The Video Formats of Classic Doctor Who
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- Опубліковано 2 лип 2024
- If you go back from more modern Doctor Who to the Classic run, you will find it looks different - more low definition, and occasionally inconsistent in terms of quality. Why is this? Find out why here!
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Footage used from:
Several Doctor Who episodes (all cited in video)
Charles Park Seward • Ampex VR-1200B Quad VT...
ADAPT Television History • 16mm telecine process
Instert Name Here • VHS Generation Loss De...
imagewatom • interlaced video/FCP t...
I'mFairlySureThat'sChroma • Doctor Who: The Moonba...
zman953 • Inferno DVD Quality Co...
Time tunnel asset in title sequence by @lothahn8332
Music:
None. I... forgot to add some.
Theme Song:
"Doctor Who Theme" by Ron Grainer (arr. David Arnold)
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:14 Film vs Videotape
05:06 Frame Rate
06:56 Restoration in Black and White
09:51 Restoration in Colour
11:46 Reverse Standards Conversion
13:19 Chroma Dot Recovery
15:11 Manual Colourisation
16:08 A Blended Approach
18:12 Conclusion
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*Michael's Correction Corner*
Per @MuchWhittering , the switch to 625-line PAL tape happened in late 1967 with "The Enemy of the World, Episode 1" rather than at the end of the black and white era as stated here.
Per @johntomlinson6849 , the last serial to have any location work filmed on 35mm film was _The Tomb of the Cybermen_ in 1967 rather than them using it until the end of the black and white era as I stated (I've also seen some say that 35mm film might have been used as late as _The Web of Fear_ but I'm not certain at this stage). I was conflating location filming with model work, some of which was still done on 35mm film on occasion until the 70s (my understanding is that the models for _The Space Pirates_ were done on 35mm film.)
There are also a lot of exceptions to the general rules I laid out for the production of Doctor Who, but if I listed them all this would have been half an hour long. Believe me, I was tempted to dork out about which serials had videotape shot on location and why.
Per @MarkHevingham - I described telecine very, very badly. His comment also has a couple of other details, but those are details I omitted on purpose for the sake of keeping this video simple and under 30-45 minutes long.
Technically, Enemy of the World to War Games is 625-line tape, but not PAL. PAL is just the name for the way the colour information is encoded. Therefore 625-line b/w is not PAL because there is no colour information to Phase Alternate by Line. 😉
2:30 - Quad wasn’t just the standard for the BBC, it was the *only* broadcast videotape standard anywhere in the world, until 1” was commercially released as a joint effort by Ampex and Sony at the end of the 70s.
3:46 - film wasn’t phased out entirely in 86. It was still used for model shots (like the Dalek shuttle entering the mothership in Remembrance part 4 from 1988).
@@stickytapenrust6869 the one about film being phased out was a more generalised point on purpose. I was worried I would have been getting pedantic if I went "except for some model work"
12:25 - they didn’t go back to the original machine that did the conversion, but they studied its principles (as the technical documentation and schematics still existed, while most of each converter was long since dumped), did the maths (quite literally! There’s a *LOT* of advanced mathematics in standards conversion!) and used this as the basis for building bespoke software to “unpick” the work of the original converter.
Thank you for your kind words!
Any time! Thank you for watching, this comment was the last thing I expected when I posted this!
Your work is amazing, Babelcolour!! Been following your work since the early days of NuWho!
Babelcolour, your work has been admired and appreciated , it is great to see you acknowledged here.
Bring back the Ten Doctors please!
The "film outside, video inside" look will always make me think of that Monty Python sketch. "Gentlemen! I have bad news. This room is surrounded by film."
Monty Python had some incredible metahumour going on
One of my favourite sketches as it leads on from the royal society for putting things in top of other things.
Actually, every episode of _Python_ used the 'videotape inside/film outside' format for its entire run.
England is a very wet country so bringing video equipment outdoors wasn't practical. Portable video was also still much more expensive than film cameras back then. _Fawlty Towers_ was an even better example of this..
@@HailAnts Nearly all British TV was like this until the 80s with some exceptions like soaps and a few Dr Whos. The earliest I've seen OB used in a drama was an episode of Callan from 1970. It was mostly used for sport and other live events.
@@HailAnts Nothing to do with our weather, camera manufacturers supplied weather covers as accessories for their cameras. Video equipment was extremely expensive and even more so when you have to kit out vans to use it. So the BBC and the regional ITV companies like Thames, ATV, Anglia etc all bought as much as necessary only to cover live sports, news coverage and other functions like general elections where immediacy was of paramount importance. It was occasionally used on other programmes but that was only when an outside broadcast team was not needed for something else, as sport, news and current affairs automatically had priority for this kit.
As technology developed through the 80s, like portable ENG cameras and videotape equipment being introduced and the cost of this kit climbed down, more and more shows started to use it. Doctor Who increasingly used it from about 1984 onwards and it was the de facto standard for location shooting from 1986.
One correction, they switched to 625-line from The Enemy of the World onwards I believe, which is why the latter half of the Troughton era looks so nice.
I'd probably also mention the supressed field recordings, where a handful of Hartnell episodes are only half the vertical resolution due to the telerecordings only picking up half the fields. Fortunately it's very few.
Pinned so everyone can see the relevant correction. Thank you for that information. (edit, this comment is no longer pinned. Someone else had an extra correction, so I started a new comment so both of them were easily visible.)
As for the suppressed field recordings it would have been interesting to look at that, but if I went through every individual case of "except for when it wasn't" I'd have been here all day. You've no idea the temptation I had to fight to not list off which episodes from the black and white era were broadcast from 35mm film for example
The later Troughtons look so crisp, don't they? As if they're 70s DW with the colour "off". I'd love to see a colourised War Games ep 10.
