Modern methods for the visualization of lenticular film colors
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23738/CCSJ.140108Keywords:
lenticular film, Kodacolor, color reconstruction, deep learning, film digitizationAbstract
Some of the first home movies in color were shot on 16mm lenticular film produced by Kodak from the late 1920s to the 1940s. This very special film stock called Kodacolor is embossed with a vertical array of hundreds of tiny cylindrical lenses that allowed to record color scenes on a black&white panchromatic silver emulsion. There are multiple possible methods to extract the color information from the film images. An efficient method to obtain digital color images from these historical motion pictures is to scan the silver emulsion in high-resolution and let a software extract the encoded color information. In this context, a new approach based on artificial intelligence has been demonstrated more efficient for the localization of the lenticular screen than other previous methods. An alternative solution cosists in digizing the color images while these are created with the original optical method. While this last approach has the advantage of better representing the original historical appearance, it requires specific equipment and skilled operators.
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