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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: We're Smart Happens. This podcast is brought to you by

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Speaker 1: com slash brain Stuff Today for details. Hi, I'm Marshall

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Speaker 1: Brain with today's question. How do they color old black

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Speaker 1: and white movies? Most of the classic black and white

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Speaker 1: movies have been colorized, mainly so that they can be

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Speaker 1: shown on television and color. It turns out that the

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Speaker 1: process used to add the color is extremely tedious. Someone

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Speaker 1: has to work on the movie frame by frame, adding

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Speaker 1: the colors one at a time to each part of

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Speaker 1: an individual frame. To speed up the process, the coloring

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Speaker 1: is done on a computer using a digital version of

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Speaker 1: the movie. The film is scanned into the computer and

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Speaker 1: the coloring artists can view the movie one frame at

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Speaker 1: a time on the computer screen. The artist draws the

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Speaker 1: outline for each color area and the computer fills it

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Speaker 1: in the original black and white film holds all the

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Speaker 1: brightness information, so the artists can paint large areas with

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Speaker 1: a single color and let the original film handle the

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Speaker 1: brightness gradients. This means that the artist might only have

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Speaker 1: to add ten or so actual color areas to a

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Speaker 1: scene to speed up the process even more. Interpretation is

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Speaker 1: common from frame to frame. There's normally very little variation

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Speaker 1: in the position of objects and actors. Therefore, the artist

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Speaker 1: might manually color every tenth frame and let the computer

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Speaker 1: fill in the frames in between. Do you have any

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Speaker 1: ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send

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Speaker 1: me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, go

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Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com.