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Topic: Black & White On Color Film Stock- - Why?
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 08-16-2009 08:41 AM
Black and white printing is now more expensive; labs are set up for high-speed processing of colour stock, but not black and white. Black and white processing in recent time has been limited to things like track negatives, separations and certain special effects elements such as travelling mattes etc, which are probably done digitally these days, and of course for small numbers of new prints of classic films. To produce a large number of black and white prints you'd have to either give the lad a lot of time to do them using the limited black and white capacity they have, or get them to convert an ECP-2 line to do black and white, which I'd guess is probably possible, but colour processing is normally done at a high temperature these days; you'd need to reduce the temperature, and slow down the mackine to handle black and white. It would also mean downtime while the machine was converted, and again while it was converted back to colour.
With colour prints all of the silver is removed from the film these days, and almost all of this can be recovered by the lab and sold. With black and white much of the silver remains in the print, and is thus passed to the customer, not recovered by the lab. This silver can only be recovered when the prints are recycled.
Silver absorbs infra-red much more strongly than colour dyes, and so it is much easier to damage the film by overheating than it is with colour stock.
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Richard P. May
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 243
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: Jan 2006
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posted 08-16-2009 11:58 AM
Some of the questions were already answered above, but I can elaborate a little.
It is hard to make a good b&w print on color stock, as the final color tends to drift during processing, resulting in a print with a color tinge. A few years ago, while at WB, we ordered some prints of the restored THE BIG PARADE, with the tinted sections, of course, on color stock, but also printed the b&w sections on the same film. The client got the print, and said it looked like green and white. The final result was to print the B&W sections on B&W stock, and intercut them with the tinted scenes. In other cases, this has been done perfectly.
Universal originally printed SCHINDLER'S LIST on B&W, and the theaters had trouble with emulsion sticking, causing no end of projection problems. I understand later prints were made on color stock. To project well, B&W stock need to have the sprocket hole edges waxed. Color film has this built in.
As far as sound, a B&W track reads the same as cyan. The red LED light thinks cyan is black.
I saw TETRO projected digitally, and it was beautifully photographed. I'd guess printed on color stock it would lose some contrast, and maybe pick up some color tint.
The movie about Bettie Page a few years ago had a lot of B&W photography, and when I saw it the color changed with each reel, from slightly pink, to slightly green, etc. Processing temperatures cause this.
DM
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 08-16-2009 03:06 PM
NOTHING looks like a B&W stock print. Double nothing if it is on nitrate stock, but we've visited that issue elsewhere. But B&W on color stock simply can't look as good or have nearly the same aesthetic as B&W stock. And it's simple -- B&W is only a single emulsion layer thick, not three, not to mention it's B&W by nature and can't be anything else. Color has three emulsion layers trying to be the in perfect relationship to produce NO color -- fat chance.
Plus, I have never seen any of the so-called B&W film sequences like on PLEASANTVILLE or SCHINDLER'S LIST or the opening of RAGING BULL where you couldn't immediately see the color "behind" the B&W, so to speak. I suppose that look could be something a director might want, but that would really be a stretch. For a pure A / B comparison, there is no question a REAL B&W print has a genuine look that color stock simply can't capture.
And as Dick May says, printed at slower speeds and with an emulsion that contains silver (and that silver can be regulated too -- prints purposely made leaving more silver behind in the emulsion also have an incredibly rich look to them), real B&W prints tend to make some exquisite looking images that won't be duplicated by high speed color B&W wannabees.
Too bad this aesthetic isn't used by more directors and DPs. Yah, yah, it costs more, but in the overall scheme of things, how many millions will a decent movie bring in in the first weekend? The additional cost for well-made B&W release prints could be recovered in, what....the first 4 hours of release? Or maybe they don't need to have 15 different kinds of bottled water at the catered commissary for every meal. Or maybe they can hire actors who can actually speak without needing to hire "dialogue coaches" for every one on the set, or they could eliminate a Dolby consultant or two (sound mixers haven't learned how to mix Dolby tracks YET?!). I'm just sayin.....
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 08-16-2009 03:30 PM
I saw Schindler's List at the Empire, Leicester Square a few days after it opened, and again several months later at another cinema where I also projected it. I remember there being a note in one of the cans requesting that it be shown without an intermission where possible. Unfortunately, this wasn't possible as this cinema had only one projector and a tower and it wasn't possible to fit the whole print on one spool, even by over-running the edge of the spool. This is one of the few times I've run film on a tower, and I didn't like it, I'd much rather run two machines.
On both occasions the film was printed on black and white triacetate stock, as was the trailer for the film. Sorry, let me correct that, I didn't actually see the print at the Empire, so I can't be certain that it was triacetate, as the other print was, but both prints, and the trailer, were on black and white stock. The trailer was printed on Agfa stock, and I'm pretty sure the feature was too. The negative stock was Kodak. The colour sections were spliced in, which must have made the prints expensive to produce. I can't remember what type of splice, tape or cement, was used. I've never seen a print of this film on colour stock, but I can't say whether or not there were any in this country. The 'present day' scenes at the start of the film, and of Oscar Schindler's funeral at the end were in colour, and there were scenes, I think two, during the film where a girl's dress was coloured red, but everything else black and white.
The changes to colour stock just before the red dress appeared were very obvious.
I'd forgotten about 'Goodnight and Good Luck'. We ran that at Croydon, and had terrible problems with it, but nothing to do with the stock. The sound was very poor, this was the first black and white print we ran after converting to ted laser readers. We thought at first that this was the problem, but it turned out to be a defective print; when it came back a couple of weeks later we got a different print, and it was fine with the red readers. Strange that the previous cinema(s) hadn't reported it.
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