RLM65/70/71 - German colour footage

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

This is a German propaganda film shot in colour.

 

At the beginning is some footage of the Bf109E in RLM 65/70/71 followed shortly after by some Ju87s.

 

 

Note minimal contrast and very dark shades of upper surface colours (if you're guilty of lightening these RLM colours to death, maybe reconsider?). Also, the film is not ambiguous in the hue of RLM 65 here. There's not a hint of green in it.

 

Whilst not conclusive in its self - we all know footage can be deceiving - it does strongly support the corresponding shades Jürgen Kiroff presents in K.A. Merrick's two volumes on Luftwaffe camouflage.

[yarvelling]

Thank you for sharing that.... it is always fascinating to see what was at the time to be considered 'true colour film'...... some of the footage is very damaged and faded, but some is still strong and vibrant, and those introductory moments certainly show-off the low-contrast effect of the 70/71 camouflage scheme very well - only as the aircraft, or the camera moved, can you see the demarcation lines between the two paint colours - very good footage, and as we have humans in the frame, who look a normal colour too( a good colour reference point?), I think it can be fairly safe to say that overall, we have pretty accurate colour footage of these aircraft in question..... infact, it shows that what had me puzzled at several points, that Humbrol actually got it right :- their 70 & 71 acrylic paints are so close together, that I'd wondered if I'd got mislabelled pots!!  A 1/72 Stuka from Airfix that recommended those paints - which I duly bought - and under most natural lighting looks like one colour, but is actually both 70 & 71 is confirmed from that footage..... both RLM 70 & 71 were so black/dark, that it's hard to see the change from one to the other...as requested by the RLM - very low contrast!!  
Thanks again

Edited March 17, 2017 by yarvelling

[Andre B]

What type of aircraft was seen some minutes in that film where "fallshirmjäger" was jumping out of the aircraft?

 

/André

[stevehnz]

Possibly a Savoia-Marchetti SM.82 in Luftwaffe service. I think.

Steve.

[dogsbody]

12 minutes ago, stevehnz said:

Possibly a Savoia-Marchetti SM.82 in Luftwaffe service. I think.

Steve.

 

That's my opinion as well, for what it's worth.

 

 

Chris

[Chuck1945]

I noticed the Fallshirmjäger appeared to boarding a He 111 and jumping from a SM.82. The opening color was quite good as already mentioned showing the apparent low contrast with 70/71

[JWM]

4 hours ago, Chuck1945 said:

I noticed the Fallshirmjäger appeared to boarding a He 111 and jumping from a SM.82.

Indeed, they board by a hatch below airplane and jump out by doors. More natural would be opposite, is't?

Presence of Savoia suggest I thing yar 1944 - or late '43. Before swiching sided by Italy the italian machines were not caputered (or even bought) to Luftwaffe, I think.

Cheers

J-W

 

[TonyTiger66]

11 hours ago, Chuck1945 said:

I noticed the Fallshirmjäger appeared to boarding a He 111 and jumping from a SM.82. The opening color was quite good as already mentioned showing the apparent low contrast with 70/71

 

I'm erring towards the SM 82 too Chuck, perhaps an SM 82P?

 

This is from the Wikipedia page:

 

"Between 1942 and Spring 1943, FliegerTransportGruppe "Savoia" operated 100 Savoia Marchettis. After September 1943, SIAI kept on producing SM.82 for Luftwaffe, delivering 299 planes"

 

Best regards

TonyT

[Bigglesof266]

Not to detract or distract from the OPs well intentioned helpfulness.  Just a heads up for those of you who may be unaware. Be cautious of accepting that -for what it's worth, as accurate colorisation even if digitized from original colour film stock.

 

I wouldn't put too much stock in the colours in that clip opening. Whilst the opening footage could well be a cleaned up ripped digi repro from original colour footage, most of that clip definitely isn't. But one characteristic of recolouring is an inability to delineate between near shades well, if at all. Of course the result is as good as the software used and the time, effort and skill of the person colourising. There's a discernible unreadable watermark on the opening section top left corner put there somewhere along the line by the original poster or reposter he ripped it from.

 

Recolouring Wehrmacht, SS or 30's NSDAP era film footage and setting it to music has become quite a popular pastime on You Tube, with some of the better users sites doing a decent but usually discernible recolorisation with their colourisation reprocessing. Their work is subsequently ripped, clipped and cobbled together under all sorts with no creditation to the original author, and frequently misleading to totally erroneous descriptions.

 

I've found it sage to take the You Tube poster's claim as "from original colour footage" with a not credible until source authenticated proven so elsewhere 'grain of salt' perspective as experience has demonstrated to me one must for example with Pinterest pic description captions on pics.

