"Color Recovery" without Colorization!

Post by **Ben** » March 7th, 2008, 8:27 am

Hey, I read this in Guardian Technology this week and now it's online.

The BBC have found a tricky way to pull out color from kinescope films of originally color-shot programs.

This isn't Colorization as we know it but a new system being called "Color Recovery". It seems very exciting and valid:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... search.bbc

"As far as computer colourisation's concerned it's very time-consuming and very expensive, and you need to either invent colour from scratch or use colour reference material to figure out what colours things were. In the colour recovery process, what you get out are the original colours."

This also raises the question, going back to "standard" Colorization: would it be right to go back to only b/w surviving film footage (such as, maybe, Walt Disney's TV intros) and use Colorization where the Color Recovery process would not work?

Interesting debate!

GeorgeC · Post by **GeorgeC** » March 9th, 2008, 12:34 am

Colorization is a mixed bag.

It never seems to work well with live-action. Skin tones look fake and eyes are just creepy. Also, these films were lit for B & W photography and nobody seems to know how to color the backgrounds for this lighting.

Thanks, but I'll stick to B & W originals of Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street. The colorized versions of those films just look sick.

As for animation, I've got mixed feelings. The purist and historian in me wants the ORIGINAL B & W versions always available but I've got fewer problems with colorizing B & W animated shorts as long as some sensible color scheme is followed for the characters -- ie, somebody remembers that Donald Duck wears a blue sailor suit and that Mickey's pants are red with yellow/gold buttons!

Where colorization doesn't really work well with B & W animation is when A) you have mixed live-action animated shorts like "You Oughta Be In Pictures" {go back to why I said live-action colorization doesn't work}; B) backgrounds are three-dimensional, live-action shot turntables or models like a lot of the Fleischer shorts; and C) shorts that have a lot of washes of grey, black, and white in them. It just doesn't seem anybody knows how to paint color into those backgrounds digitally well at all.

Post by **Ben** » March 9th, 2008, 9:07 am

George...you missed the point entirely. This isn't about the "Colorization" process, this is a new system, being called "Colour Recovery", that seeks to un-code the chroma dots in vintage video footage, allowing for the computer to restore the color that was already there originally.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... search.bbc

The scenes in these instances were SHOT for color, IN color and BROADCAST in color. Archive purging over the years means only black and white safety copies remain, but these were never intended to be seen this way apart from in b/w markets.

They're not guessing the colors of a Casablanca, they're RESTORING the colors from material that originally captured them!

Second - and totally apart - to that, my further question was then: how do we feel about bringing back color, by the standard Colorization process (that you're talking about), to material that was again shot in color (like Walt's TV intros) but now only remain in black and white?

In no way am I suggesting coloring Casablanca (or even The Absent Minded Professor, though it's a heck of a good job) and I am not condoning the process, but again, things like Walt's intros were lit and shot for color - it's only now that they only exist in black and white.

If Snow White had been a flop and only existed today as a public domain b/w dupe print, would there be an argument for a company to Colorize it against matched up artwork?

This is the question I'm raising. Not to bring color to King Kong, or even black and white cartoons - they should remain so - but what about those Walt TV segments, shot for and in color...?

It's an interesting debate, but one that I think you totally missed my points on...

GeorgeC · Post by **GeorgeC** » March 9th, 2008, 2:41 pm

Doctor Who? That's what they're trying to bring back color for?

I dunno. Sounds pretty darn expensive to me.

I "kind of" understand the principle of the process but it doesn't sound like it's going to be perfect by any means.

If anything will sink it, it's going to be cost of remastering and the quality of the final product. We'll see if the tests sink the proposal. I wouldn't bet on it being practical in all honesty. I'd still say the same things that sink traditional colorization are going to pop up in that new process. Colorized B & W film just doesn't typically look that good. I don't think going from full color to B & W and then back will make much difference in the end. There just might not be enough information left on the film transfer to reconstruct the information.

I could very well be wrong, though. There were a lot of naysayers about the quality of DVD and look how that technology turned out.

So they did a video to film dupe of those episodes? Weird. Usually, it's the other way around from what I've heard.

GeorgeC · Post by **GeorgeC** » March 9th, 2008, 2:50 pm

Ben wrote:
If Snow White had been a flop and only existed today as a public domain b/w dupe print, would there be an argument for a company to Colorize it against matched up artwork?

Ah,

But that's a big difference from most colorization projects. They don't usually have a nice color representative to work from, there's a lot of guesswork, and that's why most colorization projects turn out yucky. You'd need that artwork to even get close to getting the correct color. Even then, without representatives for every scene, there's still a lot of guesswork involved.

Every Disney film prior to CG coloring was a unique color experience. Paints were specially mixed for every film and then thrown out AFTER thee films were finished. This is getting nitpicky, yes, but even a restoration is NOT going to really bring a film back to what it was 100%. It's just not humanly or mechanically possible after 40, 50, 60 years.

Even then, there are differences between standard definition and hi-definition color. I believe the color ranges increase massively as resolution increases. Sure, the human eye is limited to so many colors that it can perceive at any one time, but even then look at the differences in color between a VHS copy of say The Little Mermaid and the same film on DVD from the same print. You pick up more colors and greater contrasts on the DVD.