Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com. We're Smart Happens. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audio book downloade of your choice when you sign up today. Log on to audible podcast dot com slash brain Stuff Today for details. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. 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 and 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 an individual frame. To speed up the process, the coloring is done on a computer using a digital version of the movie. The film is scanned into the computer and the coloring artists can view the movie one frame at a time on the computer screen. The artist draws the outline for each color area and the computer fills it in the original black and white film holds all the brightness information, so the artists 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 ten or so actual color areas to a scene to speed up the process even more. Interpretation is common from frame to frame. There's normally very little variation in the position of objects and actors. Therefore, the artist might manually color every tenth frame and let the computer fill in the frames in between. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com. We're Smart Happens. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audio book downloade of your choice when you sign up today. Log on to audible podcast dot com slash brain Stuff Today for details. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. 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 and 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 an individual frame. To speed up the process, the coloring is done on a computer using a digital version of the movie. The film is scanned into the computer and the coloring artists can view the movie one frame at a time on the computer screen. The artist draws the outline for each color area and the computer fills it in the original black and white film holds all the brightness information, so the artists 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 ten or so actual color areas to a scene to speed up the process even more. Interpretation is common from frame to frame. There's normally very little variation in the position of objects and actors. Therefore, the artist might manually color every tenth frame and let the computer fill in the frames in between. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.