Why couldn't Technicolor make its Dye Transfer on 70 mm prints?

[Vivaldi]

Why couldn't Technicolor make its Dye Transfer on 70 mm prints?

[MrOracle]

They could have, but the cameras would be too large to be usable, and it would have been too expensive.

Many things are possible but are simply not practical.

[Vivaldi]

I am talking about for those shot on Eastmancolor.

Some were shot on 65/70 mm Eastmancolor films. Their 35 mm print versions had Technicolor's Dye Transfer only. Not 70 mm prints.

[MrOracle]

The dye transfer process was made possible because there were 3 separate black & white negative films, each filtered for a different color, for every scene. This required a giant camera with prisms and 3 film strips running, which made the camera giant and heavy and required tons of light - plus 3 times the film stock.

The whole point of Eastmancolor was to get it down to a single, full color negative, But with a single full color negative, you can't use the dye transfer process because you no longer have the 3 black and white negatives that the process required. And no one wanted the old dye transfer process anyway, since it really only did extremely saturated colors well - it was not possible to get the more natural, muted colors that a lot of movies called for. Eastmancolor could.

Technicolor always had serious limitations, but those early color movies worked within the limitations and got great results, but directors quickly desired to move beyond those limitations, and finally could with Eastmancolor single strip color. That was the standard for the next 60 years (with some refinements along the way, of course).

[Vivaldi]

Technicolor did Dye Transfer from Eastmancolor films as of 1954. This went on until 1970s but only 35 mm prints.

[Vivaldi]

Read it

https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/1445/

[Vivaldi]

Three b/w color separations were produced from the Eastmancolor negative and printed by dye transfer on blank film

[MrOracle]

I'm sure, but that would have added significant costs to the development process, so it would have only been done on select titles that both would have benefited from the intense color saturation and were expected to do very well at the box office.

To do the same with 65mm negatives would have probably quadrupled those additional costs, and so the studios just weren't prepared to spend that kind of money.

As I said from the beginning, it was not a technical limitation but a financial one. The benefits in the 50s and 60s didn't justify the expense, and as film got better by the 70s, that level of saturation was possible with Eastmancolor if it was desired - but it largely was not desired.

As it is, 70mm was very rarely used due to costs. When Disney rented cameras for Tron in the early 80s, they still had sand inside from Lawrence Of Arabia, which was shot in the 60s. You needed such deep pockets for 70mm - and had to be able to live with very restrictive camera limitations, that almost no one used it.

[JustBe333]

I’m guessing this has to be a rhetorical question seeing as film is now extinct 😕😢😭