Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/848

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��Popular Science Monthly

���The mechanism of the attachment by means of which the colors are blended on the screen

nearer the day when natural color motion pictures will be the only ones in use.

Experiments are now under way for perfecting a process of dyeing the black and white film the color of the four primary hues. If this can be done — and recent tests seem to promise that it can — there will be no need of the four-colored filter on the projector, and this natural color system will be simplified so much further.

It is planned to take the black and white film which has been exposed in the camera and sim- ply immerse it in vats containing the various dyes. When it is placed in the red vat, for instance, all of the individual pictures of the film, excepting the one- fourth of them which corre- spond to the red portions of the scene, are covered up by small rubber blocks. The dye cannot touch them, therefore, while those parts of the pictures which correspond to the red portions of the scene are colored red.

After these pictures have dried, they are covered up and the rubber blocks are removed from those por- tions of the picture to be dyed blue in a similar way. And this is done for the yellow and the green-blue portions also. The film is thus colored di- rectly and no extra filter is needed on the projector.

��"Editing" a Motion-Picture Film with a Phonograph

AFTER a motion-picture film has been 1\ developed and printed it is sent to the general manager or to the director to be "edited." Like an author's manuscript in the hands of an editor, it is shortened here and there, the captions altered, some parts entirely "cut" or deleted, and the whole film dressed up to suit the ideas of the men closest in touch with the theater-going public.

The editing takes place in the projection room, but the altering — cutting the film and changing it — is done in the cutting and assembling room by men who do nothing else. Sometimes the men in the cutting room ("cutters," in the trade lingo) are so overwhelmed and confused with orders issued by the studio officials that they are compelled to ask for additional expla- nations. Needless to say this wastes much time.

By means of the phonograph, however, one motion-picture company is eliminating this waste and saving money. As the director watches a picture in the projection room he utters his editing orders into the transmitter of a dictating machine. The film is then sent back to the cutting room with the phonograph record.

As the director watches a picture he utters his editing corrections in- to the transmitter of a dictating machine

���In the cutting and assembling room the corrections are made from the records of the dictating machine

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