What do you think of "digital surgery"?

[FlyingSquid]

@RocketJForklift

I thought at the time that it was very impressive that they were able to take the black and white images and figure out what the original colors were.

Just as a technical note, they didn’t figure out what the original colors were. It was guesswork.

[awatts]

@RocketJForklift

All the TV shows would have someone say “ENHANCE!” at a computer screen and somehow it would take a low-res image and turn it into a crisp, clear image in which you could read the critical clue in what had been a cluster of four gray pixels.

@RocketJForklift

And yet, somehow, apparently, we’ve gotten to the point where you actually can do that?

Basically it looks at tons of “similar” frames in the movie (especially those nearby forward and backward from the current frame) and uses detail from those to infer missing information. It’s still got limits and can’t magically clear up anything, but if over a few seconds different parts of something are clear it can interpolate and fill in.

[awatts]

@FlyingSquid

Just as a technical note, they didn’t figure out what the original colors were. It was guesswork.

Sometimes you can use color set photos to help. I know that some hobbyists who have colorized pre-color Doctor Who episodes[1] have taken advantage of the fact that the BBC routinely had photographers take color pictures for publicity purposes which often still exist.

[1] vs the teams who re-colorized 3rd Doctor episodes where only B&W telecines existed, where they used other techniques (i.e. mapping NTSC home video chroma over the higher quality B&W telecine or using microdots that PAL → film telecining causes that allows them to recover color)

[klcorridon]

I always thought ‘telecine’ sounded so much better than ‘film chain’. Everybody looked at me like I was an idiot for using it, though.

[jolomo]

I’m just gonna say it: “A Case of Spring Fever” perfected for IMAX! Yes