Check out this colorized version of "The Addams Family" intro

Any idea when we'll be able to buy all of those colorized Stooges episodes?

 

.....but, but, they're supposed to be creepy and kookie.

 

Mysterious and spooky! They're altogether ooky!

Naaaa, it's just a crappy job.

No clue. I'm not 100% sure if all of them were done, but I'm guessing "most" of them were colorized around 2006-2008 and made available for syndication and/or streaming.

 

Thx!

 

As much as I generally hate colorization, the Stooges in color were the most impressive I had seen on the couple of discs that were released.

 

Make no mistake, colorizing today can be done so well, that if you didn't know a show was filmed in black and white, you would think it was color film.

I want to see all the classic black and white tv shows colorized now. They've been in black and white for 50 years. It's time for something new.

 

That intro might be the hardest rocking EVER.

 

I have to say, it did not suck, and I'm usually the first guy to say, "aaaaa, it looks kinda fake and crappy." The Three Stooges colorization was OK here and there.

 

Thank you for the input. Sometimes the colors come out better and other times they could be more vivid. The Munsters was my very first video colorization and it was painted frame by frame, so I understand the wobbly edges and things. Saturation/vibrancy is difficult because it's a fine line between bright and colorful and over-saturated. I err on the conservative side and sometimes in retrospect, it could jump a little more.

 

Nice job and welcome to the forum! I thought The Addams Family clip looked decent, but I guess there is only so much you can to do to "colorize" shadows and things like that...

 

Looks great.. She's smoking!

 

Is that the foyer to the new PETA Chamber of Horrors museum?

 

All I know is Carolyn Jones was quite the looker in b&w or color.

 

Yes, that's really the trick. I don't dispute the degree of effort involved, and what you did is already light-years better than what they could do in the 1980s and 1990s. It just shows you with Maya, Mocha, After Effects, and all these VFX programs, plus a lot of time and skill, it's possible to come up with interesting results.

The little secret about commercial colorization is that it's basically an animation process, so it's extraordinarily labor-intensive and frequently requires hiring a couple of thousand overseas workers (at low wages) to spend vast amounts of time to get the job done. Bear in mind that every Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney film were all essentially animated the same way... only they had the benefit of breaking the picture up into layers that could easily be separated out. When you have a single B&W image that can't be split apart, it's really tough to do.

 

I lost a lot of respect for Legend once I saw the blu-ray of their colorized Plan 9 From Outer Space. What is that they put in? A joke? -Not funny.



(Original)

 

I keep away from colorized recreations anyway. It messes with history. If reconstruction or restoration is necessary, I want it to be done in a way that resembles the original work as much as possible. I'm not that interested in seeing random dude in a studio's interpretation! No offense to the guy who did the Addam's Family clip, he did a decent job, I just generally shy away from that sort of thing.

 

Yeah, but we're talking about colorizing The Munsters, not Casablanca. It isn't harming anything or demeaning to the artistic integrity or historical importance of The Munsters or The Addams Family. And nobody is forcing the Munsters purists to watch.

To my eyes, it looks far more lifelike than previous colorizations of Bewitched and Gilligan's Island.

 

Yep, I would say 99% of the work is rotoscoping. Color takes its own time, but nowhere near the amount it takes for roto, motion tracking and and painting mattes. I've been collecting bids from roto companies for other projects and even with teams of 40-100 people, output is quoted at about 5-7 minutes average per week. It's a ton of work and I mainly do this for my own entertainment and education, but it's fun to share with the people who enjoy it.

 

Back in 2003, I worked with this guy Barry Sandrew with Legend Films, who had his crew in Mumbai colorize the famous 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead. I worked on the mastering, mainly bring up color in some parts of the frame and bringing it down in others, while keeping every shot very consistent. Sandrew explained to be at length how his technicians back in India essentially hand-roto'd every shot in the entire film. I think the explanation they generally gave out in the 1980s and 1990s was that "the software colorizes the film," but the reality is that it's the artist doing the work. Tracking movement in a three-dimensional space is a nightmare, especially if it's being occluded by other objects going in front of it, or if the lighting changes and the moving surface is going through light and shadow, which changes the color. It's a complicated process.

He told me that "reasonable" colorization could be done for about $5000 per minute, so that was about $500,000 for a film like this, done over a period of maybe 2-3 months. But they had a staff of hundreds and hundreds of people, all rotoscoping around the clock, 14-15 hours a day each. I think they could do maybe 1 minute per week, plus a certain number of days for fixes and redos.

The process for converting flat films to 3D is actually very similar, but again: very labor intensive. And that's more like $20,000 per minute. I seem to recall Michael Bay said Paramount spent $20 million converting the last Transformers movie to 3D, because he was very exacting about what he would and wouldn't accept. But they were using Mocha, Maya, Houdini, Combustion, After Effects, Fusion, all those off-shelf tools for the most part. Some of these can track to a point, but they all need some help.

I agree, but those bad 1990s colorization jobs were done on analog systems under very primitive conditions. Nowadays, all you need is time and a ton of effort. It also helps to have good taste and pristine elements with which to work.

 

I thought the Adams Family clip was outstanding. also, youve got to remember, 99.1 of the people who would be watching/buying it arent "video people" and would LOVE the way it looks.

Its time to start colorizing all the classic black and white movies and TV shows. If EMI can use DES technology to bring the Beatles, the most iconic Rock Group ever, into the modern age, (on the upcoming Hollywood Bowl set) then theres nothing wrong with using technology to make movies color that should have been in the first place.

 

I have often said that if you're going to colorize anything, colorize really popular old TV shows (like I Love Lucy and the B&W seasons of Bewitched and Wild Wild West, stuff like that). But again.... $5000 per minute. If it basically costs $100K per episode, and you have 179 episodes of Lucy, do you think Sumner Redstone is really gonna spend $18 million to do that?

 

Marc, good point, and I understand what you mean, but why couldnt the people who already work for the networks in the editing depts be trained and do this work themselves without having to send it offshore?

Second point is, dont the owners of "I Love Lucy" make more than 18 million a year on its world wide syndication? And wouldnt it being in color open up markets now closed just because its B&W and there are some networks that simply wont run black and white programming?

 

Probably my favorite TV intro of all time. Jack Marshall on guitar