Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/847

 Making Natural-Color Motion Pictures

Light filters through a four-colored attachment which is rotated in front of the projector lenses

��NATUR.\L-COLOR motion pictures have not been a success in the past. Color results were too poor to warrant the mechanical complica- tions and the consequent expense of the necessary' processes. A new sys- tem is being commer- cialized, however, which is unusually simple and which produces pictures more truly colored than ever before.

Like its predecessors, the new system depends upon the fact that beams of certain primary- colors when mixed together in varying proportions of intensity will produce a ray of light which will show forth every color in the spectrum. In the new process, the pictures are taken by the camera through a four-colored rotating filter, so that one primary color will affect one picture of the film, a different primary- color will affect the next picture on the film, and so on in very rapid succession. The developed film is run in the projector with a corresponding colored filter, and the color pictures are thrown on the screen in the same rapid sequence as they were taken in the camera. Twenty- four color pictures follow each other in a second. The eye has not the time to distinguish one color from the other. They blend all together and pro- duce almost the same effects of color which appeared in the original scene.

This process is therefore similar to that of the ordinary motion picture, with the colored filter thrown in. It is no more complicated. Even the film looks black and white like the others; only of course, each film pic- ture instead of containing the com- plete outline as in ordinary- motion pictures, contains only the part of the

���complete outline which corresponds to one of the four primary colors. The colors which have been found to produce best effects are red and green-blue, yellow and blue. Blends of these produce colors so real- istic that the separate figures on the screen seem actually to stand out in relief. A system as simple and effective as this brings us much

At left: The four-colored rotating filter through which pictures in four different • colors are taken in rapid succession

���Photographing natural scenery in all the beauty of its own coloring, by means of the filter camera attachment whidi "ttxies in" the primary colors

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