Roddenberry Vault Footage - colour correction

[toonloon]

does anyone know if any fan with a good knowledge of colour correction has tinkered with the deleted footage to restore the colours as were used to seeing them?

I believe over time some of the chemicals in the RGB spectrum fade quicker than others. I wondered if someone like Dave Tilotta or Darren dochterman had given a clip a quick pass for re-timing.

 

[Maurice]

I deal with faded motion picture film all the time at the Internet Archive. There are some pretty amazing tools for correcting the color, but a lot depends on the film stock and precisely how it's faded. There are prints I've seen where the film is super magenta and the other colors are just so faded as to be impossible to make look anything their original color.

This film's an example of that (link), after a lot of fussing this is the best I could get it. It was super magenta and the greens were mostly gone. Some shots are vaguely passable, the rest, not so much.

You can do a lot of fine tuning on single frames that simple can't be done practically at 24fps. More's the pity.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

You can do a lot of fine tuning on single frames that simply can't be done practically at 24fps. More's the pity.

Maybe the studio software they use to colorize b&w films could be adapted for color correction. Basically: for every scene, the artist marks off every separate object and selects a color for it. From there, the computer colorizes every frame until the scene changes and the human artist has to get involved again.

I don't see why that system couldn't be used for faded color films. It wouldn't bring back the "true" color image, but in many cases it would be close enough.

 

[Maurice]

Yeah, but as you say, that's not quite the same thing.

 

[Michael]

Personally, I can live with the faded colors of the footage, but the odd presentation – with the found footage strewn almost randomly across several featurettes, obscured by text overlays and interview audio – is something that still bugs me. That's one instance where less really would have been more; just give us a list of the episodes and their accompanying deleted scenes/outtakes for easy consumption.

 

[spockboy]

I'm frankly amazed at what I have seen. It appears that they did absolutely nothing to improve the appearance of the films. I haven't purchased the blu-ray yet but I have seen clips and pictures on the net. I made this color correction in about 60 seconds. The fact that it was so easy and so fast is what amazed me.

Spockboy

 

[Gary7]

Well, Gene in all his tenacity for trying to make a few extra bucks out of Star Trek, took all that cutting room footage and sold off a few frames at a time to buyers (probably dating back to Lincoln Enterprises). Heck, I think I may have even bought a set way back when. What a shame. Who knows how much footage was cast to the wind like that.

Still, with these few seconds of footage here and there, they probably could've been collated in some fashion to at least make them somewhat cohesive. Like all clapboard takes done in groups by actor. Or as M suggested, grouped by episode. Sounds like these clips are all randomly strung together. Rod is carrying on the Gene tradition, it seems.