@@Charlie_Duz Honestly if any of season 6 were to be colourised I'd take The Mind Robber or The Invasion. The eerie nature of The War Games, Episode 10 I think is helped by it being in black and white
@@michaelinlofi Fair point. Especially 'The Mind Robber'. Just as long as it isn't 'The Dominators'. I can't get through that without either giving up or falling asleep. 🥱
@@michaelinlofi Ooh! "The Mind Robber" would be an interesting case to *selectively* colourise! The whiteness of the white void in ep one would seem all the more stark if the TARDIS interiors were in colour. And if the white-dressed "zombified" Zoe and Jamie were, just for that section, drained of *all* colour, faces and hands included... like a black & white illustration in a storybook... =:oo
interesting video, thanks. You might like to know, at the BBC, we often referred to NTSC as Never Twice the Same Colour!
They had little choice over there due to their low-powered electricity network of 110v, it affects source recordings. Speaking of sources, I must mention....due to Dr Who often getting the sharp end of the stick, budget wise, the production team often had to use older equipment and cameras, as the newer stuff was reserved for "Proper" drama shows lol. A lot of sometimes dodgy EMI 2001 cameras could be found prowling around the studio like Daleks and while they were the backbone of the BBC, they could be iffy sometimes with the colour Green!
PAL was known in the US as Pale and Lurid :-)
The iffiness of EMI 2001s with green I think is down to all the modifications the BBC did to them and also the archive dubbing projects the BBC took up - I understand these green tints were exacerbated by dubbing from 2” to - of all formats - D3 in the 90s.
I’ve seen ATV, Thames and LWT shows shot using EMI 2001s from the same time and they didn’t have the green tint that the BBC’s ones had.
@@tortysoftOr People Are Lilac.
The BBC didn’t prioritise studio space on budget in the 70s and 80s. Doctor Who got the same standard drama budget, so got equal access to studios and facilities that other drama shows did. In fact, IIRC The Awakening was the first BBC show shot using Link 125 cameras. CSO was extensively tested out on Who, as was scene-sync.
Imagine a new show or a film decides to go full-on videotape.
There's potential for a kind of analogue horror there. Recently watched Inland Empire for example, that being shot on camcorder made it all the more unnerving
Check out the 2016 Christmas special of Inside No. 9. They used 1970s cameras to recreate that old studio look
As a video and film technicalities nerd, the chroma dot restoration method has fascinated me ever since I stumbled over an article talking about how it was developed for restoration of Dad's Army episodes that likewise was only available on BW film archival prints.
It does always make me so thankful that pretty much all of Monty Python was saved because one of the Pythons was told that their tapes were scheduled for wiping and they decided to buy the tapes from BBC.
Not quite all. The undertaker sketch only existed on a 525 tape. I know, I did the conversion back to 625 🙂
The so called "most tasteless sketch" being the one not held on 625 tape is in of itself very funny to me
I’ve been a Who fan since I was a young boy. I remember all the restorations when they first came out. I’ve never seen anyone boil it down like this, though. Very good!
This is such a cool video! It’d be amazing to see a companion video to this about the New Who production practices/cameras/episode masters, etc. Although there may be much less to talk about on that front! Keep up the good work :)
Intending on it! I've needed to do an addendum video anyway for clarifying statements on some of the information in this one anyway, so throwing in info on the production of Who from 1996 to 2010 would definitely be fun as well!
I love deep-dive, detailed tech videos like this, packed with cool info. Great work 😎
Incredible video, this was entertaining and engaging throughout, keep it up!
Thanks! I have a bunch more Doctor Who stuff in the pipeline somewhere, just need time to get it all done!
@@michaelinlofi Boy can I relate😂 keep at it man👍
The goat spotted!
@@Splongus_ 🙏
Bloody. Hell.
I have nothing more coherent to say than that. Except thanks to the wizards in the restoration team, and thanks for the explanation.
You're good at this stuff, I knew most of this anyway (though not to the same technical level) though I was still engaged throughout.
well done - that is an excellent summary of complex elements.
What an incredible video. So fascinating to get to scratch the surface of all this.
Another correction - 35mm was used up to The Tomb of the Cybermen, and 16mm from The Abominable Snowmen. I think occasional model shots may have been on 35mm thereafter.
You may be right. I can't find anything that confirms either of us, but I think what happened is I saw that the masters of The Space Pirates 2 and The Seeds of Death 5 were 35mm film and assumed its model and location work was 35mm film. I believe that is the case for Space Pirates 2, but not necessarily Seeds of Death
Actully they used 35mm film until “the web of fear”. From “fury from the deep”, they used 16mm film. There’s a few photos from “the enemy of the world” and “the web of fear” showing that they used 35mm cameras on location and Ealing studios.
@james68908 this may be the most hotly contested piece of info in this video. I'm fascinated now
I doubt it was a hard switch-over at a specific time, more of a case-by-case decision by the director until everyone was satisfied the 16mm gear was OK for general use. It's not like the change over of video formats, where every piece of equipment in a given studio had to be replaced at once or it wouldn't work together.
A very good and simple explanation of some very technical terms. Thanks!
Great video, informative af. Keep it up!!
Nice video. Enjoyed it. One thing I don't think I heard you mention was that the studio cameras used in the early years were massive, heavy things attached to large cables, that were hard enough for the camera operators to move around a studio floor with smoothness, or indeed speed, so they were totally impractical to use for exterior recording which often involved capturing rapid movement in action scenes of some kind. Possibly for that reason, it was quite a number of Doctor Who stories in (was it The Savages?) before the recording of any exterior scenes was attempted in a script. That's why they opted to use film cameras: they were a relatively portable option that gave the production extra realism by breaking free of the studio for some scenes. The "video indoors/film outdoors" thing was standard across all productions that included any outdoor filming at that time (BBC and ITV productions), and as someone who lived through that era, I can tell you that we viewers learned not to let the difference bring us out of the story being told. The viewer's mind would notice it subconsciously, but "park" the difference in picture quality/feel, and just ignore it. Perhaps that makes it easier for older viewers to enjoy the 20th century stories without questioning picture quality? :-)
Indeed, the film/tape outdoors/indoors association could be used to make a studio-shot scene look "outdoorsy", if for some reason you had to use a set rather than a location (e.g. a pick-up shoot for something that went wrong on location) It wasn't done very often though (can't think of any instances in Doctor Who), possibly due to the extra expense, or maybe union issues with letting a film crew shoot in a studio normally staffed by video guys, or letting the video guys pick up a film camera. (It wouldn't be the silliest dispute to cause a strike, by any means!)
