Colour Luftwaffe Guncamera Footage

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by ChrisMAg2

Etienne,
if you carefully look at the movies, you will notice there are actually only two "colors" visible, plus a gray variety. A real color footage would show a very broader range of colors, even if downgraded to web-quality.

I certainly won't argue with someone who actually knows about this stuff, I'd just observe that a lot of photography and movies (Hollywood included) from the 1930s and 40s has this kind of look. I have a DVD "America's War in Colour" and there is a sequence where the colour values suddenly become "modern" and the contrast with what went before is quite startling.

Is some of the variation because different colour processes were being used, perhaps?

[Boomerang]

Christian:

As a stickler for authenticity, I believe there is a real distinction between genuine colour footage and colorised material, so thanks for your advice.

In the spirit on Nick's comments, having seen some colour footage via sources such as the Second World War in Colour television series and segments from the Deutsche Wochenschau, the quality does vary significantly and the colour range shown is highly variable. Is it always clear cut as to whether footage is genuine colour material, or colorised? I don't claim any particular knowledge and would advice from an expert.

As Etienne says, please share those (genuine) colour images - after all, Agfa was a world leader in colour film technology in the 1930s/early 1940s and there must still be fresh material out there!

Cheers

Boomerang

[ChrisMAg2]

Nick, I'm not quite sure if realy got, what you mean, but IMO the reason for your observation cannot be fixed on just one explanation. Actualy this can or might happen
•if parts of the reel was even just exposed differently from the rest
•if different batches of film are mounted together and then processed together
•if one of the reels underwent a differnt dev-process
•if something was changed on the entire copying process.
and/ or any combination of the upper mentioned.
It is almost impossible to specify, what actualy caused a change in color, unfortunaly! There are just too many posssibilities

@Etienne,
yes, those are real color photos. The reason for their effect is a partial fading/ desintigrating of parts of one or more color layer(s). This is very typical effect for (wartime) color material. This is not nessecarely due to age. Mostly it happened due to it's compostion and processing. Effects of age are a bit different. But that's a differnt story....

[ChrisMAg2]

Originally Posted by Boomerang

Christian:

As a stickler for authenticity, I believe there is a real distinction between genuine colour footage and colorised material, so thanks for your advice.

In the spirit on Nick's comments, having seen some colour footage via sources such as the Second World War in Colour television series and segments from the Deutsche Wochenschau, the quality does vary significantly and the colour range shown is highly variable. Is it always clear cut as to whether footage is genuine colour material, or colorised? I don't claim any particular knowledge and would advice from an expert.

As Etienne says, please share those (genuine) colour images - after all, Agfa was a world leader in colour film technology in the 1930s/early 1940s and there must still be fresh material out there!

Cheers

Boomerang

This is difficult to answer. To what I understand or know, for Wochenschau-moviereels only pure color material was used. I strongly doubt, they would have taken the task and colorised some thousand copies of footage. Besides why should they go for the lower quality? Unlike for stills which are easy to colorise on a large scale. So if you have a color newsreel clip you can assume it would be real color.
Now I cannot tell you for sure if the material from "youTube" was edited or not. That is not possible. But knowing the possibilities of nowerdays computers, it is not so very unlikely this is edited material. It looks (to me!) too clean to be done by the traditional (with paints and dyes) way.

Reg the "fresh material": I read that two truckloads of (late) wartime photo- and cine- propagandamaterial (including also the war color material of the Propagandaministerium) has been lost on an airstrike on the transport evacuating this archive out of Berlin in late 1945. So if ever realy new material can show up, it can only come from private sources and there just aren't that many (more left). The US Library of congress already opened it's archive, so if we ever could expect anything more from institutions, then from european/ russian ones. But - the hope dies last...

[mkenny]

Originally Posted by ChrisMAg2

I read that two truckloads of (late) wartime photo- and cine- propagandamaterial (including also the war color material of the Propagandaministerium) has been lost on an airstrike on the transport evacuating this archive out of Berlin in late 1945.

I have always heard that the French got one truckload and it is all in the ECPA now.
For certain they have a lot of late war German armour photos not available elsewhere.
I believe the US returned everything they had after copying it.

[Andreas Brekken]

Originally Posted by hihotte

Holá Boomerang
thank you for your posting. The Bundesarchiv and the MA in Koblenz are full of those colour footages but unfortunately the authorities in charge
consider the german people and the rest of enthusiasts all over the world
for mentally not prepared to watch these "propaganda" rails. Result of political correctness.
@all, this is what you miss, if you don´t visit the site boomerang had posted.
Cheers
hihotte

Hi.

Just a short comment with regards to your information here. The PK movies and films are not afaik at Koblenz (the so called Bundesarchiv - Bildarchiv) or in Freiburg (Bundesarchiv - Militärarchiv), but in Berlin in the unit called FA for short or Filmarchiv.

Find it interesting that you state that the content of this archive is off-limits for the public. You can buy copies from the archive (it is however very expensive), and if you are able to visit the archive you can ask for a viewing of films you are interested in. Also - in cooperation with several other institutions and companies, the Bundesarchiv have made a lot of their collections of Wochenschau movies available for anyone to wath on the internet:

http://www.wochenschau-archiv.de

From this site one can register and view Wochenschau movies from the entire collection, including movies from the NSDAP period.

Well, this is at least my experience when I visited the FA in 2002.

Regards,
Andreas

[VtwinVince]

My God, the "P" in PK stands for propaganda? I guess we better not watch these films then. Seriously, this is great footage. Can anyone identify the two Ritterkreuztraeger at the beginning?

[mkenny]

Originally Posted by Andreas Brekken

Hi.

a if you are able to visit the archive you can ask for a viewing of films you are interested in. Also - in cooperation with several other institutions and companies, the Bundesarchiv have made a lot of their collections of Wochenschau movies available for anyone to wath on the internet:

Where are the original PK reels of the unedited footage kept? The newsreel stuff is the edited bits jumbled up in no real order. The original raw footage would be much more interesting.
In the UK you can go to The IWM and view the original reels as taken by the cameramen. It is free,all you have to do is book in advance and you can buy vidoe copies/stills of anything you want. The Pathe Newsreels have but a fraction of the available footage.

Now if only I could find the German originals in some archive.................