Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Kinemacolor coronation drill

Kinemacolor coronation drill

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 9 Aug 2024 at 16:33:38 (UTC)

Original – A Kinemacolor film taken at Reedham Orphanage in Richmond, London in 1911, in which the orphans perform for guests. The film demonstrates both the capabilities and limitations of the Kinemacolor process, which supported two colors rather than the three used in modern processes, and displayed them through sequential, alternating frames.

Reason: Lively demonstration of the Kinemacolor two-color film process, an important milestone in the history of color photography. Apart from imperfections in the original, this is a very good transfer. The frame rate is at or near real-time (often a problem with showing films from the hand-cranked era) and in HD. The source at the Internet Archive (1) says these are the original colors plus a white-balance pass. Kinemacolor was also a sequential color system, which is why some movement has anaglyph-like effects to it.
Articles in which this image appears: Kinemacolor, Reedham Orphanage
FP category for this image: Photographic techniques, terms, and equipment
Creator: Uploaded to Wikipedia by Cesias7 from a copy at the Internet Archive, where it is credited to Natural Color Kinematograph Co., Ltd.

Support as nominator – Moonreach (talk) 16:33, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support Interesting example of pre-Technicolor movies, amazingly little color strobing in the fast-fluttering flags! (Partly because the red and blue registered only on respective frames...) --Janke | Talk 17:18, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This does seem to have the frames blended, inasmuch as pausing it in any given place still shows both colors. I checked our copy against the one on the Internet Archive and found that it's the same there; both are 25 fps. While I would have liked to see a version that preserved the sequential color, I'm not sure that would have been possible. I also don't think it would have made a difference as far as the strobing goes. Since a small period of time elapses between the color changes, there's no version of this where the colors would have lined up perfectly. That's an unsolvable problem akin to reconstructing a single frame out of interlaced video - you can get close, but never exact. Although the bitrate of the Internet Archive copy is higher, and maybe we should upload that one just to have it, this is otherwise about as good as it gets. Moonreach (talk) 20:47, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support Excited to see this getting nominated, I was just looking through this article last week after going through some predecessor films by William Norman Lascelles Davidson. We only have one other HD example of Kinemacolor, and this video does a much better job of showing how it captures different kinds of motion. hinnk (talk) 19:27, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And the sweet peas appear to be shot from a theater screen, hand-held, with a spectator blocking the lowest part of the frame - so that one is definitely not FP material... --Janke | Talk 06:55, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh my god, I didn't even catch that part. I was wondering why they were shifting the image down in the middle of the video. hinnk (talk) 08:37, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hahaha, yeah. I realized about 10 seconds in that I was looking at the back of someone's head and wondered if I should say something. Moonreach (talk) 14:13, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's more Kinemacolor than just this film, for example on archive.org (a quick sidenote: almost all of these films weren't digitized in HD, including this one - I can't remember why I uploaded it at such a high resolution) Cesias7 (talk) 10:59, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The IA version is at the same resolution, were you also the uploader there? Considering the alternative examples all seem to be watermarked or super compressed, I'd be fine featuring this even if it was upscaled. hinnk (talk) 22:13, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I uploaded them to IA. This film, the shortest of them all (7 seconds of footage repeated 3x), is the only one which was digitized in HD. The others are all 720x576, except for a few scenes in the Delhi Durbar, which are even lower quality. Cesias7 (talk) 08:23, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Shame it's watermarked, that's a fun piece of footage. I like seeing candid moments from long ago. They make the past feel more real. Moonreach (talk) 13:31, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support --Carlosmarkos2345 | Talk 08:00, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support – Yann (talk) 14:31, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support – Hamid Hassani (talk) 02:46, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support. MER-C 10:02, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Coronation Drill at Reedham Orphanage 1911 Kinemacolor.webm --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 20:04, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]