@@therealpbristowThere are quite a few examples from DW. The one that springs to mind is the majority of the Thunderbolt-collection sequence from _The Mind of Evil_ (1971), where most of the film footage was deemed unusable and reshot using CSO backgrounds in the studio.
@@DrWhoFanJ Oh, there's plenty of cases where they did pick-up shooting back in studio, yes, but not using film cameras to match the outside look. In the case you mention, they were able to use CSO precisely *because* they were shooting with electronic cameras: CSO is a an electronic processing technique.
I immediately think of Terror of the Autons and The Green Death, which both have some very awkward edits between pick up studio work and location film (specifically The Green Death, Episode Six)
Another reason for using film for exterior work was that video recorders back then needed compressed air to lubricate the head drum ! I did a short stint in Head Maintenance in which I had to turn on the pumps at TV center at about 5am. The 'breathing' sound of a Quadruplex VT area was iconic.
Interesting, thank you. Incidentally the switch to 1 inch was from season 21 and onwards. The BBC Engineering department held the tapes until transferred to the film library about 1978 and became the film and videotape library
I did say "season 21" the first time, but then accidentally said 23 the second time. That's just a fluff of reading there lol
This was fantastically informative. Thank you so much.
This is a great explanation and very informative..more please..
Nice video!
The RSC method and the CDR process both share something in common - they took advantage of the “wrong” crude conversions done in the first place in the 1970s. If it wasn’t for the fact that the lines of video weren’t duplicated instead of blended into NTSC, it wouldn’t have been possible to unstitch the “mess” and synthesise the original video lines and fields. Well, they got 480 out of the original 576 lines, and could blend in the rest. But the good part was the 480 lines were the originals, and not blended out of all 576 - which is the good way of converting PAL to NTSC, and is what always happens today (or from the 1980s and 1990s). The conversion used by the BBC in the 1970s was an early electronic prototype and not “point a camera at the TV” or a full-quality electronic conversion.
The CDR process equally had a lucky stroke in that the film camera pointed at the TV to make the telerecordings were both black-and-white, and the TV was so old that it didn’t know to “get rid of” the colour information. In fact there’s one episode where the BBC originally did filter it out, so we couldn’t use CDR. But if you had a hypothetical super quality B&W viewing setup in the 1970s, this might have annoyed you. I highly doubt anyone noticed. I did see a film copy in B&W of an old cricket match on Fox Sports HD once, and it was filmed right around the time of colour TV starting. The chroma dots were intense but also annoying. Though not as annoying as having to watch it without colour at all. I’m sure the CDR system could have been attempted on that footage, but it was film converted to SD TV and upscaled to HD, so possibly not enough raw detail.
You have the chroma overlay method out of chronological order there - it was the oldest method, used on DVDs and even on VHS. Originally it blended film luma with tape chroma from NTSC tapes, and the NTSC was just converted into PAL with whatever was the best NTSC-PAL conversion in the 1990s (which, to be fair, was perfected around 1994, but not designed for material that wasn’t natively NTSC sourced in the first place). In any case you wouldn’t notice the difference on VHS, and it was just bloody amazing to have the show back in colour with PAL resolution. Going from NTSC to PAL was like upgrading from 720p to 1080p is today.
Another reason this “blending”process seemed like such a big deal in the 1990s (and we’ve forgotten today) is that they had to stretch the video source to line up with the film source, since the film didn’t contain all the details to the edges … thanks to TV underscan during the telerecording originally. The whole “stretch the video” thing was still high tech 30 years ago and quite slow to set up and process. Today that sort of thing is a bit of a doddle with a basic laptop or even a tablet video editor. A phone could probably do it but you need to zoom in a lot to line up the pixels!
Oh yes, getting the chroma to fit the FR luma was hard, small, lightly trapezoid, each cut a three frame mix, somehow requiring resynchronising all the time - probably due to the chroma's life on non sync cassette machines, eg at least Umatic transmission from a university, recorded at the edge of reception range on a beta, copied to beta again - then I got my hands on it and used the BBC crystal reflection system for conversion back to 625. I used a Quantel digital framestore processor to warp it back to the right size and shape. I only mixed the two sources, no filtering. Nothing clever, it was just a proof of concept . Wow it worked so well !
@@tortysoft THANKYOU sir, I really admired the craft. I was wondering one thing for the last 30 years: Was it ever considered to use the chroma source as the canvas, and blend the luma onto it, not the other way around? Yes I know that would mean the edges were always blurrier, but it maybe hardly mattered in the age of CRT underscan. Back then we had feather-mask tools on pretty early NLE software, and it would've blended in fine. I would have probably chosen this at least for the proof-of-concept because it would have respected the original geometry of the transmission, and made it easier to do an A/B comparison against an original PAL tape … probably. Another upside would have been the increased detail density, just a few percent, in the majority of the picture.
@whophd I only had a vision mixer to generate a combined video output, there was no 'canvas' as such, that concept was decades away. I must admit I did not notice a bit of the FR monochrome video not being coloured but it probably did have a gap somewhere. The geometry of the output was fixed as standard 625 PAL. as only the chroma input was manipulated, I don't think of that as a monochrome canvas though.
