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This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It!

Corridor Crew · 7.3M views · 2024-04-07 · 12:25

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Overview

Corridor Crew tracks down Disney's lost sodium vapor prism process, used for Mary Poppins-era transparency mattes. They explain how a narrow sodium wavelength and a beam splitter enabled better compositing than green screen.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a fun, informative rediscovery of a lost film-effects technique.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2025–2026

Topics

Animation & visual effectsTech company stories & documentaries
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vfxdisneygreen screenmary poppinsbeam splitter

What people said

btown · 2025-12 · Strong recommendation

To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - [LINK] - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place. On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. [VIDEO]

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nuccy · 2025-03 · Recommendation

Some technologies have been lost, even though they were superior to what is available today. Take, for example, the old “green/blue screen” technique using sodium vapor lamps, used by Walt Disney in film production in the pre-digital era: [VIDEO] (12 minutes long, but totally worth it).

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meatmanek · 2026-03 · Reference

The lights are relatively easy to get. iirc (it's been a bit since I watched their full video on the subject[1]) the hard part to find was the splitter that sends the sodium-vapor light to one camera and everything else to another camera. 1. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Corridor Crew, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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