The art of sound pictures (1930)

246 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES audience. A more or less successful application of this type of additive color process was made by the old Kinema Color Company. Colored motion pictures, starring many famous players, were shown throughout this country and England by means of the Kinema Color process. The chief trouble with this process lay in the extreme rapidity with which the motion picture film had to be run through the projector. As a result of this required superspeed of the film and the over-rapid exposure of the eye to different colors, an effect of pulsation was experienced by a majority of Kinema Color audiences. This pulsation probably consisted, in reality, of a fatigue in different parts of the eye as a result of being compelled to accommodate too rapidly to different pictures. A later refinement of this process made it possible to eliminate pulsation by running the film at a still higher speed, so that the eye did not even have time to accommodate itself separately to the individual color pictures but only accommodated itself to a single group of pictures, giving the total effect of natural color. But this very high rate of speed proved impractical for many technical reasons. Also, there were visual effects called flicker and fringe which were never successfully eliminated from the Kinema Color process. Flicker is an effect which is due to the change in brightness of the light on the screen, so that first the picture appears very bright, then darker, the brightness and darkness of the picture alternating rapidly yet noticeably to the audience. Fringe consists of a sort of streaking of one of the mixture colors, especially following the rapid movement of an arm or a leg in the picture. The technical reason for fringe in the Kinema Color