@@tortysoft sorry, but I was using "canvas" in the non-technical sense. I just meant to refer to the background image, asking which image was used to overlay onto which. I know what you mean by "the geometry of the output was fixed as 625 PAL", but the decision had to be made whether to start with the 525 NTSC image or the telerecording first, onto the 625 PAL. If you had chosen to lay down the 525 NTSC as the background, it would have more closely lined up (geometrically) with the lost original recording; in theory the luma from the FR monochrome could have been laid over that, with edges missing of course. But even if you could solve that with a bit of edge-feathering, the main question is whether the tools were available to keep the chroma from the bottom layer and use the luma from the top layer plus a geometrical distortion. It was difficult enough already, as you say … with all the resynchronising regularly.
On top of all that, I only had a few hours to do it all !@@whophd
I sure do love super niche videos! great job!
Loved the video mate
Really enjoyed this - thank you!
Fascinating. Very well explained.
Great vid as usual
Thanks!
Subscribed on the back of this episode alone. Top work.
Cheers mate!
@@michaelinlofi on the contrary, we appreciate your content.
Fine commentary!
Incredible work! I remember being too embarrassed to show my friends classic Who in the 90’s because it looked like it was filmed on a camcorder 😂 you explained the reason behind it well!
Nicely informative
Fascinating. Thanks for this
Early colour TV was exported on b&w film (they said so in Dad's Army documentary about restoring the early seasons) - they filmed a TV usually with the colour switched off on it
great video, as I remember the tail end of standard definition. The 50 frame interlaced frame rate is probably better described as being equivalent to 25 frames per second,
Classic Who, Classic Who, Classic Who is best!!! (Sing along to "Red Kangs, Red Kangs, Red Kangs are best!")
Very good explanation video
- good, but often inaccurate.
@@tortysoft Though some of that is for simplification and/or keeping it less boring and short; I think lofi knows his stuff technically.
Awww great stuff, nicely put it’s amazing how the restoration of all the Pertwee episodes lives in my head rent free , I’m sure you’ve corrected most of your things or anything I would add to. )if you haven’t said already … is the restoration of episode three of planet at the Daleks is the chroma recovery on top of the already commissioned hand coloured version by Legend Films
Haven't added that, but that was more for simplicity reasons than anything else. But you're absolutely right the chroma dot recovery is enhanced by the use of a manual colourisation to tidy it up. Kinda wish they'd do a similar process with the chroma dot recovered Ambassadors of Death honestly - it looks great a lot of the time but it pushes towards oversaturated on occasion
Does this explain why the Doctor Who man keeps changing how he looks? Was that depending on the type of iPhone they were recording on in the 1960s too?
They used blackberry back then.
Despite appearing in front of a bland BG, underlit, with no trickery save the intertitles, you held my attention solidly for the entire runtime! As a longtime classic DW fan who has collected the blurays (and watched them as NTSC broadcasts in Canada in the 70s and 80s), I applaud your efforts!!
Content quality triumphs over technical quality yet again! It's just like he's making Classic Who... =:o}
Thank you for saying so, it really means a lot to hear that :)
The only problem I have with most original Doctor Who serials was with gunfire. Every time a gun would discharge especially a machine gun, the screen would develop lines in the picture that were not necessarily straight. Sometimes it was in a V shape across with all levels filled in, some were fairly straight but had a tilt to them. The funny thing was it just happened with the gunfire and not throughout the entire episode.
That particular visual artifact fascinates me. I'd love to know what's going on there
That was the camera tube shaking with the volume of sound from the gun.@@michaelinlofi
Ha ha, now I have an explanation for it! Thank you!
What's interesting about that is that the quality varies wildly depending on the era. The black and white era and the Pertwee era's gunfire effects aren't that bad by the era but the later Tom Baker era not so much. The first half of the 80s gunfire? Decent. Late 80s (despite being my favorite era of the show) iffy. My theory is the quality of the gunfire effects depends heavily on how much scrutiny the show was under for being too violent. UK television censor's attitudes towards guns are comparable to American television's censors attitudes towards sex
I think it was down to the physical vibration stabilisation of the camera tubes :-) There was no point in me calling the studio to say it looked bad - there was nothing that could be done. Caves of Androzani had that problem.
@@clashcitywannabe
Adding a fun fact - something not mentioned often with early use of videotape in the UK, when videotape first came into regular use, the cine- camera operators were worried about their jobs being replaced by videotape operators & shooting only on videotape. They complained to the highly unionised industry at the time and it was decided that all outside (non studio) footage had to be shot on film only. This is why programs like Dr Who, Monty Python, Dad's Army, Keeping up Appearances, Faulty Towers and many MANY more were all shot like that. It's fascinating, oh and must have been a real pain to edit. Stupid thing is, all the film has to be transferred to VT for editing anyways as you mentioned... This silly rule ended before 1980.
I've never heard that one, and I worked on the show - interesting !
@@tortysoft it's interesting. I worked in TV here in Australia back in the day, it was common knowledge here about our UK counterparts. I always found it fascinating !
It’s hogwash. It’s because of the cost of outside broadcast kit and how much was needed that made shooting external shots for fictional TV series economically impractical, so the few that were needed were only used where immediacy was of paramount importance, like live news interviews, sports coverage etc. Certainly not a union issue because technicians in both film and videotape had to be members of the same unions as they were “closed shops” (ABS for the BBC, the ACTT for ITV. In fact, the clue is in the name for the latter, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and (allied) Technicians). Fictional shows like Who only got to use OB units as a luxury if they weren’t needed elsewhere. It’s much easier and cheaper to send a crew of 10-15 people to do a film shoot than a crew of 40-50 people to do an OB shoot on VT.
Notice that OB use went up once portable ENG videotape cameras were introduced and climbed down in cost? That’s no coincidence!
@@stickytapenrust6869 Cool, happy to be corrected in what I was informed y my employer of the day.
They shot Robot, The Sontaran Experiment , both in 1974, on OB Videotape. The Stones of Blood was also shot on VT.
