Trucolor

Trucolor was a color motion picture process used and owned by Consolidated Film Industries division of Republic Pictures. It was introduced as a replacement for Consolidated's own Magnacolor process.

Republic used Trucolor mostly for its westerns, through the 1940s and early 1950s. The premiere Trucolor release was Out California Way (1946) and the last film photographed in the process was Spoilers of the Forest (1957). With the advent of Eastmancolor and Ansco color films, which gave better results at a cheaper price, Trucolor was abandoned, coincidentally at the same time as Republic's demise.

At the time of its introduction, Trucolor was a two-color subtractive color process. Approximately three years later the capability of the process was expanded to include a three-color release system which utilized DuPont . The DuPont film was later replaced by Eastman Kodak film stock. Thus, in its life span of approximately twelve years, the Trucolor process was in reality three distinct systems by which color release prints were made, all bearing the same screen credit, “Trucolor”.

In its original two-color version, Trucolor was a two-strip (red and green) process based on the earlier work of William Van Doren Kelley's Prizma color process. Trucolor films were shot in bipack, with the two strips of film being sensitized to red and green. Both negatives were processed on duplitized film, much like Trucolor's rival process Cinecolor. Unlike Cinecolor, however, the film was not dyed with a toner but a color coupler, similar to Eastmancolor film. Because of this chemical composition, Trucolor film fades over time, unlike Cinecolor.

Three-color Trucolor was first used in 1949, for making prints of cartoons photographed in the "successive exposure" process, in which each animation cel had been photographed three times, on three sequential frames, behind alternating red, green, and blue filters. Multilayer Du Pont Color Release Positive Film was used as the printing material.

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