BBC new colour restoration technique using chroma dots

[johneymute]

it,s amezing that even during telerocelinening to b&W,that even then color had leaved their traces in the form of chroma dots,wich can be retrieved, by scanning the tape in hd,analize the richt color in accordance to the amount of chroma dots to recover it,just amezing!!!

now if only an software cut be invented wich is able to automatically realtime converting even original b&w to color,in accordance to the gray scale,that would be perfect either !!!!

[Marshalsify]

Don't forget ITV color programmes and others have been wiped and yet to be restored in color to full glory!

[johnxgin1]

@Marshalsify like Timeslip and Tightrope (both starring spencer banks)

[borgduck]

Part 2 of Planet Of The Daleks or Part 1 of Invasion Of The Dinosaurs? WHICH was he talking about?!!!

[wx4newengland]

I wonder if america could do this to my moms fave soap, all my children whos 1970-71 season in color was wiped at abc in america.

[MegaWayneD]

@wx4newengland Doesn't work with NTSC I'm afraid, it only works with programs that were originally in PAL colour.

[AbuAvital]

You can only restore colour if you have a tape, too bad that so much was permanantly errased.

[ksteiger]

Damn. It "sees" the individual phosphor dots in the shadow mask of the color tube. It's like they used a combination of color separation and digital encoding without even knowing it. AMAZING!!!

[baffledboy]

@mattyCox: this was from BBC2's Newsnight.

[mattyCox2]

What programme was this originally from?

[OofusTwillip]

For me, the question of whether or not to colorize comes down to the intent of the creators of the original material. If a movie or TV show was originally done in colour, and is now in B&W, then it should be restored to colour. If, however, the original material was done in B&W, then colorizing it is tampering with the creators' vision, so should not be done. The one exception I've found is Laurel & Hardy's "Babes in Toyland", which they'd wanted to do in colour, but couldn't afford to.

[masterstarfox]

@OofusTwillip it also goes for she(1935)mervin.c.cooper wanted to shoot the film in colour but r.k.o pulled the budget at the last minute and it had to be made in black and white.

[YoshiUltimate]

0:36 you can see a guy go past James through the window in the door.

[kinglonewolf104]

Excellent work. Such a shame that the Beeb ditched much of their archives.

I'm a big fan of Dads Army - it's a classic which will bring laughter to all ages.

.

&eB

[Attmay]

Is it possible to do this for B&W kinescopes of NTSC recordings?

[MikieLAX]

@Attmay No; unfortunately NTSC kinescopes do not produce the chromo-dots that appear in the PAL films.

[TheManhattanThrush]

Thanks for posting this, really interesting. They did a great job of colour recovery on the pilot episode of Are You Being Served.

[JohnnyTheWolfLupino]

A real significant breakthrough into restoring some much loved TV shows to how they are supposed to be viewed, amazing!

[critic189]

hope they do this with dr who eps

[jerryaltman]

I imagine if some of those original color TV programs that survived only in 16mm bl&w film, was recored from a B&w TV screen to 16m b&w, instead from a color TV screen to a B&W16mm.

Imagine a whole arquive with 16mmB&W from color TV shows, that had the bad luck of be made from a telecording that used a B&W TV screen instead of a color TV screen. If the telerecording use a B&W screen, this new technology cannot recover the color.

[dolphin8b]

The processof colour recovery work on b&w film ONLY... it picks up chroma dots; interference form the chrominence signal interfering with the luminance signal on the PAL system. This can be used to reconstuct the PAL signal if you can plot the geometry of the crhoma ots accurately.

[Markjuk]

The BBC were guilty of "junking" material even as late as 1993. ITV are even worse, material was reportly seen in a skip outside the old ATV studios in Birmingham in 2003! What must have been going through these peoples minds? were lessons not learnt in the 1970's?

[bicostp]

I wonder why they didn't make prints on color film. Even in the mid-60s it seemed pretty obvious that color was here to stay. That decision must have been solely based on cost (B&W was probably much cheaper than color), but still color film must have been cheaper than those huge tapes they had back then.

