1950s color process using three separate film strips for RGB — demanding but vivid saturation. Now archival only.
Do you need intense, almost supernatural color saturation? Then you'll encounter Hérault Trichrome cameras — a French process from the 1950s that worked with three synchronized film strips. Each strip recorded a primary color: red, green, blue. It sounds simple, but it wasn't. The camera's optical bench split the light using dichroic mirrors onto three separate lenses. In editing, the negatives then had to be precisely superimposed again — a huge effort, but the results had a luminosity that classic Kodachrome single-strip processes couldn't achieve.
The practical hurdles were considerable. Keeping three film reels synchronized demanded mechanical precision on a level you're not used to with modern cameras. A minimal running or sprocket error led to color fringing — visible as colored flicker on edges. The camera was also bulky and heavy, and the light output was significantly worse than with single-strip processes because mirror optics are lossy. On top of that, you needed three times as much film material. For long-term productions or TV series, this was economically absurd.
Only a few European and French productions experimented with it, mostly for prestige projects or color documentaries where the visual intensity justified the technical effort. With the introduction of more reliable single-strip processes (Eastmancolor, later Fujifilm), Hérault quickly disappeared from the market. Today, you'll only find such negatives in archives, and even there, recombination and digitization are specialist jobs — the three original strips must be overlaid with sub-pixel accuracy, otherwise the image disintegrates into color components. If you ever come across old French color archive material and it has color shifts that seem almost systematic, Hérault might be behind it. A peculiar piece of technical history — but practically irrelevant today.