Why were the early movies in black and white, what was so difficult with colours? And what are the dots on old movies?
In: Technology
The earliest film cameras were black and white. They used a light sensitive substance (which is called photographic emulsion.) Basically, you open a lens to focus light onto a piece of film. The film reacts to the light. Areas that were very bright will end up white, areas that were very dark will end up black. It preserves brightness, but not colour.
The earliest video cameras worked on the same principle – they just had a moving reel so you were capturing 20-30 images per second, and then you could project those images by shining light through them.
The problem with capturing colour is that you need to filter the light somehow. All your film does is react to light. So the early colour video cameras actually used multiple lenses with filters on them – Technicolor originally used two film strips, one with a red filter and one with a green filter. The red one would capture the intensity of red lights, the green one would capture the intensity of green lights. When you projected it, you’d have to project the two film strips at the same time, and you’d have to project them through filters, and line them up so that the images overlap and play simultaneously. In short, it was a lot of work and required special equipment, so that’s why it didn’t really catch on.
After that process was invented, another process was invented where they would film on three different strips with three different cameras, and they could print the three strips together onto one strip with special coloured film, so that it could be projected with ordinary light and didn’t require a special projector. That’s called three-strip Technicolor, and it was the dominant way to film and project movies in colour for about 40 years.
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