Are off-air colour Pertwee tapes still needed?

[RWels]

What is says in the subject. The Pertwee era has all been recolourised in some way. Are there any specific episodes for which off-air colour tapes would still have any added value?

[John Wall]

Definitely. Invasion of the Dinosaurs 1 for a start. There are episodes of the Daemons that could be better along with Mind of Evil, Ambassadors of Death, etc, etc.

[martinjwills]

If the off-air were PAL it would be better, although i think VHS PAL in the early days was 1/2 the size of the Later VHS PAL. I dont know about the earlier Recording formats. The colour episodes used for restoration were NTSC so already converted once from PAL.

ALL the off air colour conversion episodes could be improved. Im sure any more off air recordings would be useful, and there was the colour bars on some of the NTSC recordings.

i am sure other methods will be developed in the future so a computer can auto work on the frames.

[John Wall]

There are lots of different routes used.

Reverse Standards Conversion of 525 line NTSC broadcast tapes revovered from TV stations are, wth the application of Digital Noise Reduction, very very good:-)

If domestic colour recordings of things like Dinosaurs 1 turned up I'm sure the Restoration Team could do wonders combining it with the b&w telerecording and colour recovery version.

[Charles Daniels]

May 30, 2017 12:27:13 GMT RWels said:

What is says in the subject. The Pertwee era has all been recolourised in some way. Are there any specific episodes for which off-air colour tapes would still have any added value?

I'm constantly on the look out for n1500 recordings of the Pertwee era.
I have found programmes contemporary to Pertwee on the format, but no luck yet.

Definitely Invasion of the Dinosaurs 1 would be the holy grail find there.

[Richard Marple]

I've wondered before that some more colour off-air recordings from the Pertwee era might be in the hands of a collector, possibly in North America.

[Ed Brown]

May 30, 2017 12:27:13 GMT RWels said:

The Pertwee era has all been recolourised in some way. Are there any specific episodes for which off-air colour tapes would still have any added value?

Although restoration has been possible in many cases, there remains a core of episodes for which recovery of a colour videotape recording would be of significant benefit. Namely, the following episodes:

'Ambassadors of Death', Episodes 2 to 7
'Mind of Evil', Episode 1
'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', Episode 1


For 'Ambassadors of Death', only Episode 1 survives at the BBC in colour. Recolourisation of the other six episodes has been only a limited success, because of colour patterning/banding on the only surviving off-air colour tape currently known to exist.

For 'Mind of Evil', chroma dot restoration was possible for all the episodes except Episode 1. Even recovery of a black-and-white film print of Episode 1 would be invaluable, provided it has the chroma dot pattern preserved on it; the only b/w print the BBC has does not.

'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' survives intact at the BBC, in colour, except for Episode 1. The only b/w film print the BBC has kept does have chroma dot information recorded on it, but poorly, in an incomplete fashion. So that again, even the recovery of a black-and-white film print of Episode 1 would be invaluable, if it has the chroma dot pattern preserved on it.

[Sue Butcher]

So the BBC b/w film recordings of "Ambassadors" 2-7 have no chroma dots?

[RWels]

I now read on the restoration team website that later US repeats simply left out individual b/w episodes when the rest of the story was colour, or cobbled something together. So off-airs from the US might SEEM to be all colour but could still be missing the vital episodes.

[martinjwills]

Jun 5, 2017 5:40:35 GMT Sue Butcher said:

So the BBC b/w film recordings of "Ambassadors" 2-7 have no chroma dots?

I think they only used the chroma dot recovery on sections of the episodes that were not already done by colour restoration, rather than the whole episode. The Whole of Episode 5 was not touched as it was a colour restoration already, so is an example of this.

[Steven Sigel]

Two notes:
1) Ambassadors does indeed have Chormadots. I think it's only MOE #1 that doesn't have them at all.
2) BBC does not have the IOTD (1) print - they have an HD Scan of the print.

[George D]

If we were in the old days, we could get a chromadot recovery of ambassadors of death perhaps.
If mind of evil 1 doesnt have it, then probably all film prints are from the same negative so would need an off air recording.
An update of invasion of dino would be very helpful but rare. We're fortunate we have what we do.