Be Excellent To Each Other

For a couple of years a number of members of the Doctor Who Restoration Team have been investigating ways of restoring colour from black and white telerecordings (black and white film copies taken of colour TV shows for overseas sales).

Basically when the b/w copies were taken, some of the chroma (colour) information wasn't properly filtered out and becomes evident as a fine pattern of dots on the recording. The theory went that if you could decode these dots you could then restore the colour, frame by frame. Easier said than done.....

It's not been an easy task but finally this weekend the BBC will be airing an episode of Dads Army in colour that, although originally made in colour, has only existed in black and white for the past 35 years.

Newsnight feature here that explains all:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7778770.stm

The restored episode airs at 8.35pm this evening (Saturday) on BBC 2.

Hats off to the guys behind it. Another one of their technologies will be on display as well when the episode is aired. About 10 years ago they invented a way to restore a "video" look to film recordings. So you'll be watching a black and white film recording restored to full colour interlaced video. And judging by the advancements they've made with Vidfire (the film to video technique) over the past few years, the future for the re-colouring of episodes of all sorts of things looks rosey.



Full details better than I could ever explain from The Guardian earlier in the year which explains both techniques and why they are so wonderful: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/research.bbc

That was brilliant, one of the best episodes I've seen (but obviously not as good as the U Boat one). The colourisation was splendid, although I think I prefered the raw colouring than the final colouring as the end result looked like a NTSC broadcast with some of the colours too bright and with bleeding. All in all though from a technical perspective it was impressive and helped by the quality of the episode in question (the drill sergeant was the star of the show).

Bloody missed it, gah.

Remember that they will be able to refine the process so the results should improve. I suspect the raw colouring couldn't be left as it was as in the prototype test frames I saw a few years back huge bands of colour had a tendency to go missing.

I'm now wondering which of the Pertwee Doctor Who episodes they will now be able to recover. The entire process depends on the filter not having been switched in at the time of recording.

I know some episodes of Ambassadors Of Death might be candidates because there are some screenshots online from UK Gold with rainbow patterns over the BW image which is what happens when the chromadots are present. The restoration team are not commenting at all, I suspect because it's a tricky time consuming process that only works under specific circumstances.

Yip that was brilliant. Great episode aswell

Just goes to show that Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier were laughter merchants, with a big stall of um, laffs. You could basically base the show on just those two for an episode, they're awesome. Hugh Laurie as Fraser is always awesome as well.

I felt the 'one catchphrase a character' was probably the thing that killed Dad's Army in the end, as lazier script-writing began to take over. It also manifested itself in the place of genuine characterisation and jokes in ALL SUBSEQUENT EFFORTS by Perry & Croft.

The part with the ants had me creasing up. Fantastic !

I used to like Dads Army as a kid as it was old blokes doing silly things but coming back to it as an adult you really do appreciate the scripts and comic performances. Lets face it, it was Perry and Croft's finest hour, every thing that came afterwards was pretty poo...It Aint Half Hot Mum, Are you being served, Allo Allo and Hi De Hi, god help us.

These two are not Croft and Perry but IIRC Croft and David Lloyd.

You Rang My Lord?, was a very brave attempt at doing a 50 minute long sitcom in order to facilitate more complex plots. Often overlooked but actually not bad. Theme tune sung by Bob Monkhouse, Chinnytrufax!

There's a post from the guy who did the colour grade on the Restoration Team forum about peoples comments that the colours seem overblown:

http://www.rtforum.co.uk/read.php?id=246259

Basically it seems that Dads Army has never broadcast from "remastered" copies so side by side the new episode will look quite saturated and bright + it's also early days for the colour recovery process.

Interesting. It was amazing to compare the quality of the coloured transmission with the Black and White clips of the same episode in the documentary afterwards...they looked like completely different shows.

Indeed. They've had the missing colour episode of Planet of the Daleks recoloured in the USA and have also done the chroma dot recovery and then combined the two.

Annoyingly with the exchange rate the way it is, I can't see it happening for any other stories for the time being. They could afford to do it because the exchange rate is so good.

But it will be good because computer recoloured stuff tends to be a tad plastic and flat looking, but the chroma dot recovery system has the original colour but with loses colour at the edges at where the colour was desaturarted to begin with. By combining the two the final image should look as good as we will ever get without the original 2" Quad turning up!

Hang on, surely not?

I suspect they'll do the dinosaur one before Ambassadors as it's more famous (but nowhere near as good). It's be strange, to be honest. I think it actualy works really well in black and white.

Also, I remember really enjoying You Rang M'lord? a a kid. I hope it's as good as I remember. The fact that it's the cast from Hi De Hi doesn't fill be with confidence, though.

Ambassadors certainly has chroma dots in places (it's been noted that on the old analogue UK Gold transmissions you could see the interference associated with them). I dunno about Dinosaurs.

The recolouring was done months ago and with the exchange rate the way it is, we'll have to see what their next move is. My guess is that they will probably go for one of the stories that has the Betamax colour applied like The Daemons or Terror of the Autons. If they have the chroma dots + the Betamax copies they might get some very good colour indeed. Even better than the job they did on The Silurians.