 

 

[MagpieFNQ]

^ I agree, even modern photography has issues with accurate colour renditions.

[stevehnz]

4 hours ago, Bigglesof266 said:

Not to detract or distract from the OPs well intentioned helpfulness.  Just a heads up for those of you who may be unaware. Be cautious of accepting that -for what it's worth, as accurate colorisation even if digitized from original colour film stock.

 

I wouldn't put too much stock in the colours in that clip opening. Whilst the opening footage could well be a cleaned up ripped digi repro from original colour footage, most of that clip definitely isn't. But one characteristic of recolouring is an inability to delineate between near shades well, if at all. Of course the result is as good as the software used and the time, effort and skill of the person colourising. There's a discernible unreadable watermark on the opening section top left corner put there somewhere along the line by the original poster or reposter he ripped it from.

 

Recolouring Wehrmacht, SS or 30's NSDAP era film footage and setting it to music has become quite a popular pastime on You Tube, with some of the better users sites doing a decent but usually discernible recolorisation with their colourisation reprocessing. Their work is subsequently ripped, clipped and cobbled together under all sorts with no creditation to the original author, and frequently misleading to totally erroneous descriptions.

 

I've found it sage to take the You Tube poster's claim as "from original colour footage" with a not credible until source authenticated proven so elsewhere 'grain of salt' perspective as experience has demonstrated to me one must for example with Pinterest pic description captions on pics.

 

 

 

On 18/03/2017 at 9:47 AM, SovereignHobbies said:

This is a German propaganda film shot in colour.

 

At the beginning is some footage of the Bf109E in RLM 65/70/71 followed shortly after by some Ju87s.

 

 

Note minimal contrast and very dark shades of upper surface colours (if you're guilty of lightening these RLM colours to death, maybe reconsider?). Also, the film is not ambiguous in the hue of RLM 65 here. There's not a hint of green in it.

 

Whilst not conclusive in its self - we all know footage can be deceiving - it does strongly support the corresponding shades Jürgen Kiroff presents in K.A. Merrick's two volumes on Luftwaffe camouflage.

I really don't find this an example of "the OPs well intentioned helpfulness" but a legititmate observation with reasonable caveats in place. I've seen those same colour chips & am happy to come to the same comclusion. Not wanting to pick a fight but I found Biggles observations contribute unnecessarily to the fog which surrounds such subjects.

Steve.

[Bigglesof266]

No need for a fight Steve. Nor was my opening caveat intending offence or denigration of the OP.  I made no mention of the reference chips. I was referring merely to the linked footage. I'd thought I made that pretty clear when I stated my intention. I've been around the net since its GUI inception made it publicly available. I've also seen plenty of footage and colour stills in my years on the planet. If you can link us to an original source confirming the veracity of even the first edit (Bf 109's) in this being a digital rip of original film footage shot in colour, other than the posting a link to the posting You Tuber's self description, that'd be helpful.  Otherwise, whilst I take on board what you say and respect you being free to draw your own conclusion as to what you want to believe, your perspective is still just conjecture.

 

As I said, I'm open to believe it may be legit, but applying a modicum of Mk V issue common sense, discernment, for the purpose of, I've seen a lot of recolourisation too at varying levels of competency which bears keeping in mind. That's all I was saying. My apology that it aroused such umbrage. 

[Procopius]

On 3/18/2017 at 0:14 AM, Chuck1945 said:

I noticed the Fallshirmjäger appeared to boarding a He 111 and jumping from a SM.82.

 

Nazi superscience!

[stevehnz]

1 hour ago, Bigglesof266 said:

 My apology that it aroused such umbrage. 

Sorry if it came across like that, though on rereading I concede it did. My apologies in that case. I guess it is something that I've arrived at after years of following circular colour discussions on these forums, ultimately this far down the track we can neither prove nor disprove such assertions as Jamie postulated. What you posted does not disprove his postulation , neither though does it take us closer to an definitive answer. I've come to believe that after endless pouring over the available evidence, we can come to reasonable & practical conclusions that enable a way forward in the on going colour debate.  Otherwise we're eternally sitting on the fence. For me, Jamie's suggestions were both reasonable & helpful & until such time as someone can prove them to be flawed, they fit well enough with much of what I've distilled out of these discussions over the years to go with them. OK, that works for me. It may be that we cannot agree on that but at least I hope we can agree not to agree & do it amicably, so again, sorry for being a bit strident. BTW, what's GUI re the net?

Steve.

[Duncan B]

'Graphic User Interface', and that is about the sum total of what I can contribute to the conversation! Nice footage though.

