BBC new colour restoration technique using chroma dots

How the BBC have pioneered new software to allow colour extraction from black and white telerecordings using miniscule chroma information dots unwittingly embedded in the film.

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  Education

[Stuart Reid]

@mattyCox:  this was from BBC2's Newsnight.

[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]

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.

[lleborp]

The fact that the dots are visible shows that the engineer setting up the film recorder did the job correctly & got the focus just right! Also left the 4.43 meg lp filter out of circuit!

[johneymute]

chroma dots are patterns in the form of microscopic horizontal,vertical,diagonal straps and a combination of both each,

for example the red shows horizontal straps,green vertical straps,blue diagonal straps,and yellow has a combination of vertical straps and diagonal straps.

so each color has their unique pattern left off,wich means that even if the film was telerecorded from a b&w tv with a b&w camera,these chroma dots will just survive.

chroma dots shut be not confused with chroma noise LOL!!

[t0nito]

That's impossible because different colour combinations can output the exact same shade of grey, there's no way of any software to guess what the original colour was. Chroma dots, on the other hand, are patterns and each colour shade results a unique pattern and what the software does is convert the pattern into a colour. Only coloured to film videos can be converted to colour because original b&w film/video doesn't have any chroma dots.

[johnxgin1]

like Timeslip and Tightrope (both starring spencer banks)