Article on recolouring b/w film recordings

[Daniel O'Brien]

Today's 'TechnologyGuardian' has a piece by Charles Norton on restoring the colour to b/w film recordings.

The article claims that new technology can extract the original colour from the films and reapply it, thanks to the presence of 'chromadots' on the recordings (caused by interference from the colour encoded signal).

Quote: "It might be possible to decode the original colour signal of the show from these chromadots, since they contain an electronic remnant of the original video signal."

The article, which should be on the Guardian website in a day or so, stresses that the technology is in its early stages but initial tests have proved encouraging.

Thoughts?

[JeffVagg]

www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/research.bbc

It's already on their site.

[Rich Cornock]

sounds like work in progress but still good news, just shows that work is going on without people knowing about it. interesting they worked on a piece of top of the pops, i wonder what clip they used.........would love to see it

[jonny]

& some stuff made in b/w with no orig color signal has also been colorised
very effectively by more complex but also very cost prohibiting methods.

[LanceM]

This is great news indeed, though have heard and read similar promising articles in the past proclaiming this same process, of recovering a video signal through the residual chroma dots. Would be as happy as others if this could become a cost effective reality. As would love to see such items as off air Top Of The Pops clips recovered, or episodes from Doctor Who (Planet Of The Daleks ep 3, Invasion Of The Dinosaurs ep 1, Mind Of Evil all ) or other series where the original color signal is lost and only black and white signal remains. I for one am just happy that we have the black in white material to see, let alone the colour masters, if further material can be restored this way that would be fantastic, if not then I would hope people would be happy still, as it is better to have something than nothing at all.

Will be most interested to see how this all pans out, and how this research progresses.

Cheers, Lance.