 

Duncan B

[Bigglesof266]

GUI = Graphical User Interface like you're using right now. Specifically in the case referenced in my previous post, accessing the Internet via a web browser. 

 

Prior to the introduction of Mosaic, a graphical Unix port in '93, and subsequently the popular Netscape GUI browser, web access required knowledge of the Unix syntax driven command language input via a Telnet login which pretty much kept it from commercial exposure and thus unavailable to the general public outside academic institutions or business with Telnet access and competency with the Unix command language. Mosaic changed that. We transitioned from BBSes and Fidonet to the WWW and Usenet within a year as ISPs arrived to take advantage of the Internet GUI browser. '94 or early '95 down under if I recall accurately because I was in the US in early '94, and was still using a 2400k dial up modem back in AU, or it might have been 9600k by then, to connect to BBS when I returned later that year. I remember how excited I was when I bought a 14.4k Intel and brought it home from the U.S. o.O!

 

Microsoft thought the net would never catch on and focused on their proprietary MSN along the lines of established proprietary player Compuserve. When they realised they were wrong, they quickly changed direction. They bought Quarterdeck's superb but low profile browser, gave it a cosmetic makeover and bundled it with Win95 to force its install onto every Windows desktop PC.  

[stevehnz]

Thanks, Netscape was where I came in though use was very limited, I recall the frustration of having a resource but finding little to do with it. Win 95 sure changed that & the rest, as they say.........

Steve.

[FalkeEins]

there is a certain amount of colour wartime (and Luftwaffe) footage on the Agentur Karl Höffkes film archive AKH site. (just put Flugzeug Farbe  in the search box and scroll through the 'Suchergebnis', search results, all 719 of 'em) Some of it looks very strange - here's a screen grab from film of II./JG 2 in Tunisia late 1942-early 1943. This is  Fw 190 A-4 "Black 1 + - "  flown by Wolf von Bülow, Staffelkapitän of 5./ JG 2. How to explain the fuselage cross given the white fuselage band and swastika outline ?

 

 

 

[Greenshirt]

Ahh, the days of telnet command lines...life was simpler then. 

[JackG]

According to wiki, well into late 1941, German film industry, or Agfacolor, was still having problems capturing colours properly in the outdoors.

 

As for the screen grabs of the 190's, looks more of repaint over the fuselage crosses than a film problem?

 

regards,

Jack

 

 

 

 

[Wm Blecky]

Thanks for sharing - a real treat!

[Stonar]

16 hours ago, JackG said:

 

 

As for the screen grabs of the 190's, looks more of repaint over the fuselage crosses than a film problem?

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can still make out the remains of the outer black border. The white has been over painted and judging by the proportions of what's left the central black cross may have been slightly overlapped with the fresh paint too.

Reducing the visibility of national markings was not that unusual, even some RAF bomber units* managed to to do it, and the British were sticklers for this sort of thing (not over painting national markings).

Cheers

Steve

* No 3 Group informed Bomber Command that some of its squadrons were covering all yellow or white markings with "'black lead' which is easily removed" in July 1942. I have no idea what 'black lead' might have been, it is in quotations in the original signal, but it was presumably black and obviously temporary. I associate black lead with the stuff that used to be applied to stoves, not aeroplanes

 

[Vonbraun]

The Bf 109 images are from a film entitled  "2. Staffel 1. Jagdgeschwader 77 " "Grünherzen"  filmed in 1939.  Here are a few more images which are perhaps more representative of the nature of  the contrast between 70 and 71.

 

Here is a link to the film: JG 77

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bigglesof266]

Quote

The Bf 109 images are from a film entitled  "2. Staffel 1. Jagdgeschwader 77 " "Grünherzen"  filmed in 1939

 

Thanks.

 

RAD pics on the first page are gold mine, with promise of pages of interest to explore. Shame about the intrusive watermarks.  

[MilneBay]

I tend to agree with the OP that these show diminished contrast between the two greens and it is something I noticed years ago. When painting 70/71 schemes I have always aimed for less rather than more contrast. Also we seem to be in the middle of a trend towards lightening camouflage colours (perhaps to show fading or weathering) which heightens the contrast when the colour pics tend to show the opposite. Oddly this is particularly marked in trends in recent models of aircraft camouflaged in the 74/75 hues which almost make the two both too washed out, too matt and almost indistinguishable. The colour pics I have seen of the real aircraft suggest to me higher contrasts and that colours themselves were supposed to have a hue contrast. I don't think we can completely dismiss these early wartime colour films as simply aberrations of emulsion behaviour. These colours were supposed to mimic shadows etc. as well as naturally occurring colours.