Is this about how good lenticular Kodacolor looks?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Home Movie: Galante Collection: 003375 : Galante Family : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Although I never studied it in depth, I stayed away from lenticular Kodacolor because of the lines.  A Kodacolor collection had come up for sale. All the sample frame shots from the collection looked crappy. I looked up a sample Kodacolor scan at the Internet Archive of an unrelated film to those being offered for sale. It seems to be pretty low-res stuff. Take a look at the link and view it full screen. Is this about how good lenticular Kodacolor looks? If so...it is garbage for res! 

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Bikers' Mardi Gras Panoramic 2014 from 'Bikers' Mardi Gras' artists' book 2015 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography
 

Edited February 26 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Perry Paolantonio]

Lenticular color isn't about resolution. Never was. It was a pre-Kodachrome color process that required a special filter on the camera lens to split R/G/B channels that the lenticular lenses baked into the film. It would "encode" as three-channel greyscale color information. On projection the same lens was used on the projector to "decode" the color. Because it's basically 1/3 the resolution of normal film, yes, the resolution is lower, but I think it's a pretty fascinating format. The filter was so thick you had an effective ASA of something like 10 or 15. Basically you could only shoot it in mid-day sunlight to have any hope of getting an image!

Some older telecine machines were modified to accept the lens and could do an ok job of decoding the color. See this film from Eastman House: 

 

We are working on some software to do the color decoding but it's a huge challenge because this film is 100+ years old now, and is warped. Any software that deals with this will have to detect shrinkage and warping, and straighten out the vertical lines (which is hard, if not impossible, to do when the film is dark). The film gets scanned at the highest resolution you can go, then has to be scaled down to a lower res to have any hope of concealing the lines somewhat. 

We've taken a few stabs at this over the years but now that I'm better with the color processing tools we use in some of the software I've written, I want to take another crack at it. Just need to find the time. It's not a format that has come up enough to justify the effort, unfortunately. When we do get it from a customer, it's usually just a couple hundred feet at most. 

Edited March 2 by Perry Paolantonio

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Thanks Perry!