How do they color old black-and-white movies?
How do they color old black-and-white movies? Most of the classic black-and-white movies have been “colorized,” mainly so that they can be shown on television in color. It turns out that the process used to add the color is extremely tedious — someone has to work on the movie frame by frame, adding the colors one at a time to each part of the individual frame. To speed up the process, the coloring is done on a computer using a digital version of the film. The film is scanned into the computer and the coloring artist can view the movie one frame at a time on the computer’s screen. The artist draws the outline for each color area, and the computer fills it in. The original black-and-white film holds all of the brightness information, so the artist can paint large areas with a single color and let the original film handle the brightness gradients. This means that the artist might only have to add 10 or so actual colors to a scene. To speed up the process even mo
