You_Too said:
Maybe he's referring to generation loss when creating a theatrical print. I don't know about the chemical process of creating a print but I know that there is negative -> interpositive -> internegative -> theatrical print. Except Mike Verta said the technicolor IB prints of SW were printed straight from the negative itself.
If he meant they were printed directly from the negative (with no intermediate steps), then he's wrong.
As I understand the Technicolor printing process (in the 1950s-1970s Eastman negative era), 3 B&W separation masters (each recording blue, red or green) were made from the negative, and the prints were made from those masters.
There was no way to make an IB print directly from an Eastmancolor negative, since that would have required a light-sensitive chemical process, and Technicolor prints were made in a full-daylight lithography-type process.
Even if there was a way to make an IB print directly from a negative, it would have had to be an internegative (in part, at least), since the original camera negatives wouldn't have had any wipes or other finished FX on them.
On a side note, for the SW Eastmancolor prints, they reportedly used the infamous color reversal stock as the intermediate between the negative & theatrical print, which cut one generation out of the equation:
negative ->color reversal negative ->theatrical print (or something along those lines).
But the color-reversal stock was unstable and faded much faster than the traditional stocks, hence the large number of fading 1970s film sources.