Coloring Old Movies: Foes See Red, Backers See Green

August 29, 1986|By Abigail Reifsnyder.

What`s black and white--and colored--all over? A lot more than you may realize. If you went to see ``Weird Science`` last summer, you saw a segment from the original 1931 black and white ``Frankenstein``--except it wasn`t quite the original. It was in color. If you watched the network televsion miniseries ``Kane and Abel,`` you saw some old stock footage, shot in black and white, of an ocean liner cruise--except you saw it in color.

When NBC started airing Alfred Hitchcock in color for the introductions to its ``Alfred Hitchcock Presents`` series, there was much hoopla. But this was not the first example of black and white turned color. In fact, back in

`78, NBC`s ``King`` docudrama about Martin Luther King Jr. included eight minutes of colorized black and white footage of the Washington peace march.

These examples are merely a prelude to the vast number of productions we will be seeing in color in the next couple of years. There are about 16,000 movies, or, as one company put it, 2,790,000 minutes of black and white movies and TV shows, available to be colorized. And the prospect has many movie buffs up in arms.

Two companies--Color Systems Technology Inc. (CST) and Colorization Inc.--are behind virtually all the colored blackand white productions we are seeing. Using similar, though not identical, technologies, these companies have taken advantage of one of video`s special qualities--that it can be manipulated electronically. (Film, by contrast, is a chemical medium, so it can be altered only chemically, with irreversible results.)

Colorization Inc., founded by Wilson Markle and owned by Hal Roach Studios (HRS), is steadily working its way through the Hal Roach library, coloring the 1937 production of ``Topper`` with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett and the 1936 Laurel and Hardy movie ``Way Out West.`` The company also has colored the public domain classic, ``It`s a Wonderful Life,`` with Jimmy Stewart. Colorization Inc. uses a system developed by Markle in the early

`70s. Image Transform, Markle`s company at the time, colored all the pictures from the Apollo space program to make a full-color television presentation for NASA. Since then, Markle has refined the system, making it easy to color full-length feature movies.

Markle and his partner, Brian Holmes, transfer the original film to video. Then, using the Dubner graphics computer (which is able to track color data at real time), along with microcomputer workstations and custom software, they pick key frames at the beginning of each scene of the movie. An art director determines generally what colors should be used for the overall look and technicians then color each part of the picture. The computer takes this general information and assigns a color to each pixel of the picture. The computer tracks the movement of each pixel on the screen and moves the colors accordingly. There is only 4 percent change from one frame to the next, so the computer colors in 96 percent of the next frame based on the information in the previous frame and the technician fixes the remaining 4 percent.

CST`s process is somewhat different. Developed by electronics engineer Ralph Weinger in his garage in Philadelphia in the early `70s, the CST process is more hardware (rather than software) dependent that Colorization`s. Rather than color in the picture, the technician, or ``colorist,`` takes one segment of the frame--someone`s dress, for example--and chooses a range of colors for the area. A computer then produces a gray scale for the area and assigns a particular color to each shade of gray in the area. This way, if the dress was yellow, the gray scale might include a brownish yellow for the darker, pleated areas all the way to a bright yellow where the light falls directly on the dress. The technician does this for each part of the first and last frames of a scene. Then the computer interpolates all the in-between frames. If it runs into a gray for which no color has been assigned (a new character enters the scene, for example), that area remains gray and the technician must go back and color that spot.