DWIN was pleased to sponsor an evening event featuring Doctor Who Restoration Team maestro Steve Roberts. The discussion with Steve included a demonstration from Steve about the Chroma Dot Recovery process and how it worked on restoring colour to the previously black and white Planet of the Daleks episode 3.

Chroma Dot Recovery, or Colour Recovery as it as is called, is a process so fantastic even the Doctor might call it magic.  As fans know, many Jon Pertwee episodes only exist as black and white film recordings of colour videotape. What some clever boffins realized though, is that these black and white film recordings still contained the field information for the chroma (colour) signal as a series of dots. Through a highly technical process that I can only barely understand (but you can read about here) they have now figured out how transform those dots into an actual colour signal. The results are remarkable.

We were pleased to see Steve demonstrate how this was done with Planet of the Daleks 3 (the episode was already being computer colorized when this process was proved viable—in the end they took the Chroma Dot recovered work and added it to the computer coloured work to provide a near perfect recreation of the colour on this episode). But Steve had one more thing to show us.

Steve then showed us a clip of The Mind of Evil. In colour.

That CR has been used on The Mind of Evil is probably the worst kept secret in Doctor Who today. But Steve finally had permission to give fans the whole story of what was going on with the colour recovery on The Mind of Evil and the answer is more complex.

Yes, they have managed to achieve colour recovery on The Mind of Evil episodes 2-6 (Episode 1 is apparently unrecoverable due to some setting made in original transmission that prevented the chroma information from being recorded). But the result is far from stable. While some scenes, such as one shown to us from Episode 2, are stunning in how well the original colours were able to be recovered, other scenes are much less than satisfactory. We saw a clip from the climax of the story in Episode 6 where the colours bled badly into each other and there was psychadelic strobing effects when characters moved on screen.

So the short story here is: yes, The Mind of Evil is now (mostly) in colour through a process that seemed like science fiction even a year ago. No, it’s not coming out on DVD anytime soon.

Steve Roberts indicated that the story has been pushed back as far as possible to allow for other cost-effective solutions to transpire to stabilize the colour recovery through manual intervention, computer colourization, further enhancements of the Chroma Dot recovery process or some other still-to-be-discovered means. And if nothing can be found it may be released in Black and White. Fans wait and hold their breath until then…

Other interesting news from the evening with Steve Roberts:

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• Colour recovery has not yet been attempted on the other two black and white Pertwee stories, The Ambassadors of Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs episode 1, though Steve indicates that CR has worked on episodes of Ambassadors’ vintage and while Invasion of the Dinosaurs 1 is a print further down the line, as it were, the chroma information is still there.
  
• There are no plans to do animated episodes for stories which have episodes missing from the BBC archives as the cost is prohibitive. In fact, no incomplete story (that wasn’t in the Lost In Time DVD release) is currently on the DVD release schedule at this time (heartbreaking for fans of The Ice Warriors who want to see it VidFIREd!)
  
• There is a rough schedule drawn up for the next three years, culminating in the last classic DVD release in November 2013, the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who
  
• The process of releases are only rarely affected by the new series: the only instance where this happened was pushing up The Invasion of Time because of the appearance of the Sontarans
  
• The classic series range will soon be reverting to the branding of the new series and after five years Doctor Who will have one unified brand. And for all those fans who fear for the spines in their DVD collection, BBC and 2Entertain are apparently going to release reversible cover art with the ‘McGann’ logo still on the opposite side. (North Americans need to start lobbying BBC America!)
  

All in all it was a great evening with the highlight of seeing footage from Doctor Who in colour previously unseen in this format in North America since it aired on PBS in the 1970s. Incredible!