Colour Luftwaffe Guncamera Footage

[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...