It's much cheaper and quicker to shoot exterior sequences on Film in the 1960s and 1970s.
16:09 Part Eight should say "PAL D3 Restoration Method" but otherwise good job with making the video.
You're totally right there, that was the name for the process on a lot of material I've seen, but ultimately I just called it "a blended approach" for simplicity. Hope you don't mind if I explain my reasoning.
The general intended audience when I was writing this was people who might be curious about this stuff but don't know all the technical jargon. The only reason that method is called D3 is because it was initially handled on D3 digital videotape, and introducing yet another videotape format right at the end of the video didn't seem like the best of moves to me. Moreover I believe the process is now completely digitally handled now, so "D3 restoration" _might_ be a bit of a misnomer.
But absolutely, that process was referred to as D3 restoration, so maybe a throwaway line in there somewhere wouldn't have hurt.
Thanks for watching!
The Space Pirates 2 was *not* shot on 35mm film. Nothing aside from Spearhead from Space was *shot* entirely on film. The Space Pirates was cut together in the usual way on 625-line b/w videotape and then was telerecorded to 35mm film for broadcast. This was done because the necessary videotape equipment was expected to be in use for another program that evening, and thus they had to show it from film. What you essentially have with episodes that were broadcast that way, and have been retained in the archives, is a somewhat better representation of what the episode would have looked like on broadcast, in other words, a much better copy of a videotape's resolution than 16mm film telerecordings would have produced, but still low resolution compared to something was acquired directly onto film in the first place.
I have since been made aware of this. Frustratingly enough that was my initial impression but a couple of sources such as TARDIS Wiki alleged it was shot on 35mm. I got turned around, and made a mistake here. A correction was issued in my follow up video
@@michaelinlofi That's good.
By the way, there are some 35mm film sequences that were shot for inclusion in Pirates Episode 1, and they were included on the Lost in Time DVD set. But these sequences, as you mention in your video, were, as a matter of routine, telecined to VT and edited into the material acquired/shot directly on VT, thus reducing their quality and producing an entirely VT experience. The filmed material looked fuzzy simply because the telecine equipment of the day was pretty low tech compared to today's scanners. Typically, the filmed sequences were retained for a brief time and then thrown out. (horrors, I know) The few which have survived when scanned look fantastic!
Really interesting video. I wonder if you have any information about how they completed the recent colourisation of The Daleks serial? I'm assuming due to the fact that it was never shot in colour it's a manual process based on reference material (presumably colour photography of the time) but would be interested to know if you knew any more.
Thank you for watching!
I can't pretend to know any more than what I've presented here unfortunately. I imagine a lot of the colourisation process was digitally handled, most likely based on studio photos (though I can't find any photos to explain why Barbara's shirt is that aggressive pink shade), but beyond that I wouldn't have the foggiest I'm afraid
Rich Tipple is active on UA-cam and Twitter, so you'd be best just asking him.
Loved this I always geek out with all this fantastic restoration work, it is like digital archaeology. AI tools are just going to enable the next step to restore and even improve the originals. Adding side panels, making the picture truly widescreen and colourizing old episodes. You should do one on the audio restoration, now that is a fascinating story. Doctor Who audio is a series all on its own.
Ooh, audio restoration. You know I would love to do a video on that, but it might be hard to do so because I understand that Josh Snares (another Aussie WhoTuber) has also done a very informative video on the very same subject and I'd hate to get done like James Somerton.
AI... I'm not sure how I'd feel about applying it to Doctor Who. In terms of restoring some of the episodes that have been sourced from lower generation sources? Maybe. But extending the frame to widescreen I would be totally against - those shows were framed for 4:3, and in 4:3 they should stay. Extending the image would throw the framing way off.
Now AI in terms of audio restoration, that I could get behind. Just borrow the tech Abbey Road's using to clean up old Beatles recordings and whammo
I don't know what it is, but with any TV show recorded this way, I get a nice warm feeling of nostalgia. Gimme paper-cutout or sand-like CSO/chroma key any day!
It's the color rendition of 70s tube cameras - they have a gamma curve that your brain responds to.
@@squishmallowfan025the flat gamma of early digital looks so flat and lifeless. Glad modern digital cameras with log formats and colour grading can get those looks again nowadays.
Since I was a kid I always wondered about the inside/outside differences with Doctor Who and other BBC programs. Probably since before you were born. Thank you for explaining.
Great video! I've got a bit of a question about a quirk I've noticed in some Pertwee era episodes. I noticed that whenever someone fires a gun you can see white horizontal lines flutter across the screen. I always assumed it was something to do with the noise of the gunshot, but it's always stood out to me
Great question! According to someone who worked for the BBC restoring Doctor Who, what's happening there is the loudness of the gunshot is shaking the internal mechanics of the camera, leading to distortion. Or at least, that's how I understood his explanation
yes, this phenomenon is called microphony @@michaelinlofi
That’s the sound of the gunfire physically vibrating the picture tubes in the camera. It happens whenever there’s a loud noise for the same reason.
IS THAT M83 AT THE START ❤
Yep! I've been using the more 80s themed M83 songs for a while now - before "Laura" it was "Moon Crystal" for a few years
As someone that grew up watching Showa Era Kamen Rider and Super Sentai , Classic Doctor Who looks reminds me of that, heck, they even have the same combo of "low budget effects but cool stories/also lots of stories set on a quarry" that I always liked.
Looked into it, those shows appear to have been shot on 16mm film. I also understand that Japan used PAL so Doctor Who and those shows having visual similarities makes total sense.
(Edit: They used NTSC, not PAL. But it's still film being telecined to video so a vaguely similar vibe still makes sense)
British Tokusatsu
9:22 "…first scanned into digital video. This programme then creates intermediate frames…" - does it do this by taking the interlaced frames from the film copy? Are the interlaced lines even _visible_ on the filmed copy, or was it blurred vertically at the time of making?
