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Reverse Engineering Doctor Who Into Color
Lanxon writes "In 1967, the BBC set about junking its Doctor Who archive: a moment sci-fi fans wish they could travel back in time to prevent. There are 108 vintage episodes missing, but since 1978 a number have been rediscovered as 16mm black-and-white films. The BBC shot many of these series in color, but made monochrome copies for countries such as Australia, where many TV companies were still broadcasting in greyscale. The reels had sat in archives since. Now, the Doctor Who Restoration Team, an independent group contracted by the BBC, is using a new technique to regenerate The Doctor in color."
I traveled back in time and re-posted it. . In Colour!
. .
Since this is the BBC, they shot *none* of them in color but many of them in *colour*....
The article says that they are using color information that was on the b&w prints. Not really reverse engineering, but still cool.
nt
So the article was devoid of anything of particular interest other than some jargon. The jargon, on the other hand, led to fascinating little technique about reconstructing the color of the grayscale image from "chroma dots". The actual method was discovered by a BBC engineer, and you can read more about it here: colour-recovery.wikispaces.com.
Can they reverse engineer the scripts instead? Color or black and white, those old episodes are damn unwatchable. We'd be better off giving Wikipedia descriptions of the episodes to the writing staff of Golden Girls. Those old droning 5-part episodes would be turned into 22.5 minutes of tightly scripted comedy starring Bea Arthur as the Doctor. And any of the other old hags as K-9.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The good news is that they've figured out how to restore colour to the B&W negatives. The bad news is that it requires Kodachrome processing...
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
this isn't a new technique - TFA even says it's a refinement of a technique that's been used before.
damn cool though, to get the crap from the colour subcarrier that spilled into the luma image and re-generate the original from it.
good thing those old kinescopes were in focus!
"Computer Science: it works, bitches!"
For a taste of recolored Who, see Babelcolour's videos (hand-recolored, frame by frame)
to put some taste back into their food.
C'mon people! The war is OVER!
Dude, the Rolling Stones just called. They said you aren't taking The Mick anywhere.
Like everything from Colin Baker. Seriously, aside from Peri's chest, there was nothing of interest in those episodes.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
At least, if they restrict this to those serials that were originally shot in color. I would be a bit uncomfortable if the older, black and white originally, serials were colorized.
Since in this case, film is meant to be run through a projector of some sort, the "white" areas are actually transparent, and the "gray" areas are, well, transparent areas that are partially obscured by black pigments.
And AC simply because I don't care about karma whoring.
I think the clue is in the name, you are speaking English not American.
...oh, and yo momma's so fat, her Schwarzchild radius is visible to the naked eye.
On the restoration processes used in the past can be found on the RT's website, if you dig around a bit: http://restoration-team.co.uk/
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
From TFA:
"It's very, very labour intensive -- several hundred man hours' work every episode," says Roberts.
Given the production quality of the original, I'd have thought it cheaper and quicker to redo it in the manner of Jack Black's "Be Kind, Rewind".
Unlike the old movies featured in that, they might have made improvements to "Dr. Who?".
The politics behind the Chroma Dot story is intriguing and in some places unpleasant. The instigator of the team was James Insell, and a method was created to perform the chroma dot extraction by a man named Richard Russell. Insell became a bit proprietorial over it all, and he and Russell parted ways, and now Russell it doing it alone. The original Colour extraction blog is here but they don't seem to have made any huge advances since Russell left. There is some more info, plus a link to Russell's own work (including software download) on my own Dr.Who webpage here
My web domain.
A method of digitally replacing, Jon Pertwee, Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann with... I don't know ... Ewan McGregor or anyone!
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
All they really need to do is to give the prints to Turner.
No, really.
I am sure this is a dumb question but why doesn't it just work? If the colour subcarrier is there then why doesn't it just show in colour when displayed on a colour TV? I thought this was why some patterned ties, shirts, etc. with fine monochrome lines would show as a glittering rainbow of colours.
" ... Why doesn't it just work ... "
Because colour TVs don't interpret chroma dots to display colour, they use three different signals for RGB. Engineers would have had to build chroma-dot interpretation into the colour TVs.
Things don't just work. They have to be made to work. Are you in middle management by any chance?. Do you use the phrase "Make it so Number One"?
I know enough to know this is wrong, PAL uses a colour difference signal. Fine patterns in the luminance signal do show up as colours, check patterns would often show as strobeing colour on older colour TVs.
