Cinecolor

Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger, and its various formats were in use from 1932 to 1955.

As a bipack color process, the photographer loaded a standard camera with two film stocks: an orthochromatic strip dyed orange-red and a panchromatic strip behind it. The orthochromatic film stock recorded only blue and green, and its orange-red dye (analogous to a Wratten 23-A filter) filtered out everything but orange and red light to the panchromatic film stock.

Since the distance to the two film emulsions differed in depth from a single emulsion, the camera's lens focus had to be adjusted and a special film gate added to accommodate a bipack negative.

In the laboratory, the negatives were developed and the orange-red dye removed. The prints were made on duplitized film and developed as black and white positives. One side containing the red-orange filtered recorded and the soundtrack was toned blue-green; the other side containing the blue-green record was toned red-orange.

Cinecolor could produce vibrant reds, oranges, blues, browns and flesh tones, but its renderings of other colors such as bright greens (rendered dark green) and purples (rendered a sort of dark magenta) were muted.

The Cinecolor process was invented in 1932 by the English-born cinematographer William Thomas Crespinel (1890–1987), who joined the Kinemacolor Corporation in 1906 and went to New York in 1913 to work with Kinemacolor's American unit. After that company folded in 1916, he worked for Prizma, another color film company, founded by William Van Doren Kelley. He later worked for Multicolor and patented several inventions in the field of color cinematography.

After leaving Multicolor, Crespinel co-founded the Colorfilm Corporation of California in 1932. By May 1932, the name of the company was changed to Cinecolor, Inc. (later Cinecolor Corporation). William Loss, a director of the Citizens Traction Company in New York, was its principal investor. The company bought four acres of land in Burbank, California for its processing plant.

The company was largely founded on the patents and equipment of William Van Doren Kelley and his Prizma Color system, and was in direct competition with Multicolor, which folded in 1932, and Cinecolor then bought its equipment.