Colour restoration - Dad's Army on 13th December

[diankra]

BBC2 is running a Dad's Army episode on 13th December - Room at the Bottom. What's on topic here is that it's the only Dad's Army episode which was made in colour but only survived as a black and white film print. But the version they're running on the 13th has been restored to colour by interpreting interference patterns in the black and white print.
It's something the restoration team had looking at as a possibility for a while, but clearly it works, so that ought to mean that over time the Pertwee Who episodes that only exist in black and white can be restored the same way...

 

[Haggis and tatties]

There is a nice little documentary on The Silurians DVD that shows you how they took the perfect Black and white version of the serial and then took a colour but very poor quality off air betamax video version, and merged them to give you a very good quality color version.

Fascinating stuff, i would be quite interested in seeing them doing all the Hartnell and Troughton stuff in colour.

 

[Rarewolf]

There is a nice little documentary on The Silurians DVD that shows you how they took the perfect Black and white version of the serial and then took a colour but very poor quality off air betamax video version, and merged them to give you a very good quality color version.

Fascinating stuff, i would be quite interested in seeing them doing all the Hartnell and Troughton stuff in colour.

This is a completely different process. There is no colour copy what so ever. We don't know yet if it will work for all the Pertwee episodes, it depends on the recording.

Dad's Army has a lot of luck!

 

[diankra]

There is a nice little documentary on The Silurians DVD that shows you how they took the perfect Black and white version of the serial and then took a colour but very poor quality off air betamax video version, and merged them to give you a very good quality color version.

Fascinating stuff, i would be quite interested in seeing them doing all the Hartnell and Troughton stuff in colour.

This is a completely different process. There is no colour copy what so ever. We don't know yet if it will work for all the Pertwee episodes, it depends on the recording.

Dad's Army has a lot of luck!

It'll depend on the quality of the film print: the print for Invasion of the Dinosaurs 1 is pretty poor, so the relevant interference patterns may not be clear on that one.
If what Radio Times says about the quality of the results on the Dad's Army episode is accurate, it could be that it'll be worth using this process on stories like The Daemons which have been recoloured using the offair Betmax recording (as with Silurians, the recoloring was going to be redone for any DVD release anyway, as the results available now are so much better than those produced back in 1992).

As for colouring Hartnell and Troughton stories, in addition to this process not working unless episodes were produced in colour in the first place, the Restoration Team's mission is to restore episodes to their original condition: like a lot of film buffs, they'd probably be opposed in principle to colouring stuff that was made in black and white (as would I, with the possible exception of The Mind Robber, where it might be interesting to use colour and monochrome Wizard of Oz style, to denote reality and fiction...)

 

[Tomalak]

I believe Mind of Evil part one won't work either, as some turnip turned off the colour signal.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I think we should probably be thankful that the William Hartnell & Patrick Troughton years weren't in color. The production values are so poor anyway, I can only imagine what sins taking the black & white is hiding.

 

[Rarewolf]

I believe Mind of Evil part one won't work either, as some turnip turned off the colour signal.

Or did their job properly! The colour was supposed to be filtered out so the patterning wouldn't be visable on the B&W prints.

So it is questionable if they missed it on Dinos 1. They should have been paying more attention!

 

[Haggis and tatties]

So did anybody see the episode, quite good, and the colour restoration was also quite good, although you could see the joins at times it was still a very well done, and it made the program look and feel very fresh.

And the small program before it on how they were able to make it colour again because the colour signal was still turned on when it was being recorded from a black and white TV monitor with a black and white TV camera was very interesting........fascinating stuff.

 

[Captain Shaw]

I saw the show but miss the other show telling you how it was done might watch it on iplayer later.

 

[diankra]

I saw the show but miss the other show telling you how it was done might watch it on iplayer later.

It wasn't a seperate programme - though BBC2 did also rerun the old Missing Believed Wiped documentary which was made when two season two episodes were recovered a few years ago - just a five minute introduction with Ian Lavender talking to the head of the team that restored the episode.

 

[Starkers]

I think we should probably be thankful that the William Hartnell & Patrick Troughton years weren't in color. The production values are so poor anyway, I can only imagine what sins taking the black & white is hiding.

Maybe the BBC is missing a trick here, maybe a lot of classic Who would look better if it were black and whited