintaining smooth action is not trivial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine).
It was actually ADOPTED as the official US color broadcast standard by the FCC from 1950-1953.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-sequential_color_system
The main limitations of the CBS field-sequential system were the requirement for a rotating color filter wheel more than 2X the diameter of the picture tube. TV sets larger than 10" screen size or so became absolutely HUGE. The system was also incompatible with existing monochrome sets, which already had a substantial installed base by then.
Once RCA developed the all electronic system that eventually became "NTSC", the field sequential systems were relegated to niche applications such as the color cameras that flew to the moon on the Apollo landings. And yes, a similar system forms the heart of modern color DLP projectors.
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"Hey, I got an idea: let's film some sugar-induced brats destroying table decorations!"
"Brilliant!"
Table-ized A.I.
We can do this today with a synchronized bank of LEDs that flash in color rotation with the camera frames (black and white film or monochrome sensor).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He made one even earlier of a mouse piloting a steamboat, but that one was lost in a mysterious fire...
2. transfer it to 35 " film first before digitizing it.
angry reason: interneg loses detail.
Maybe, just maybe, these people know a little more about film restoration than you do.
More importantly though, where did you get this information from? It's not in the linked article, and it's not mentioned in the video. They only say they did it "digitally."
Know what makes me angry? People who don't capitalise the first word of a sentence, and fail to use apostrophes in words like "you're."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"World's First Color Moving Pictures Discovered"
"...who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899..."
Moving pictures predated film by decades or millenia. The zoetrope was invented in 1833 according to Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope -- which also mentions a similar device in China in 180 AD.
Modern films seem to have a lot of jerks in them too.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.