[buck746]

It lost because there were only 3 prisms made. It also required a lot more lot as running thru an optical splitter means at least half of your light was lost, it's not a big issue today. Modern cameras are insanely more sensitive than film was at the time. Alfred Hitchcock used this on "The Birds". In the YouTube video they got a great result even with a smaller studio than would have been used on Mary Poppins. The trick needed the screen as far back as you could get it to minimize the chance of spill, that used to be normal on blue screen before the software improved.

[kadoban]

> It lost because there were only 3 prisms made.

But it seems so much better that that shouldn't have been a blocker. Like optics isn't magic, and knowing that someone did it before should be enough incentive? Not like movies are a small or poor industry.

[astrodust]

Incentive is one thing, budget is another.

Keep in mind stuff gets lost all the time, even really important things like nuclear weapon components like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

[kadoban]

Fair. But looking at that story (very interesting btw, thanks), they did recreate it. So incentive does mean a lot when $$ is also available, which I'd suspect it is in movies.

[astrodust]

I think the US nuclear program has a much bigger budget than Disney, and if they need something, they just get it.

The movie industry had cheaper options, so they went with those.

[kadoban]

I think you're underselling Disney's budget and reach. Yes, it's probably technically smaller than the US nuclear program, but even just Disney is worth $200 billion USD, ignoring all other studios and etc. Movies are big money.

[cooper_ganglia]

I wonder if it’s just more cost effective to use a well-established tool like green screen, and then contract out all the rotoscoping clean-up to other countries for less than minimum wage?

[486sx33]

I think part of the deal is that, no amount of manual intervention will allow translucent objects (like the veil) as nicely as sodium vapor lighting , also motion blur

[kadoban]

Yeah maybe it's something like the person choosing the camera process doesn't directly have to deal with 12 hours of roto per day, so practically it's just not something they think about.

[bigiain]

"and then contract out all the " blame for it's shortcomings...

"Sorry boss, that's industry best practice. Nothing we can do to make sit better."

[wbl]

Today we could use a dichoric coating but back then I think fabrication was much harder.

[namibj]

Well, the technology for them is far from recent, the process control and chamber geometry design to allow the needed precision and uniform-ness at the throughout needed to not be extremely expensive, however, required cheap microprocessors for a good decade to develop the required skills in control engineers to then actually go and make a machine like this. And the computers suitable we're still triple-digits in the 80's, so this only really started to deploy to factories ~25 years ago.