Kodak's April Tech Brief: Motion Pictures Become Environmentally Friendly.

Business Editors

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 2004

Building on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency award received by Eastman Kodak Company in 2003, Kodak is expanding its commitment to environmental responsibility by helping to pioneer a new, environmentally friendly way of creating sound tracks on motion pictures.

In 2003, the EPA recognized Kodak's efforts to reduce ozone-depleting chemicals through the development of specialized technology to clean motion-picture film. Starting next month, motion picture prints will have new soundtrack formulations that are processed with less water and chemicals at the film lab.

Kodak's Tech Brief for April explores how the soundtracks of motion picture prints - the reels screened in your local multiplex - are processed using fewer resources and creating less waste.

Unseen sound tracks

Movie prints contain much more than pictures. Most prints also contain digital audio tracks and an analog audio soundtrack. In most cases, the analog track is a back-up track, in case the digital signal somehow fails. Today, several studios are switching to cyan dye soundtracks, in which the analog audio portion of a feature film is recorded in a dye layer on the film print.

All color film has at least three dyes - cyan, magenta, and yellow. When combined in different levels, these dyes create the full-color images on a movie screen.

For decades, the motion picture industry recorded sound on a silver-based soundtrack on the edge of film frames. Silver halide, after all, is a key light-sensitive material in all photographic films. Film labs had to process and recover this material when converted into metallic silver and washed from the prints. This cumbersome, water-intensive technology remained unchanged until the 1990s, when representatives from Dolby, Technicolor, and Kodak began exploring alternatives.

In the 1990s, Kodak researchers pioneered a soundtrack that used the magenta dye layer of a film print. This led to further experimentation, and ultimately came to fruition in 2003, when DreamWorks SKG released Anything Else, starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci - the first feature film in which all release prints were recorded with a pure cyan dye soundtrack. Since then, MGM and Walt Disney Studios have announced plans to completely convert their productions to cyan dye soundtracks, starting in May 2004 with MGM's Soul Plane, and Disney's Mr. 3000, to be released in September.

Learn more about the environmental benefits of cyan dye soundtracks at www.kodak.com/go/research.

About Eastman Kodak Company and infoimaging

Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, print and view images - for memories, for information, for entertainment. The company is a major participant in infoimaging, a $385 billion industry composed of devices (digital cameras and flat-panel displays), infrastructure (online networks and delivery systems for images) and services & media (software, film and paper enabling people to access, analyze and print images). With sales of $13.3 billion in 2003, the company comprises several businesses: Health, supplying the healthcare industry with traditional and digital image capture and output products and services; Commercial Printing, offering on-demand color printing and networking publishing systems; Commercial Imaging, offering image capture, output and storage products and services to businesses and government; Display & Components, which designs and manufactures state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode displays as well as other specialty materials, and delivers optics and imaging sensors to original equipment manufacturers; and Digital & Film Imaging Systems, providing consumers, professionals and cinematographers with digital and traditional products and services.