This along with the MGM fire that destroyed the original Tom and Jerry prints, is more proof of how piracy can help us. If this stuff had been pirated all over the net like it would be today, it wouldn't have been lost in the first place. Hopefully they would have used a loss less format though... :-)
In other words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_mDTLphIVY&feature=related
Why not re-record them with the new cast? I'd love to see the old stories, but where there's nothing left but audio & a few stills...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Americans write American, which is similar to English. The English and the rest of the Commonwealth (including India, Australia, N.Z., Hong Kong, most of Africa, Canada (excluding Quebec), etc...) write in British English. So to those of you who think that Americans out number the rest of the world, you'll need to check your stats at the door. The rest of the world actually learns to write British English except in countries with a significant post war American occupation/policing/McDonalds presence such as Vietnam - who learn to write American.
In all cases, the critical point here is in how they write, not how they speak or pronounce the words.
Texas, Louisiana, the Bronx ... entirely different story.
Conservative Albertans could/should be excluded from any list where writing is a requirement. It's a similar story to the majority of Republicans in the US who were, most definitely, "left behind". ;)
Hoots mon ye awl diskrinate against mae az I spake Ollster-Scods!
Ah, memories of watching Tom Baker followed by an episode of 'The Tripods' then to be lulled to sleep by 'The Star Hustler'.... On Fridays and Saturdays I could stay up WAY past 9:00...
I seem to remember that episodes starring his immediate predecessor weren't bad either.
Before that it was black and white. I think I only ever saw Dr #1 discover the daleks, and Dr #2 probably wasn't bad, but he did look like one of the Three Stooges...
I also remember not liking to watch Doctor Who anymore starting with the Fifth Doctor there may have been more doctors? I stopped caring.
Then as an adult, starting with Christopher E. , I've been a fan again. I've really enjoyed every one of the new Doctors since then.
It's been long enough since watching the old Tom Baker episodes that I don't remember the plots anymore, but having gone back and watched a few on Netflix, I don't see myself watching any more of them.
The special effects are very dated of course. I mean, green slime covered green lightbulbs wrapped in bubble wrap skin are obviously just what I described. But that's not the real reason. I just don't think the old episodes have much to offer someone who can/has viewed the new ones. The best of the old is part of the new character and plotwise, with HOUR long episodes to flesh things out more deeply.
...
If "color" is incorrect, tell the Spaniards. The French have already been telling you "colour" is incorrect; it's "couleur".
"Colour", "centre", "realise", etc... these are all Frenchisms that the British slavishly adopted centuries ago during the period of heavy French influence after the Norman conquest, and now, for reasons unknown, defend as though they are some sort of historically English or even British spellings.
If you want to use English spellings that are free from foreign meddling, you use -or, -er, -ize... basically, you use what you've erroneously been calling "Americanisms".
English is almost entirely made up of foreign meddling - it's a peasants combination of many languages that adapts and changes with time. Very few words (except modern technical terms) have no root in a foreign language.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
Tradition says that technical terms be based in ancient greek or latin. Thus television, for example. Just about no-one spoke latin when the word was coined, but it's just tradition.
This is at least the 2nd time the BBC restored a B&W Doctor Who episode to color [sic]. The first was by combining an early color videotape recording (by a fan in Texas for the color) and the B&W film for the image itself. They just superimposed the fuzzy chroma on the film image. The result was surprisingly sharp and colorful (but then I watch NTSC standard definition so I ain't picky). They had to adjust the picture shape just a tad because the VHS image wasn't an exact match for the film. *sic: Since the color tape was from a U.S. fan, I spelled it the U.S. way.
No, those are the original spellings of the words as first adopted into English. The spellings you advocate were created solely in the US, many by Webster.
What most people don't realize is that K-9 was actually a zebra!
It was supposed to be appalling.
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You may be pink, but black and white are my favourite colours.
For those that don't bother to RTFA I'll distill it down for you: From the summary we know that theyhave some long lost missing episodes that are in B&W and are converting them to color. The article says "...they didn't filter off the colour carrier [encoded as a 'chroma dot' pattern in each frame]" And continues with "...used the signal to reverse-engineer raw colour pictures that could be retouched frame by frame. 'It's very, very labour intensive -...' " Uhmmm... So basically TFA says "we reversed engineered it, and it is hard." I guess its for them to know and for us to find out. And here I thought TFA would maybe give me some INSIGHT on how they did it.
And just like there's no country named America, there's no country named England.
I have roughly the same memories of watching public TV in South Fla and starting with Who, and endng with The Star Hustler.... I am very tempted to get some old eppies of it to show my son after he's done watching Who/Sarah Jane, just to see if the stars attract him as much as they did me...