Double Printing

[Jody Lipes]

i am interested in using the double printng method on an upcoming film. i know that the natural was the first film to use this printing method. does anyone know any other films which did?

[David Mullen ASC]

It was not double-printed. The early scenes used an optical printer to combine a color I.P. with a b&w positive onto a new, desaturated color internegative -- in other words, those scenes were duped. A normal print was made.

 

This technique of combining a color I.P. and a b&w positive (both made from the same original camera negative) onto a new dupe neg was also used for the Auschwitz scenes in "Sophie's Choice." It was also done for sections of "The Sacrifice".

 

A similar approach was done for the original prints of "Deliverance" except it involved using the Technicolor dye transfer system as well. "Reflections in a Golden Eye" also did this.

 

John Huston's "Moby Dick" did a similar effect but in this case, they created b&w separations from the Eastmancolor negative using broad-cut instead of narrow-cut filters -- i.e. each color separation was "polluted" by the other two colors. When recombined, the image was very desaturated and low-contrast. He then used the fourth silver "key" printer in the Technicolor dye transfer line to restore the contrast.

[John Pytlak RIP]

I think "The Night They Raided Minsky's" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" both used a slow dissolve from B&W to color in their opening sequences. "Hello Dolly" had a wipe from a sepia B&W still image to a moving color image.

[David Mullen ASC]

"Star Trek 3" also began with a slow dissolve from b&w to color for footage from "Star Trek 2".

 

"Rocky 3" had some optically-printed desaturated shots as well for a flashback.

[Mitch Gross]

The remake of D.O.A. starring Dennis Quaid (dreadful film, btw, but lots of silly fun camera & lighting techniques) starts in B&W and cuts to color, and in the end the color "drains out" to B&W. Looked like a completely post decision by the music video-trained directors and the B&W was very contrasty, which I'm sure they liked.

[Jody Lipes]

what is this technique (combining b+w to control saturation and contrast, and color) called?

 

and what is double printing?

 

i am interested in using a similar method to create a desaturated, contrasty, sharp, grainless, clean image. i know that this method reduces sharpness because you are essentially overlapping two images, but i was told the level of control with regards to saturation and contrast is high in this method, and it may be worth it to sacrifice the sharpness for control in these other areas. is the lost of sharpness dramatic?

[Max Jacoby]

I think in Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' this was applied as well

[Christian Appelt]

In a recent article I read that the newest film from Volker Schloendorff (known for THE TIN DRUM and DEATH OF A SALESMAN) uses traditional optical printing to control the de-saturation shot-by-shot - for the complete feature film.

 

They made b&w separations on an Oxberry printer and recombined them on dupe negative stock, so they could fine-tune the degree of color saturation like in the old Technicolor 3-strip days.

 

Surprising to me was the fact that this technique gave

 

- better image quality

- faster turnaround time

- better control during grading

 

compared to the latest scanning/digital grading/film recording procedures at Arri Digital.

As a side effect, they got a set of long-time archive color separations, which is a nice thing too...

[David Mullen ASC]

Except that his entire film becomes a dupe, i.e. grainier and more contrasty, unless he was planning on making release prints from an IN anyway and is doing this work each time he needs another IN. And simply recombining b&w separations doesn't give you a desaturated effect unless you combine them with a b&w dupe of the color negative.

 

And I can't see how this would make turnaround times FASTER. What can be faster than working with one film element instead of three? The more control you have over the image, the more time to tend to spend to fine-tune the image.

 

By the way, this was how IN's were made in the 1950's -- dupe stocks were poor so b&w positive separations were used to make the IN, instead of a color IP.

 

Technicolor was a little different in that the b&w positives were not normal separations but were "matrices" to be dipped in dyes and then pressed onto a "blank" roll (dye imbibation printing.) Color could be controlled both in how the matrices were made and processed, and in the dyes created for printing.

[Christian Appelt]

Thanks for the correction!

 

I will look up the article, it was printed in the German periodical KAMERAMANN some time ago. You are right, separations alone will not get a desaturation effect, IIRC they used an b&w interpositive too.

 

As for time & cost, the article said that they compared film in/out and digital color grading at 2K resolution, and tests showed that the loss of detail in optical printing was smaller than 2K (better quality at 4K would certainly have been more expensive and time-consuming). But I will look it up...

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, compared to a 2K digital intermediate, an optical printer conversion would have more resolution (unless done badly).

 

I was just comparing a normal color-timing using IP's and IN's versus using b&w seps and IN's in terms of time.

 

In terms of comparing doing optical printer desaturation versus digital desaturation, they are so different in approach it's hard to compare them but I have a hard time believing that SHOT-BY-SHOT changes to the level in desaturation would be faster using b&w seps and an optical printer since every shot would have to be wedge-tested. It would be like having 1000 optical printer effects in a movie. You'd have to try an effect, get it developed and printed, screen it or look at wedges, and go back to incorporate the changes. In a color-correction suite, you'd just pick the level of desaturation right there in real time and move on to the next shot.

 

Now if you were talking about a simple overall desaturation effect for an entire roll, at the same level, that would be different.