You know, I do not know the answer to that one.
The only thing I can tell you is that in my personal experience with the Doctor Who Blu Ray line it's a case by case basis as to whether the interlaced lines are visible. On my copy of the 1964-65 season (all the episodes of which are retained on 16mm telerecordings) a definite Venetian blind pattern is visible almost constantly across the episodes and on occasion you can see some combing. But the Blu Rays of the Pertwee serials restored using 16mm copies don't seem to have these artefacts.
@@michaelinlofi Obviously on the ones that were sufficiently fine resolution that chroma recovery was recoverable, then the individual lines _would_ have been visible - though again not sure if they actually _did_ recover the interlaced fields from them. (They probably did, they're fanatically keen those people!) There _may_ also have been problems at the extreme bottom of the frames/fields: I know "fast pull-down" cameras (that could advance the film during a single flyback period!) were only developed a shade before videotape came along, and not many of them were in existence (and they were _very_ noisy!), so the tops/bottoms of the frames (which would be in the "overscan" area) might have been discarded.
@@G6JPG In fact, no! Or at least, not when chroma recovery was first being used. I made the same assumption at first, but on reading up on the process on the Restoration Team's blog, the recovery of the chroma ljust ooks for the overall pattern created by multiple chroma dots across several lines, rather than on being able resolve individual lines and dots. Thhey were capturing the shape-distorted image direct from the film into 1080p digital video, then the software would analyse that, with no attempt to "undistort" the shape or unpack individual scan-lines first. There was some discussion about maybe doing that in future, maybe once they were able to scan in even higher resolution (to reduce ambiguity about which information belonged on which original line).
@@therealpbristow Interesting! Hmm, scanning 576i (assuming the film actually has all 576 lines, see above re pulldown) into 1080p does sound rather low to get the individual lines. I hadn't thought if the image being distorted too! Yes, assuming they're actually there on the film, recovering the individual lines must surely be the eventual aim - it'd be recovery of the original video signal. But I expect that'd need somewhat more resolution scanning than 1080.
The film may have been made with "spot wobble" - ironically intended to _improve_ the quality of the image on film.
Most original videotape during the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who was junked after broadcast and so the episodes from that era are copies sent to other countries that still existed, mostly from countries like Canada. The first time I saw those Jon Pertwee episodes, about half those stories were in black and white and not color.
As a kid back in the sixties, we only had a black and white set when color broadcasts started in the US. I clearly remember noticing that shows broadcast in color had a different texture compared to black and white shows. Did NTSC use something similar to PAL chroma dots?
The PAL signal didn't use chroma dots per se, the dots are just a form of visual noise caused by a black and white set trying to understand a colour signal.
However, a similar artefact can be seen in NTSC, called chroma crawl or dot crawl - a sort of checkered pattern. However because of differences in tech between PAL and NTSC I can't pretend to be an expert on it's a lot harder to reconstruct colour information from NTSC chroma crawl than it is PAL chroma dots.
Short answer, kind of
@@michaelinlofi Awesome! It's something I've always wondered about, thinking it might have just been my imagination when I was a kid. I was obsessed with color tv, even though we didn't have one yet, and I was convinced I could tell when a show was in color.
It is the same basic phenomenon, yes. The reason it “crawls” along lines in NTSC while it’s “dots” in PAL is due to the phase alternating with every line (which is also what PAL stands for). While with NTSC the phase is static (and adjusted by the hue knob on a set, which you may have had to do when changing to a more distant broadcast as that could distort the phase).
So in theory you could recover colour information from chroma crawl in NTSC, if the telecine was high resolution enough, but just like with the hue knob back in the day you’d need someone to manually tweak and check every transfer (possibly even different parts of the same transfer) to get the red, green, and blue calibrated properly. While with PAL it’s completely automated, as the alternating of phase is something the equipment (TV or restoration software) can lock-onto.
Adrian’s Digital Basement has a few videos with B&W TVs, which really don’t care about NTSC vs PAL so long as you can adjust the vertical-hold, and he demonstrates getting crawl/dots when turning off the colour filter (which can also improve legibility of text).
So young, lol.
I sometimes forget that for some folks, it's hard for people to get their heads around how things were, not all that long ago.
It was common even in the 80s, when I was a kid, to use film for location and video for studio not just on Doctor Who.
The younger crowd was definitely the target audience for this one, fans like myself who weren't alive yet when it all went out and might want to know why it looks the way it does
Saving this to watch later. Skimmed through the chapters of this video... It looks like one thing you haven't mentioned is old Who is multi-camera, while new Who single camera? Basically what it says on the tin. Old who had multiple cameras picking up a single run through (meaning less times you need to capture the same scene), while single camera was used in new who. The advantages of single camera being that you can tailor the lighting for each shot so everything generally looks less flat (while in multi camera you get less flexibility for lighting as it needs to be suitable for the entire scene). Also, single camera gives you more flexibility in camera angles, while with multi-camera you're essentially alternating back and forth between the same angles (think game shows, or Jerry Springer).
You're absolutely right there. I didn't go into the distinction between multicam and single cam because... well I forgot. But the multi or single cam might have less to do with how the show _looks_ to people and more with how it _feels_ ie. the more "live" feel of it
Totally agree.
In fact, new Who is done as an A and B camera thing. They have two cameras going on each take, usually at different zoom amounts and places. Some directors think this is a compromise to their artistic integrity and just ignore what the B cameras are doing and basically do it single-camera.
Where do we See these restored versions you are so keen on speaking of?
On the home media releases. 🤷♂️
The DVDs and Blu-Rays are on Amazon, and I should imagine the streaming copies (if you're in England) would have the restorations too
@@michaelinlofi BBC iPlayer usually has the DVD restorations (with a few notable yet somewhat-arbitrary exceptions), but never the BD versions.
