Doctorin' the TARDIS

June 25, 2010 7:17 AM

Color Silurian Overlay: How the Doctor Who Restoration Team brought the Third Doctor serial from a telerecording to its original video glory. Here's the Guardian article, or if you're video production-literate, a lengthy technical explanation of the restoration method and technology.
posted by griphus (29 comments total)

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of the meeting where they decided to do this:

BBC Executive A: Have you seen the price of videotape recently? It's a scandal!
BBC Executive B: Yes, but we're running out! Anyone know a cheap source?
BBC Executive C: Wait a minute, haven't we got a huge stockpile of tape in the basement?
A: Really? Where's that?
C: The big room labelled "Archive".
B: Oh yes! But hasn't that got important stuff in it?
C: Nothing anyone will want to see again. Some crappy kids show called "Professor Why" or something. A rubbish situation comedy about elderly Home Front soldiers. Juvenile Footlights humour. Boring science stuff. That kind of thing.
A: Won't people want to see them again?
C: Oh, come off it. After all, it's not as if everyone will have their own videotape player, is it? [they all laugh]
A: Well, that's sorted. Trebles all round!
posted by Electric Dragon at 7:40 AM on June 25, 2010 [12 favorites]

Lovely stuff.
posted by Artw at 7:42 AM on June 25, 2010

Doctor Who: a triumphant regeneration? (contains clip from the finale with a preview image that might be a touch spoilery for folks that have not seen the last UK episode)
posted by Artw at 7:55 AM on June 25, 2010

Yay technology.
posted by monospace at 8:20 AM on June 25, 2010

Bravo on the title of this post.
posted by schmod at 8:26 AM on June 25, 2010

There's an awesome gem in that video at 1:32.
posted by schmod at 8:31 AM on June 25, 2010

There's a Doctor Who Restoration Team? :)
posted by dumdidumdum at 9:05 AM on June 25, 2010

hmm...i guess if you wanted to see any of those erased episodes you'd need some sort of...time machine.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:06 AM on June 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Holy crap. I had a color videotape of this episode, recorded during its first run in US markets. It was great quality too, taken from cable TV via my local Public TV station, recorded on one of the first VHS decks that basically only did HQ recording. I bought the VHS deck just to record Doctor Who episodes.
Then sometime around 1983, my psychoexgirlfriend stole all my videotapes and threw them away. I had several of the legendary "missing episodes" on tape and she destroyed them. I am tempted to give her name and address to some fanatical Whovians.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:26 AM on June 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

I know what Youtube video we'll be watching at our house tonight. Thanks for posting this.

We're slowly watching, or re-watching in some cases, the original series at our house and we haven't gotten to Doctor Who and the Silurians yet. I think we'll add it to the queue after we get through the bonus features of Monster of Peladon and Hand of Fear, which are currently en route.
posted by immlass at 9:36 AM on June 25, 2010

Yay for the vidfire tag

I liked how in the clip at the end of Colour Silurian Overlay they tagged on some vuvuzelas in the very last seconds to make it up to date
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:57 AM on June 25, 2010

I know what Youtube video we'll be watching at our house tonight.

This is the bonus feature track of Doctor Who and the Silurians DVD. You could wait until you watch it.

I bought the VHS deck just to record Doctor Who episodes.

I was good friends with a guy who made a living by doing this and selling the bootlegs. I wonder if he ever recorded a copy of the missing episodes.
posted by clarknova at 10:05 AM on June 25, 2010

schmod, you might enjoy this.
posted by Electric Dragon at 10:22 AM on June 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Holy crap. I had a color videotape of this episode ... and she destroyed them

Flagged for "getting my hopes up".
posted by Lemurrhea at 10:30 AM on June 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

So, I shouldn't be storing my ancient 3/4" videotape of "The Tenth Planet" this close to my speakers then?
posted by scrowdid at 11:31 AM on June 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

@Electric Dragon: That's FPP material right there. Any takers?
posted by schmod at 12:07 PM on June 25, 2010

