Editing The Black Pirate (section)

==Technicolor==
''The Black Pirate'' was the third feature to be filmed in an early two-tone [[Technicolor]] process that had been first introduced in the 1922 feature ''[[The Toll of the Sea]]''. This reproduces a limited but pleasing range of colors. ''[[Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925 film)|Ben-Hur]]'' – filmed around the same time – contains two-tone sequences but is shot primarily in black-and-white with tinting and toning in many scenes.

Fairbanks spent considerable money on color tests before making ''Pirate''. Two-tone Technicolor at that time required two strips of [[35mm movie film|35mm film]] to be fused together back-to-back to create the two-tone palette. Due to the heat of the projector, there would be so-called cupping of the film, making it difficult to keep the film in focus during projection. (Technicolor later perfected its process, so that two-color films required only a single strip of film.) A limitation of the process was that hues on film shot indoors under artificial light differed from that shot outdoors in sunlight, so two sets of costumes with slightly different colors for each character were required to get matching colors in the final film.<ref name="PickfordTestFilm"/>