About missing episode hunters

[Ben]

We hear a lot about their search for missing episodes, but do missing episode hunters spend any or much time at all searching for unedited episodes or colour Pertwee episodes? I never hear anything about those aspects of the missing Who footage.

[Greg]

I am one person looking for the color Pertwee's in the states. I am sure there are others. The likely hood of me finding them are nil but this is something I am doing in my spare time.
I know a few people who worked at the Time-Life facility that housed those tapes in the 70's. I also know a lot of people in the video duplication industry. We are looking to see what we uncover. We are checking into many different storage facilities across the US that have been known to store Time-Life related material and we are also checking with engineers who were known recording video doemstically from the 70's in some of the areas those color episodes were being shown.

Unfortunately, I am sure it will all add up to leads that will dry up but it will be fun to document my research and report out to everyone.

Take care,
Greg

[Wright Blan]

I've been meaning to ask this, and I guess here is as good of a time and place there is. So....
How well does vid-fire work with color-restored footage? Has it been tried yet? Would that be one of the reasons why color-restored stories like "The Daemons" haven't been released on DVD yet?

[John K]

The reason the colour-restored Pertwee stuff hasn't come out on DVD yet is that the possibility remains that superior recolouring techniques may emerge or even that original footage may be found. The technology is developing at a rate of knots and a DVD release now would likely look poor in 5 years' time compared to what might be achievable then.

AIUI VidFIRE works fine with colour footage - a demonstration clip in colour is available on the Seeds of death DVD (at least I think it was a demonstration of VidFIRE, might have been something else...)