Regenerating Doctor Who... in colour.

[FordSVT]

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/01/play/time-travel-tv

Personally, I'd be happy to sit there for hours colouring old Doctor Who episodes.

Any die-hards against this kind of upgrade/restoration? Or simply happy to be able to watch old episodes that didn't get thrown in the trash can?

 

[Starkers]

Whilst I wouldn't advocate colouring the original B&W episodes, using this process to salvage episodes that were originally supposed to be in colour is acceptable if you ask me!

 

[diankra]

As More Goose says, this is restoring the colour to episodes that were made in that form, not adding it to ones that were produced in black and white.

 

[Captain Dago]

Whilst I wouldn't advocate colouring the original B&W episodes, using this process to salvage episodes that were originally supposed to be in colour is acceptable if you ask me!

QFT. Now, if only they'd FIND some more of those Hartnell & Troughton B&Ws.

 

[VDCNI]

No problem with re-colouring Pertwee since that is how it was broadcast - it should never be done to Hartnell & Troughton though.

 

[Count Zero]

They're only recolouring episodes that were originally in colour but only survived in black and white. Which is only right. Considering how labour intensive the work seems to be, I doubt anyone's planning to colour episodes from the Hartnell and Troughton eras, and besides, the technique they're using wouldn't work on those because there's no information on the colours embedded in the film/video material. Also, I believe most people would prefer animating lost episodes instead.

I can understand getting tired of the stories if you have to see them so often and in such detail. I can relate to that in a way. Fans created an archive for my favourite comedy show with all the texts spoken. I was only editing the raw texts submitted by someone else but that still entailed watching/listening to the clips quite often, and going over segments that were hard to understand a dozen times or so. I can still enjoy the show but I didn't work on that for such a long time.

 

[Chris3123]

I don't particularly mind if they decide to colorize the Hartnell and Troughton serials, as long as they don't replace the originals in any way. In other words, not like what George Lucas did in regards to the Star Wars Special Editions.

 

[Captaindemotion]

I don't know enough about the technology being used here, but when they coloured some Laurel & Hardy stories some years ago, they looked awful.

Count me in the 'colour what's meant to be coloured, leave b&w what's meant to be b&w' brigade.

 

[Stevil2001]

Is it weird that I prefer the black and white version of The Ambassadors of Death? I think it gives the story a certain weight.

 

[diankra]

It's not particularly labour intensive to restore the colour on the remaining black and white Pertwees.
It was mind-intensive to get the chroma-dot restoration technique to work. And it is computer time-intensive to use - about 10 minutes for each minute, I think (and after that, there are glitches which do then need touching up 'manually').
But all of the Pertwee episodes which only exist in black and white can now be restored to colour as the finance becomes available, with the exception of Mind of Evil 1. The surviving black and white film copy of that doesn't have the chromadot distortion patterns (which should be the case on all of them, but isn't due to carelessness or other problems when the black and white copies were made. MoE1 is the only one that was done 'properly'). That would have to be coloured frame by frame, just as any Hartnell and Troughton stories would have to be if anyone was foolish enough to do it.

 

[Kelso]

I'd rather they cut the running time off all of the old serials by half... to better compliment the amount of story that was being told.

 

[FalTorPan]

As long as the original, "as shot" versions of the episodes remain available, I'm okay with colourized and/or re-edited versions of those episodes.

 

[Rarewolf]

Unfortuantly the article is somewhat inacuruate according to Steve Roberts, it may take a bit longer than they say. Assuming they can overcome all the problems

They are having a hard enough time finding the money to recolour the Pertwee episodes for which no colour remains to recover. They won't be creating colour for 60s material anytime soon.

 

[Winterwind]

We had a big thread about this a while ago. My view hasn't changed. Colouring black and white is bad, mmm'kay.

 

[Meredith]

Eventually we will have computer animation advanced enough to be able to re-animate the missing episodes in colour and to look very close to how they were originally filmed.

Lucas Films is investing in this to bring dead actors "back to life" but we could use it to "genenerate" the episiodes like Marco Polo and other missing seriols that we only have the audio recordings of...

 

[Captaindemotion]

OT, but I think Lucasfilm have denied the 'dead actors' story.

 

[Butters]

I'm all for it. I can't really call myself a fan of the older stuff but I have been known to watch the odd serial, so anything that makes classic who accessible to the modern viewer can only be good. A completely re-edited The Daleks, for example, colourised, augmented sets and special effects with CGI, upscaled picture to HD standards and a new score by Murray is fine by me.

Probably be easier to just recast Hartnel and re-film the lot from scratch.

 

[Count Zero]

Well, at one point it'll be so far removed from the original it would make it rather pointless to bother with it at all instead of remaking it.
As for animating the missing episodes, I'd wish this was done for all of them but I think for now it's rather cost prohibitive. Doctor Who DVDs are only bought by a small group of people so you have to keep things relatively cheap. Maybe one day animation will become cheap enough for that to be feasible but I don't think there, yet, by a long shot.
A friend of mine works in animation so I know that it's not as easy as some people think it is.

They did some CGI on The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I'm not totally convinced by such measures. I also have my reservations about the 'remastering' of Star Trek TOS. It might look better to modern audiences but it's just not how it looked at the time. I don't think it really fits.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

The problem with adding CGI FX to old shows like Doctor Who & Star Trek is that the worst production value problems aren't in the FX, they're in the sets & costumes. You can't replace those with CGI. And if you can get past the bad practical production values, I don't think you'll be too bothered by a handful of perfunctory establishing shots.

As for photo-realistic CGI actors, I think Tron Legacy clearly demonstrated that we still have no frakking idea how to do lips!

Also, I believe most people would prefer animating lost episodes instead.

Amen! If anything, I think the animated episodes of "The Invasion" were in many ways an improvement upon the live action episodes. While the animation sadly can't capture all of the brilliant acting nuances of Patrick Troughton & Frazier Hines, I think it did add a high quality noir-ish feel to the episodes, particularly as it wasn't confined by the usual stage-y multi-camera set-up of the old series.

Is it weird that I prefer the black and white version of The Ambassadors of Death? I think it gives the story a certain weight.

I know what you mean. I'm more forgiving of a slow story if it's in black & white because it does have a certain extra style to it. Now, I don't know how old you are, but in my case, I suspect it's merely the novelty of black & white, since I've had color TV all my life. My mother quickly tires of black & white, constantly thanking her stars that she can watch things in color today!