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The 1929 MGM musical "Its A Great Life" from Warner Archive. Beautiful black and white image quality, can see tack sharp image on the DVD-R, however the Technicolor sequences were very grainy. Was early Technicolor just naturally more grainy than same era black and white? Also in the last color sequence between musical numbers, while the camera was on the rotating swirl pattern, it appears to fade to black and white, then an abrupt splice back to color with a different pallet, this time blue and orange, rather than the more greenish and orange pallet previous. Is this just from using different source material, or did they actually adjust the dyes in the original prints to bring out more blues in the costumes of the last "Sunbeam" number?

If I remember correctly, some of the color sequences were duped from a surviving print, and others from some of the original 2-color negative that turned up during the Turner ownership of the MGM library. The section from the negative should be noticeably better quality.
I don't know the picture well enough to be more specific, but this might answer your question.

Supposedly Technicolor was overwhelmed with demand during this period with prints being rushed through by hastily trained technicians. There were widespread complaints from exhibitors and patrons about the misaligned and overly grainy prints. Under normal circumstances, the Technicolor prints of the period were beautiful. The grainy prints or negatives that survive on IT'S A GREAT LIFE probably came from that troublesome period.

As the intertitles were in silent films, were the color sequences shot on a different kind of film stock?

Grain must have been an issue even at the time, because when they brought out the System 3 dye transfer process, they specifically mentioned a less grainy image as one of its improvements.

From what I understand, it wasn't true grain in the sense that it was an artefact of the stock itself (this makes sense - the `slow' film they used in Technicolor would actually have had a smaller grain than usual) but a symptom of the difficulty of producing the image. Other than aligning the two color matrices accurately, you had to use a lot of guesswork in things like correct exposure and contrast. The lower the contrast, the more grainy the image would appear to be.

Experts - please step in!

Likewise, I'd be interested to hear an expert answer on your second question. Some sequences in `It's A Great Life' almost look blue/red rather than green/red.

The actual shade of red and green used in earlier two strip seemed to vary quite a bit, from fire-engine red to ochre and from leaf green to teal.

Presumably it would have been easy enough to print with a very bluish shade of green as an aesthetic choice, so long as you didn't have any vegetation in the shot.

Is there any record of anyone actually using the red and blue spectrum for System 3???

Brooksie wrote:
Experts - please step in!

Likewise, I'd be interested to hear an expert answer on your second question. Some sequences in `It's A Great Life' almost look blue/red rather than green/red.

The actual shade of red and green used in earlier two strip seemed to vary quite a bit, from fire-engine red to ochre and from leaf green to teal.

Not really an expert here but I seem to recall from one of our esteemed experts saying that in the early days of the Technicolor process, no two prints were exactly alike. I think it's a safe bet that the two color production numbers in the existing version of IT'S A GREAT LIFE came from two different sources. The "Sailin; On A Sunbeam" number was missing from the film during it's initial runs on TCM. It did however turn up as a stand alone One Reel Wonder on a couple of occasions before it was finally integrated into the complete film.

BixB wrote:Not really an expert here but I seem to recall from one of our esteemed experts saying that in the early days of the Technicolor process, no two prints were exactly alike.

From what I've read, that sounds very likely. These technicians really were working in the dark (no pun intended). The technology was new and completely unstandardised.

Anyone who has ever developed their own photographs would recognise the process they had to go through - multiple test prints with small changes in exposure and so forth - it's almost entirely trial and error, and apparently remained that way to a certain extent even when full Technicolor came in.

Ed,
Yes, the color sequences had to be on a different kind of film stock. The camera stock had to be sensitive to both colors (panchromatic), as it was exposed thru filters. The orthochromatic (blue sentitive) stock used commonly for b&w photography around the time of early color processes wouldn't record the image coming thru the red/orange filter.
Panchromatic stock was used for many b&w films, also, due to its sensitivity to all colors, and consequently providing a more balanced image than ortho (no black lips, for instance, making it look like everybody wore lipstick).
As to prints, since the printing process was so different from b&w, the color sections had to be cut into the b&w parts of the film.

Richard, thank you. That's what I thought. Isn't that why so many color sequences are now lost? Because of the original film stock?