@@DrWhoFanJ Thank you gents. I am in America and don't use any American/BBC apps. I know there are so many collections of Doctor Who I assumed the restorations would have a special edition name making the search easier.
@@DivergentDroid That was an inherently-false assumption. There are no "BBC apps" of relevance.
12:33 ?
_They reversed the polarity of the video flow..._ 😏
HA YEAH THEY DID
The example i used being of a Third Doctor story makes your comment even better
Before 1972 all Hartnell and Troughton episodes existed on b/w 16mm telerecorded film.Because of storage space and rebroadcast rights issues the BBC decided to burn most of these films.Alot of these films were returned from foreign and different places after 1978 when the BBC stopped destroying films but unfortunately not all were recovered like the most coveted episode 4 of The Tenth Planet
Episode 5 of The Ambassadors of Death was restored to color from an off air NTSC recording along with most of Episodes 6 & 7 and some of Episodes 2 & 3. Only Episode 4 was restored entirely via color recovery.
True enough, I just simplified there until I brought up the method of using NTSC colour recovery so as to not be confusing
I bought all the restoration dvds over the years until i had them all........they are the best way to watch the classic shows.
If you're able to get your hands on them, I can't recommend the Blu-Ray boxsets of seasons 8 and 9 enough. The extra restoration work put into those really is that extra bit better, especially on the previously RSC restored ones.
"Chroma dots" were a defect created by filters used on some (but not all) cameras at the time. There are actually more existing versions of episodes without these artifacts than with, so most of the Pertwee rescues are chroma/luma overlays. There's an oddity though - the only sources for episode one of Invasion (of the Dinosaurs) are simply missing one of the colour channels. I think that involved manual work.
Yeah the BBC were supposed to filter the chroma dots out when they were making the telerecordings, but with the ones that have been restored through that process they weren't. This is why "The Mind of Evil, Episode One" had to be manually restored, as during the telerecording process that one had been filtered properly.
And "Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode One" was entirely chroma retrieved, but the results are weird in that they're heavily shifted towards the blue. I imagine for Blu-Ray they will have someone like BabelColour go in and do some manual work for it
@@michaelinlofi I see. Never really understood what happened with Dinosaurs 1.
Of course they filmed most of it in a central London that was supposed to be abandoned so presumably that meant ungodly hours in the morning - perhaps that stark ambient light had something to do with it.
Manual work !! in buckets yes, thats why it too a decade after the first tests before the restoration team got going.
No, Chroma dots are intrinsic to the PAL system. A well-made B/W TV - especially one made after the introduction of colour - would mostly filter out the colour subcarrier artefacts, but at the expense of a slight loss of detail. (But few manufacturers bothered; by then B/W sets were definitely considered budget.) The monitors the Beeb used to film from were mostly not so filtered, in order to retain as much fine detail as possible, and because the chroma "noise" was (a) usually only visible if you looked quite closely (b) cancelled on successive frames (that's why they colour subcarrier frequency was _so_ precisely specified: it is 4.43... MHz, but it's specified down to the quarter hertz!).
@@G6JPG Thanks. I'm old enough to have had a really old B&W TV and a stand aerial so even seeing chroma dots would have been a luxury...
Kudos on a very interesting video. One additional thing about the "look" of classic Dr. Who is that the BBC tended to use a more contrasty "film-like" lighting setup for programs shot on video than here in North America where video is typically shot with a much flatter and brighter lighting scheme. The North American approach plays to video's strengths by minimizing dark and less detailed sections of the frame. Video didn't have much exposure latitude back in the day, which made darker portions of the frame look a muddy in comparison to an American sitcom or other program shot on video. The BBC went for more dramatic lighting at the cost of occasionally producing muddy video. No harm, no foul; it's just a different approach.
So very true. Ghost Light leaps to mind as a serial where you can't tell what the hell is going on because it was lit very moodily
not a Doctor Who fan, but could hear my teeth grinding when you told the fact that 97 episodes had been INTENTIONALLY erased....
It's actually worse than that, over 200 episodes were wiped. It's only through secondary sources like the 16mm telerecordings and the NTSC copies that they've managed to get the number of missing episodes down to 97
@@michaelinlofi It's worse even than that. When a tape was wiped its name was on a list. this list was used showing the 'fact' that it was no longer needed so when a copy was returned, the list was checked and if it was on the list - it was junked. When this fact was uncovered, that stopped. Loads of info about that online.
I think "intentionally" is a little _too_ strong; it implies deliberate destruction. There may even have been a list as tortysoft says of what was "no longer needed", but even that doesn't mean it was _deliberately_ destroyed - only that it wasn't consciously _kept_.
Some of the missing stories were offered back to the bbc, and unbelievably they were turned down and told to just discard them, i heard marco polo was 1 of them
Godbless the people that managed to restore color to these episodes. Hard work paid off.
An unintended and inevitable consequence of the 1969 strike action, is that Jon Pertwee’s first series is nightmarishly sinister because it’s all on film. It is very intimidating, and looks great. My personal theory is that if that hadn’t happened, the show would have evaporated and been cancelled.
Only Spearhead from Space was done entirely on film. This was due to strike action, but this only meant that all of Spearhead was shot on location. The other three serials had studio blocks, so they were still shot on videotape in studio. But season 7 does seem to have a lot more location work, so more of it was shot on film.
Either way you are right, there's a vibe in season 7 that the show in my opinion has never recaptured. It's incredible television
Wait, you’re saying that the BBC _filmed_ portions of shows at 25 fps?! Sound film is always shot at 24 fps. BBC video, being PAL, would have been shot at 25 fps. To convert to American TV it would have been ‘pulled-down’ to NTSC’s 30 fps (60 fields per second).
Also, luminance and chrominance are only used with NTSC. PAL, or phase alteration by line, uses a more complex (and accurate) color system. It’s why analog PAL televisions didn’t have a TINT adjustment on them like American TVs did. The color’s tint, or phase, was built into the PAL signal.