I'll put one together tomorrow.
posted by Electric Dragon at 12:32 PM on June 25, 2010

The American U-matic tapes only existed due to the efforts of one British `Doctor Who' fan to enlarge his own video collection. Back in 1978, Ian Levine heard that KCET TV in Los Angeles was about to show `The Dæmons' as a two-hour compilation. He wired an American friend the money to go out and hire one of the then brand-new Betamax VCR's, and to buy two one-hour tapes, at that time the longest tape available. The machine was obtained, and the broadcast recorded in its entirety, except for a gap of about twenty seconds during which the tapes were changed over. The Betamax tapes were brought over to England and, as TV standards conversion equipment was not generally available to the public, the tapes were copied onto 525-line U-matic cassettes, retained by Levine ever since.

If the videos had been DRMed (if DRM could even have been possible at the time) then these color signals could have been lost forever. A good illustration of how DRM can actually result in the loss of material. At the time the MPAA was actually trying to make VCRs illegal.
posted by delmoi at 12:43 PM on June 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

Er...Isn't this like 10 years old stuff?
posted by A189Nut at 2:10 PM on June 25, 2010

Doctor Who: a triumphant regeneration?

Is this where we talk about the finale that just aired? Because woah. It was good.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 11:15 AM on June 26, 2010

Is this where we talk about the finale that just aired?

Oh damn, I forgot all about that. I am off to torrent-land. Thanks for the reminder.
posted by charlie don't surf at 12:55 PM on June 26, 2010

Fezzes are cool
posted by Tenuki at 10:35 PM on June 26, 2010

Somehow, BB2.0 didn't seem quite epic enough. Well, perhaps just not epic enough to tide me over until christmas.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:59 PM on June 26, 2010

In keeping with all the timey-wimey "it happened because it happened" loops that happened this episode, I would've liked it had

[SPOILERS]

BB 2.0 been just the first BB. How's that for recursiveness? Not only is the explosion the end of time, but the beginning as well.

[/SPOILERS]

I loved this episode with every fibre of my being.
posted by Phire at 12:45 AM on June 27, 2010

[mouse over for spoilery talk]

I'm really happy with the season and a Doctor who seemed really iffy in the previews.
posted by Gary at 2:33 AM on June 27, 2010

[SPOILERS]

I hope you are now aware that this little trick to hide spoilers (as commonly used on other message boards) does not work on MeFi.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:17 AM on June 27, 2010

That wasn't a mangled attempt at code, charlie don't surf. Just a warning for people who hadn't seen the episode to stop scrolling... or to scroll faster.
posted by Phire at 10:19 AM on June 27, 2010

The Pandoricake Opens (delicious spoiler alert). From the Doctor Who Baking blog.
posted by Gary at 5:19 PM on June 27, 2010

The Doctor Who Restoration Team have done some really cool stuff with restoring colour. Starting from the Pertwee colourisations combining B&W film with NTSC colour video (the 'technical explanation' in the post) they later moved on to really ingenious stuff detecting colour information unintentionally bleeding into B&W recordings, see the chroma crawl section here.

Another trick they came up with is VidFIRE, a system for regenerating interlaced 50 field/second video from 25 frame/second film recordings. Although I'm no expert I'm a bit dubious about this, perhaps because I'm going to be watching the restorations on a computer that then has to clumsily deinterlace the video they've gone out of their way to re-interlace. The whole history of interlaced video -> record to film blurring fields together -> VidFIRE motion estimation to fake up interlaced fields -> deinterlacing algorithm seems unlikely to produce a net improvement.

The youtube video in the post covers the colour combination and VidFIRE, the Guardian article is just about VidFIRE and and kind of confuses the issue implying that's the whole of it.

Anyway, the Restoration Group people are cool. The chroma crawl technique has been used in a Dad's Army release, they also worked out how to reverse the BBC's old PAL->NTSC conversion process to get higher quality PAL from recovered US Dr. Who tapes.
posted by Slogby at 7:35 AM on June 29, 2010