[TashkentFox]

The method of filming TV programmes in those days was extremely crude by modern standards, it was called telerecording and was done by pointing a 16mm camera at a monitor. This was primarly for export while the master tape remained at the Beeb. The colour obtained via telerecording was deemed too poor to be of any use and after 1969 it only continued for countries which didn't yet have colour television (like Australia).

[dolphin8b]

Rapid pulldown telerecorders actually produced good results. (used from 1965 onwards.)

[qwertdr]

Using Colour film posed huge problems.

You'd need one film for each colour, green, red and blue. You'd also need a b/w high quality print. You'd then need to lay over the films.

It cost too much, the results were poor - it wasn't worth it.

[dolphin8b]

Colur telercordnigs where made by ITV companies in the UK, they look awful, problems with colur fringing. B&w telerecordings where made for overseas sale to countries who broadcast in B&W. Colur electronic conversions where made for the US&Canada from about 1972 onwards.Telerecording(film recording ended for overseasa sales in about 1974.

[davidgbarron]

It's great that it has been done to restore the Dad Army's episode. Only problem was, compared to the other colour episodes of Dad's Army it looked overdone when either a lighter touch was needed or complete remastering for blu-ray of the other colour episodes needs to take place.

[spookyphill]

if you look at the black and white version of the dr who story ambassoders of death. one of the aliens fires an energy bolt at a soldier. it flashes a bright red beam for a few frames. same thing. i noted this in 1990

[vk3ase]

I was working in the telecine department at ABC

TV in melbourne in the 1980's. Black and white film telerecordings were still being made into the start of the colour age. I noticed that when a recording taken off a colour signal was replayed the wave form monitor came alive with hf information just like a colour film and the pix monitor was crawling with dots. I fiddled a bit and got some colour reproduction, when i mentioned this to the powers that be no one was the least bit interested.

[auspete]

Doesn't surprise me at all! Many before you have tried to convince them of similar things - such as colour versions of popular shows they were making in the early 1970s for overseas sale. They couldn't have cared less.

[auspete]

@vk3ase Nice to know nothing's changed at the ABC, they're still technically useless. Watermarks galore and a beautiful HD frequency wasted on a low quality 24 hour news channel. Still a pack of idiots. Boy that must've been frustrating.

[BizMarkUK]

@vk3ase Just like you vk3ase, I'd noticed even back in the early 90s that this was doable, and I could see that where the film weave placed the chroma dots 'in phase' with the telecine, the colour was appearing, and I knew that someday, it would be possible to electronically move the pixels of the frame around so that sync with the subcarrier frequency was restored, and hence make the colour retrievable. Richard T Russell was the genuis, not James Insell.

[BizMarkUK]

@vk3ase Just like you vk3ase, I'd noticed even back in the early 90s that this was doable, and I could see that where the film weave placed the chroma dots 'in phase' with the telecine, the colour was appearing, and I knew that someday, it would be possible to electronically move the pixels of the frame around so that sync with the subcarrier frequency was restored, and hence make the colour retrievable. Richard T Russell was the genius, not James Insell.

[ReelChange]

An amazing achievement by James Insell and his team. Hopefully this process will go on to be applied to all the candidate material in the BBC archive.

[filmnet]

@ReelChange James Insell is a BBC employee who was only an advisor in the team. The real credit should go to Richard T Russell who was the main developer.

[ReelChange]

@filmnet Thanks for the info! I stand corrected. I wonder if the colour recovery process is still being developed? The colour recovery working group websites linked to on the process' Wikipedia article haven't been updated in a while.

[masterstarfox]

@ReelChange and hopefully ATV shows that are on 16mm black and white film like timeslip(1970/71)

[mike20021969]

it's good innit what they've done.

what wasn't mentioned in the news report though was that the soundtrack had been restored too from a recording made by bbc radio wm's ed doolan.