Missing Doctor Who negative located

[josephsenior]

I am in shock, thank you Paul and Richard. Here's to more good news

[stevemanfred]

Nov 29, 2021 22:55:41 GMT Paul Vanezis said:

So I asked them to check it. And yes, what they thought was a sound negative turned out to be the missing picture negative. I suspect that the two negatives were put back in the wrong cans the last time the two cans were at a laboratory to have a print made and that must have been some time before 1986. In fact, it may have occurred in the 1970's.

Regards,
Paul

The US broadcasting package for the surviving complete black-and-white stories was put together for Lionheart in 1985, seeing first use in November of that year. All those prints had to at least have been played and transferred to videotape (not to mention NTSC) at that time. 

[Robert Lia]

And some of those prints including the black and white Jon Pertwee episodes were in poor shape. It was obvious (well it became obvious in the 1990's when VHS releases started) that BBC Enterprises back then took what ever was the closest print on the shelf and used it as the master not considering checking the quality of the prints. The Mind of Evil and The Daemons had prints that had apparently been returned from Saudi Arabia as no other Commonwealth Country bought them

[dennywilson]

Nov 30, 2021 23:55:32 GMT stevemanfred said:

Nov 29, 2021 22:55:41 GMT Paul Vanezis said:

So I asked them to check it. And yes, what they thought was a sound negative turned out to be the missing picture negative. I suspect that the two negatives were put back in the wrong cans the last time the two cans were at a laboratory to have a print made and that must have been some time before 1986. In fact, it may have occurred in the 1970's.

Regards,
Paul

The US broadcasting package for the surviving complete black-and-white stories was put together for Lionheart in 1985, seeing first use in November of that year. All those prints had to at least have been played and transferred to videotape (not to mention NTSC) at that time. 

Which would have been also transferred to PAL from the telerecordings for Australia and NZ.

[dennywilson]

Dec 1, 2021 0:31:47 GMT Robert Lia said:

And some of those prints including the black and white Jon Pertwee episodes were in poor shape. It was obvious (well it became obvious in the 1990's when VHS releases started) that BBC Enterprises back then took what ever was the closest print on the shelf and used it as the master not considering checking the quality of the prints. The Mind of Evil and The Daemons had prints that had apparently been returned from Saudi Arabia as no other Commonwealth Country bought them

The print of "Keys of Marinus" #5 used for the syndication package was TERRIBLE Quality (Very washed out) - It had to be the one Ian found in the Film Library in c.1976!

[Ralph Rose]

The film prints used to create the syndication package, and the VHS releases under the supervision of John Nathan-Turner, were viewing copies.

These viewing copies were horrendous, as almost anything could have happened to them due to wear and tear.

This was acceptable because the safety print or neg was held and not used. At least not until the Restoration Team took over the VHS releases.

[John Wall]

The RT did a brilliant job, tracking down the best available prints from the BFI, etc - wonderful chaps, all of them 👍

[fredjones1]

Dec 1, 2021 0:31:47 GMT Robert Lia said:

And some of those prints including the black and white Jon Pertwee episodes were in poor shape. It was obvious (well it became obvious in the 1990's when VHS releases started) that BBC Enterprises back then took what ever was the closest print on the shelf and used it as the master not considering checking the quality of the prints. The Mind of Evil and The Daemons had prints that had apparently been returned from Saudi Arabia as no other Commonwealth Country bought them

As regards this comment I would be interested to know what is thought of the latest restoration products. I am currently using something for upscaling and it is rather good even if it is not "professional".

[ianphillips]

So is this new episode 7 negative a stored field negative or a suppressed field negative? I think you answered in the initial post that it was a suppressed field negative, but I'm a little confused on the wording, so I wanted to confirm that was the case.

[Richard Bignell]

Yes, it's suppressed field. It's the original negative of the episode made in 1964 on 1963 stock.

[Paul Vanezis]

Dec 2, 2021 22:56:45 GMT fredjones1 said:

I would be interested to know what is thought of the latest restoration products. I am currently using something for upscaling and it is rather good even if it is not "professional".

The aim is to use machine learning to create better upscaling results for archive material such as Doctor Who. Currently we have found better results using a hardware solution.

We have consulted regarding machine learning technology for both colourisation and upscaling. All the technology that claims it does upscaling better using AI appears to simply be trading noise against sharpening. It can produce sharper looking edges and reduces noise. At what point noise is reduced in the chain is important because if possible, you don't want to upscale noise. By the same measure, you don't want to upscale obvious noise reduction artefacts. It's one reason why in many cases we are upscaling already restored masters and then doing further work to resolve issues revealed by the new upscales.

For upscaling, Remini appears to do a good job of faces because it has access to a large database of faces. Backgrounds in Remini experiments however are not processed in the same way. They are simply noise reduced and softened because Remini doesn't have a large database of backgrounds.

But for a programme such as Doctor Who, there could be a more straightforward solution involving high resolution stills of sets, costumes and actors.

Paul

[markperry]

I suppose an indication of poor the archiving was was the USAs mid 1980s screening of The Ambassadors Of Death films episode 5 extremely poor copy is the same quality as Troughons vhs The Invasion episode 2.
It's online if you want compare it.

[Paul Vanezis]

Jan 4, 2022 20:22:15 GMT markperry said:

I suppose an indication of poor the archiving was was the USAs mid 1980s screening of The Ambassadors Of Death films episode 5 extremely poor copy is the same quality as Troughons vhs episode 2.
It's online if you want compare it.

I don't. And I don't think it's an example of poor archiving at all. It's an example of excellent archiving, but poor asset management.

[Richard Develyn]

Although I know a fair bit about ML and AI in general, I'm not an expert in this particular field, however the way I would imagine you would use AI in this instance would be to find a tool which will take in both the dirty and the cleaned images, associated with each other, obviously, so that it learns what the cleaning process does, and then feed it in a new dirty image to see what it comes up with.

[Robert Lia]

Back in the 1980's when they were re selling the Jon Pertwee and later William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episode's to the USA BBC Enterprises simply grabbed the first print on the shelf they came across and used that as the master. No one including me at the time thought that there was a film negative recording available sitting on the shelf and we accepted that what we got in black and white was all that existed on the shelfs. It was not until they prepared "The Daemons" for the BBC2 repeat that most fans including myself learned that there were still film negatives that new prints could be struck from. They were able to get a new recording made of episode 1 and after that more information started to emerge on the status of what episodes existed solely as film prints and which episodes had film negatives existing.