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by meatmanek 88 days ago
The lights are relatively easy to get. iirc (it's been a bit since I watched their full video on the subject[1]) the hard part to find was the splitter that sends the sodium-vapor light to one camera and everything else to another camera.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
2 comments
aidenn0 88 days ago
It would seem to me to be relatively easy to build something like that if you're okay shooting with effectively a full stop less light (just split the image with a half-silvered reflector and use a dichroic filter to pass the sodium-vapor light one one side.

The splitter would have to be behind the lens, so it would require a custom camera setup (probably a longer lens-to-sensor distance than most lenses are designed for too), but I can't think of any other issues.

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toast0 88 days ago
At the end of this video they link to another video from a year ago [1] (this is the same link as the comment you were commenting on, whoops), where they recreate the sodium vapor process with a rig with a beam splitter, one side had a filter to reject sodium vapor light and the other has one to reject everything but sodium vapor light, and then a camera on each side.

The Disney process had the filter essentially built into the beam splitter, but afaik, nobody knows how to make that happen again (or nobody who knows how, knows it's a desirable thing). Seems like the optics might be cumbersome, but the results seem wortwhile.

Also, you need still need careful lighting, you don't want your foreground illuminated by sodium vapor, but I wonder if you could light the background screen from behind (like a rear projection setup) to reduce the amount of sodium vapor light that reflects from the foreground to the camera.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

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aidenn0 88 days ago
We know how to make dichroic prisms (Technicolor used them when filming, as did "3 CCD" digital cameras), but I imagine that to have a sufficiently narrow rejection band for the sodium-vapor prociess, you would need to be smart about where you place the prism, since the stop-band of a dichroic filter changes with angle of incidence.
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diacritical 88 days ago
Yup, I wanted to say that the prisms are hard to recreate, not the light itself.
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