Sun Sep 10, 2023 6:02 am
Colorizing B&W movies is a very labor-intensive process, basically like animation. It's done as a series of hand-drawn masks and layers and mattes. Skilled artists create the "Key Frames" (the main references for each scene, and then animators and "in-betweeners" (lower-paid technicians) stitch it all together and continue that same look throughout each shot. Because every shot in a live-action movie happens in three-dimensional space, you might have a woman on the street with a blue coat walking in front of a guy wearing a red shirt... so the problem now becomes stopping the colors from one object (or person) interfering with the other. There's lots of animation and VFX software you could use to colorize a movie, including Fuson or After Effects, but not Resolve per se. Automation can help with the tracking, but I'm not convinced A.I. is ready to actually colorize an entire film yet.
Colorization is a very, very difficult and expensive process. If you've seen the recent CBS color reruns of the classic 1960s B&W Dick Van D*ke Show or I Love Lucy, both were colorized by West Wing Studos in Valencia, California and also in Goa, India. I believe the cost for each show is said to be about $20,000 per minute, so an average episode is about $350,000 or so.
I worked on the colorized version of Night of the Living Dead released by Legend 3D about 20 years ago, supervised by George Romero (who came in for a day or two). The Legend exec told me they took more than 3 months and spent about a million dollars colorizing that film, then basically had me even it out with daVinci 2K in post. Surprisingly, Romero was thrilled, because he was paid for his time and he told me "I never made a dime on this film because of the crooks who distributed it, so it's good to finally see some money at the end of the rainbow." And he was fine with the color because we didn't make it too garish or crazy. Romero also said, "we would've shot it in color, except we blew most of our $100,000 budget on 16mm film stock, effects, and actors, so we couldn't afford color."
Certified DaVinci Resolve Color Trainer • AdvancedColorTraining.com