Warnercolor and other colour processes

One of the reviewers makes a big deal about Warnercolor and all over IMDB people are confused, so here is a simplified version:


Prior to about 1950 Technicolor used a three strip process which, briefly, entailed the simultaneous exposing of three rolls of b/w film in a modified camera shot through colour filters.
Final prints were produced by a dye-transfer process which tended to produce vivid colours - although it was possible to achieve more subtle effects.

During World War II the German company Agfa perfected a single-strip colour film.

After the war the Agfa patents were treated as war booty and numerous other companies were able to use the same technology including Eastman Kodak, Ansco, Gevaert and Fuji, as well as Agfa.

The Agfa-derived film stock's advantages over three strip Technicolor included being able to use standard, less cumbersome cameras, and being cheaper and simpler to process. Technicolor had also charged high license fees and imposed often draconian rules over how their process could be used - there were no such problems with the Agfa-derived processes.

For these reasons, after about 1950 three-strip Technicolor in effect became obsolete and ceased to be a unique process except in one respect: SOME final prints destined for prestigious venues of SOME films bearing the name Technicolor were still produced by the dye transfer process. In all other respects a film bearing the name Technicolor was shot and processed exactly like most others.

Any film which says something like Eastmancolor or Anscocolor or Fuji etc used the same process and so did Technicolor - all of their films after 1950 and some of them before.

Some films have a credit something like "Color by DeLuxe" "Processed by Rank Film Laboratories", Metrocolor or Warnercolor. All this means is that one of the above, essentially identical, Agfa-derived film stocks was processed at a laboratory of that name using essentially the same process and printing techniques as any film lab, famous or not, anywhere in the world. Of course, some labs were more proficient than others, but they were all carrying out the same processes.

Whatever the name of the process, with the exception of three strip Technicolor pre-1950, the way the film was exposed and lit and the aesthetic decisions made in grading had more of an effect on the final look of a film than the name of the essentially-identical colour processes.

It is only in recent years that a growing number of films have departed from the processes outlined above by using Digital Intermediates and/or other digital stages in post-production, but many films are still shot and processed in essentially the same way as they would have been at any time post-WW2.