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Report of the Optics Committee
Since the last meeting of the society, your Committee on Optics has had three meetings to determine, if possible, the effect on an optience of tint in a motion picture. Unfortunately, due to the wide scattering of the committee, at no meeting have there been more than four members present. In spite of this, however, the committee has at least made a start toward collecting the data required of it. This report then it but a preliminary one showing results already obtained and pointing the way to a large held of most interesting investigation in the future.
In the first place, it was thought color could affect the picture on the screen in five ways. The apparent brightness may be affected. The clearness. The contrast. Then again color may improve the naturalness of the picture. For example, a blue tint for the sea, a red tint for a burning building, etc. The fifth way is in the effect of color on the mood. These last two ways the committee has, for the time being, disregarded as belonging to the psychological rather than the physiological phase of the subject, and so a question for the producer rather than the engineer.
At the first meeting of the committee, March 23rd, a general method of approaching the problem was decided upon. It would seem that screens that would absorb part of the spectrum, when illuminated with white light (i. e., tinted screens) could be assumed to give identical effects on the eye, as white screens illuminated by light from which the same part of the spectrum had been absorbed by some interposed filter. Accordingly, considerations of convenience led to the adoption for the tests at hand of white screens and of white light, from which different colors had been absorbed. The only way of comparing colors accurately was thought to be the observing of a picture in each color thrown simultaneously on the screen side by side. A request was then sent the Eastman Kodak Co. for a number of short lengths from the same film (i. e., all the lengths printed and finished from the same negative film under the same conditions), each length to be dyed different color. These, were very kindly furnished the committee. Each length was then fastened in a loop so that it could be run through a machine continuously.
While these films were in the course of preparation, some crude preliminary experiments were made at a meeting on April 13th, These tests consisted in running a loop of untinted film through a machine and observing the effect of interposing a number of tinted gelatine filters (furnished by the Bausch & Lomb Co.) in the light beam in front of the objective. It was found, as had been expected, that it was impossible to remember the characteristics of a previous color well enough to compare it with the color on the screen, except in cases of extreme difference. So extreme did these differences have to be that the committee almost despaired of arriving at any helpful conclusions.
When the tinted films arrived the facilities of the Cinema
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