The Ambassadors of COLOUR
The UK Version of Wired is reporting that work is underway to deliver a colourized version of The Ambassadors of Death
For those who don’t speak Classic Who geek, this story—among several others in the Jon Pertwee era—was originally broadcast in colour but the colour broadcast tapes were wiped, leaving only the black and white film versions that were used for foreign sales. An attempt to merge the colour signal from an off-air betamax tape (from someone watching it on WNED channel 17 Buffalo in the early ‘70s!)—a technique which successfully recolourized the stories Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons and The Daemons—was attempted a decade ago but was unsuccesful.
For this they’re using Chroma Dot Recovery—a remarkable process which finds the colour signal in tiny little dots preserved on monochrome film recordings of colour videotapes and restores them. It’s like alchemy (actually it’s science, and if you’re really interested in take a look at this explanation here)
Chroma Dot recovery was used to enhance the colourization of episode three of Planet of the Daleks on the recent DVD release but a full-on DVD release that fully recolourizes a story using Chroma Dot recovery has, up until now, not been attempted. At a DWIN event in October 2009, Steve Roberts showed us work in progress on The Mind of Evil which was stunning (though stabilizing the effect had not been perfected—while scenes from early episodes were breathtaking, later episodes had horrible psychadelic bleed effects). At that time, Steve had said no work had been done on Ambassadors, but stories of its vintage had had good results. Apparently, it works just fine!
Posted by Graeme on Tuesday, January 4 at 6:29 am
10 Comments...
...and quite possibly fake. Well, not fake, but not what Wired claims. They may be going on bad information.
http://whona.realtvboard.com/t4739-the-ambassadors-of-death-restored-colour-version
I’m a Pertwee junkie and S7 is my favourite and I can’t wait for Ambassadors but I can’t imagine we’re going to get it much before the end of the run in 2013. :(
Posted by Chris Burgess on 01/05 at 11:23 AM
Well, Steve Roberts linked to it on Facebook, unironically, so I think it’s actually on the level. Besides, it was also in the print version of Wired, and those guys are pretty good with their research.
Posted by Graeme on 01/05 at 11:26 AM
What Steve said on GB in early Dec about this article:
“I would take certain aspects of that article (such as it being “weeks away” and me being 35(!!!) ) with a huge pinch of salt. They approached me about this months ago and the interview was done over the phone. Wired’s policy is not to allow articles to be seen before publication, otherwise I would have pulled them up on the errors. There’s nothing new in this story that hasn’t been widely reported and discussed on here previously, which boils down to simply this: We are working on ‘Ambassadors’ and *hope* that it will come out in colour, but there are significant hurdles to overcome and some of those might simply be too high.”
Posted by Ryan on 01/05 at 02:48 PM
Well, Black and White Ambassadors is better than NO Ambassadors. The same goes for Terror of The Autons, The Mind of Evil, and The Daemons. (Did I leave any out?) I understand that “Terror” does exist in color and was released on VHS once upon a time so why it hasn’t come out on DVD is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is not of DVD quality. We’ll just have to be patient and one way or another these titles will be released one day. And in all likelyhood I think they will be one of the last to be released for the Pertwee era or even the entire DVD range.
Posted by Doug Grandy on 01/05 at 03:04 PM
Terror of the Autons is like The Daemons which is the same as The Silurians which is out. B&W film recordings combined with a colour signal. Terror is scheduled for DVD this year and Daemons next year using the same processes used for the Silurian story.
Posted by Ryan on 01/05 at 03:21 PM
Apparently AOD is coming out this year in a box set with The Sun Makers called The Solar System.
Posted by Ryan on 01/11 at 04:39 PM
I remember hearing about this a couple of years ago, that BBC Video was investigating technology to recover the colour image. Now THIS is what colorization is supposed to be about, not playing crayons with black and white images, but restoring. Looking forward to seeing this one.
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