G’day,
For well over a decade essentially for their own amusement people have been adding colour to b&w Doctor Who content from the 1960s, and uploading it to YouTube. (I’m sure this is happening with non-Doctor Who b&w content, too…) For some, this is sacrilegious - it was recorded in b&w, designed to be in b&w - to add colour is criminal! But for others, it’s a way to breathe new life into old art, not to mention helping the younger generations to engage with a media that they otherwise tend to dislike.
The most famous of these tubers was a guy known as Babelcolour. In about 2012 he was actually employed by the BBC to restore the colour to a Jon Pertwee episode of WHO from the early 70s. Whilst Pertwee’s stories were recorded in colour, most of the colour copies were destroyed due to a lack of foresight, and the BBC then spent a long time trying to track down colour copies. This lead to a whole bunch of new techs to retrieve colour for all but 1 episode of Pertwee’s run, and in the end they found enough money to pay Babelcolour to do the job. 1 year of his life…
Babelcolour was apparently also asked if he would add colour to the very first Doctor Who story - An Unearthly Child - in time for the 50th Anniversary in 2013, to which he said Hell No! Rumours have it we may be getting that bonus feature for the 60th Anniversary this year instead, though no word on who is doing it. Babelcolour has gone quiet, so can’t imagine it’s him.
Whilst any such colourisation will no doubt be performed the “traditional way” - which involves basically adding colour to a complete frame, and then stepping forward frame by frame trying to accommodate for movement etc using “key frames” until you need to start all over again with a new fully coloured frame… repeat over and over and over… I have just came across this on YouTube, and it’s really got me wondering about the future:
According to the poster, he’s added the colour to the video using an AI based program. It takes a lot of the “work” out of the process, reducing days of work down to mere hours.
The result is not as good as some of the more mature traditional content that is out there - It has some issues that I’ve commonly seen over the years - skin tones, hair, colour bleeding out… etc… but - if this is what a first gen AI can do when set to this kind of task - in 10 years we could have every b&w episode colourised!?
The recent news stories about AI paintings etc etc have certainly imposed a certain sense of the impending change to our lives… but I hadn’t imagined this could be one of those changes.
Now… if they can just teach AI to recreate the missing episodes, too.
(I’ve split this out from the main WHO thread, as really it’s about the tech that I’m posting it…)
cheers
cosmic
