Eric Steelberg ASC Posted May 18, 2004 Share Posted May 18, 2004 Anyone heard if the Beijing Film Group is still around and doing 3 color separations? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member John Pytlak RIP Posted May 18, 2004 Premium Member Share Posted May 18, 2004 I was in China for an ISO/TC36 Cinematography Plenary in 1987 and saw the dye transfer equipment in operation in Beijing and Shanghai. AFAIK, neither is in operation any longer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nate Downes Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 IIRC, The Technicolor company is handling dye sublination film prints again. Don't know if anyone has the 3-strip cameras anymore. (if anyone knows where a working model can be found, let me know. I'd love a chance to shoot on it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Gross Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 No more three strip, and Technicolor stopped doing the dye-sub prints. It was only for a short while and when Technicolor purchased another LA lab and moved their facilities they didn't bother to reassemble their dye-sub printer. Business decision. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nate Downes Posted May 30, 2004 Share Posted May 30, 2004 Hmm, the process is documented well enough. Anyone with the gumption to try it however? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Gross Posted May 30, 2004 Share Posted May 30, 2004 Well, the process for building an atomic bomb is pretty well documented too, but I don't think I have the backing or experience to pull that off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Filip Plesha Posted May 30, 2004 Share Posted May 30, 2004 Mitch, are you talking about their new process #6? They don't do it anymore? For a while it seemed like it had a future. They redisigned some parts of the process for the current age and now they threw it all away, what a shame. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member David Mullen ASC Posted May 30, 2004 Premium Member Share Posted May 30, 2004 The problem was modern turnaround times for making release prints. You need about a month to deal with making and timing the b&w matrices, making the dye prints, etc. And the price tag at Technicolor was something like an additional $40,000 for the dye transfer work. Most studios drop off multiple IN's to two or three labs two weeks before the release date and knock of thousands of prints. So it was too expensive and too slow. Which is sad because the whole idea of dye transfer is that, if you build a printer with enough capacity, the higher the print order, the cheaper each print gets because most of the costs are in making the matrices. Technicolor killed dye transfer originally in the 1970's because the average release print order had dropped to a couple of hundred. It wasn't until the 1980's that you started having these 2000 or more release print orders. Unfortunately, their new dye transfer printer was not designed for large print orders since it was a prototype. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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