BBC R&D attempting recovery of decomposing film

I think I've read that off-air fan recordings have indeed survived! So we'd get an improved soundtrack, although it is possible as you say to recover it from the optical track if there's the odd bit missing on an off-air.

 

I'm following this process every day. I bet the end result will far outsell all of our expectations.

 

Anyone who doesn't believe how good these things can become should go and buy/rent "Doctor Who: The Ambassadors Of Death" from 1970. Episodes 2-7 (of 7) have not existed in full colour since they were wiped (for some reason, episode 1 survives in original form) and it first had colour overlaid on the B&W film recordings (telerecordings/kinnescopes) in the 1990's only to find the NTSC home recorded beta tape had faults in it, so with the chroma dots has now been restored to full colour. The only glitch I saw was one rapid pan from left to right in one scene where everyone's faces flickered to B&W for a moment as the camera moved, something they could have easily fixed, but in 150 minutes of video, I'm going to forgive one second of flicker! Go watch this! Then read about the chroma dot recovery at Dalek War Boxset from The Doctor Who Restoration Team Website

 

This just posted today...


Incredible technology.

Morecambe and Wise: Rescuing a 'lost' film

 

There's more coverage here as well: Let There Be Light, Click - BBC World News . Skip to about 20 minutes. The final couple of minutes is a feature on the National Sound Archive, which I appear in for half a second

 

Thank you for updates on the Morcambe & Wise project!

 

Goodiesguy posted upthread about audio possibly existing for this episode. It would seem he's right and that the clip audio is from an off-air recording based on the quality. Some of the film frames in the other articles show the optical track, but the clip looks as though it'd be too unstable to recover quality audio.

 

Start with something small, which a lot of people in the UK would likely have seen when first broadcast and was popular. All about the money though I suppose. Can't have them throwing endless government money at stuff like Planet Earth II.

 

For those interested in this subject... I admit I can't make head or tail out of this.

'All the Pictures. Not Necessarily in the Right Order.' - Recovering Morecambe and Wise (Part 3) - BBC R&D

Hopefully you've been following our series of posts about efforts to recover an episode of Morecambe and Wise's first BBC TV series from 1968. Previously considered 'lost', a badly deteriorating copy of one programme had been found - but was in such bad condition it couldn't be unwrapped from the film reel...

The story now arrives at BBC Research and Development, and our Adam Wiewiorka explains how, when presented with a set of images that were warped, damaged and - because it was lasered into sections with each chunk of tape containing multiple layers of small sections of film - in no continuous order, he set about trying to develop an algorithm to tackle these challenges.​

 

I dunno. I know an awful lot about film restoration, and this whole thing sounds like a buncha bull****. I think there are sometimes good reasons to think "outside of the box" and try new things, but this sounds absolutely hopeless and a huge waste of time to me.

Once film has deteriorated to this point, you're basically animating the missing frames using digital art, and the amount of time and effort needed to basically synthesize the missing information would be considerable and would not be true to the original work. I think it'd be like taking a damaged LP and then using a synthesizer and/or sampling keyboard to basically fake the missing notes. To me, there's a point where it becomes totally bogus. Check out some of the frames they've recovered thus far:



This isn't film -- this is a train wreck.

 

A bit of an over-the-top reaction and a quite frankly disappointing response. A few posts up-thread there is a link to a short example of moving pictures which have not been seen for 50 years, and without the development of this pioneering technique, would never have been seen again.

All episodes of 'long lost' 60's shows (let's say Doctor Who) which only existed on 16mm film have been digitised and released digitally, and this has included 'synthesizing missing information', so I don't understand your objection to this process. At least those episodes were culled from film in decent enough condition to at least unwrap, clean and run through a projection/scanning system of some kind. The whole point here is that this process has had to be developed to pull original visual information from a reel which cannot be un-wrapped, let alone cleaned and scanned using any traditional method.

When they dig up a film can labelled 'Kubrick 2001 deleted scenes, please junk...', or 'Citizen Kane out-takes - DESTROY', and the reels are in the same condition as the subject of this thread, you don't want to see them?

I do, no matter how much lasering, x-raying, digitising, interpolating and the rest it takes.

 

It's doubtful anything like this technology would have ever been developed just for this purpose, but since it's available, I'm with you and would rather see the few recovered bits than nothing at all. Now, as Vidiot points out, the current state of this technology with some material may produce questionable results. But it would seem the tech. is applicable to many areas (like reading burned scrolls that crumble when touched...) and could yield much better results with some material. I'm thinking of a Melies reel that was in very poor condition and had to be picked apart in tiny pieces and restored.

 

One thing about internet discussion groups: you put ideas out there, sometimes you're going to get opinions you didn't expect, and even responses you don't agree with. But it doesn't necessarily make the opinions wrong.

 

interesting, missed this follow-up article from 2016 re: deciphering a charred burn scroll with no "physical" contact.

Computers Decipher Burnt Scroll Found in Ancient Holy Ark

I look forward to how the Morcambe & Wise process turns out! Will it be perfect, no. Fascinating and interesting how far Technology has allowed material unseen for 45+ years to be stitched together.

 

There's also an effort to recover Herculaneum library scrolls that were burned when Vesuvius erupted. Fascinating stuff, and most likely ultimately applicable to many fields of research and medicine. I suspect the math/techniques involved may ultimately be more important than the actual type of scanning used.