When did the BBC finally stop ‘wiping’ _Dr Who_ master tapes? Most American TV networks stopped doing it around the early 70s. Of course no American network TV shows were even shot on videotape until _All in the Family_ in 1971 (except for soap operas, game shows and talk shows).
Nearly all of Johnny Carson’s NYC studio shows were wiped and lost forever. The same nearly happened to the entire four season run of _Monty Python’s Flying Circus._ The BBC was going to wipe them to reuse the videotape, but Terry Jones fortunately ponied up the £900 to save and convert them to NTSC so that PBS could syndicate them in America.
The Beeb's film cameras all ran at 25fps, yes. Sound was captured separately on magnetic tape with a 50hz pilot tone, for synchronisation. The camera and tape recorder were fed the same 50hz signal from a stable source, via cables - A system called "crystal sync". Back at Ealing studios the tape recording would be transferred to 16mm "mag" - basically 16mm film, but coated entirely with oxide just like regular tape. This "mag" was kept in sync via the pilot tone, so that you ended up with a sound recording that could physically lined up alongside the film, every frame's worth of audio lining up with a frame of picture. Editing was then a simple matter of slicing across both strips of celluloid, ensuring sound and picture changed together. Or you could do a fancy early cut of the audio, ensuring sound and picture were still in synch afterwards by cutting out the same total number of frames from each, just starting at different points.
Also, luminance and chrominance are definitely just as separate in PAL as they are in NTSC. The exact way the chrominance is encoded is different (cleverer!), is all. The phase of the chrominance signal is reversed on each successive line, so that any systematic error present on one line is cancelled out on the next. Hence "Phase Alternate Line".
I did the first conversions with Keith Hunter. There are many points that need addressing here...
405 meta data? No. 625 meta data? no again. Line numbers = pixels ( sort of )- yes. The only 'Data' recorded was control track, basically an audio track of clicks at 50Htz to lock the system mechanically to the electronic aspects of the video.
One inch VTRs did not produce a better image, even slightly - if the Quad was correctly lined up.
Film inserts were NOT converted to electronic VTR format by 'pointing a camera at a monitor'. A Telecine machine engineer would not appreciate this comment - even with your onscreen rider. TK scanned a flying dot through the film. No film screen envolved.. Your description is a simplified description of an FR machine, Film Recording - highly engineered kit that lost almost no definition. As you later say, the FR machine converted Video from a video recorder - TO film for sale in countries that did not have Video tape systems.
A TK machine produced higher resolution video.
Then you describe the resolution loss due to the editing system and - far more loss than due to the FR system - which was only ever monochrome - but was recolourised.
The clip you showed looks to me like a VHS copy of a double conversion from 625 to the American 525 format - and back - loads of resolution loss there. As you say, this would be required when the original 625 transmission tapes were lost/wiped and the only existing copy was on an American standard. VHS quality tapes were NEVER transmitted.
Robot used the studio facilities of the Evesham training center at Wood Norton where the action was recorded - not really an OB.
Then, for a while you are accurate enough, but then you say the 'Combing' error as shown in the clip was due to interlacing - which it was, but, the gaps between the lines are due to the fact that one set of the fields from each frame has been lost - vertical resolution halved. Then you say Film is 25 FPS and Video 50 FPS... not by the time the film has left the TK machine it isn't !
Then you correctly talk about FR - got it right here. FYI, FR recordings were not only 'warped' but also often smaller than the original, granny cutoff sort of errors but not that extreme. Also, the FR and the cassette copy somehow ran at different speeds and so had to be resynchronized all the time. The colour 525 tapes were copies of a transmission from a 525 Umatic machine that may not have been synchronised to anything. Loads of work.
Then you mention Videfire. That was only needed if one field was lost - as I mentioned above.
Then you are again correct but only at this point, not earlier.
Then you talk about reversing the conversation. I have no idea what that is.
Next up, you talk about regeneration of the Colour Burst ( the 4.43361875 MHz signal that coded for colour - Phase Alternate Lines - from the chroma dots recorded on the FRs. A well engineered replay of an FR would occasionally flicker in to colour - this gave Simon Ashcroft and others the hint the colour could be recovered - in the way you describe.
Keith Hunter who you mention in the on screen text, and I devised the colour superimposition system - was it really in 1985? Wow. I still have the master tapes I made from the cassettes he gave me.
A point you don't mention is that the 525 colour source tapes when converted back to 625 had turned every cut in to a three frame mix.
So, you call the RSC now do you? Keith and I did our experiments years before the brilliant restoration team very high praise to them - but they had funding, we did our experiments at the risk of our jobs in secret. When I told the Dr Who production office that recolourisation was possible, they firmly told me there was not audience for it - the show was not even being made.
Finally, another point, the sound. The FR sound recordings had lost a lot of lower frequencies and the cassette copies had lost the high ones - so, I mixed the two together to get far better than either was by itself.
Now I need to sleep.
That was fun ! I bet I missed something...
Delighted to hear from someone who worked on the restorations! Want to clarify some of my choices in my writing though.
The term "metadata" for the lines not used for image information was half a simplification (this was meant to be a quick and easy look), half a misunderstanding. Source I was pulling from seemed to suggest the lines not used for video information could also hold closed caption information for broadcast. And my use of pixels to describe the lines was definitely only meant as an analogy, not a statement of what it actually is.
Same goes for my claim that 1" VT looks slightly better. Again, a case of my source of information (very probably Wiki) passing on half right information and me further simplifying for the sake of a less tech-knowledgable audience.
I very much hate my description of telecine in this video, so everyone is well within their rights to blast me for that XD
On the tack of my description of telecine, the generation loss I described was meant to refer only to the generation loss caused by bouncing the telecine'd video over to the master video reel during editing. It's my hope the upshot of the point was still clear though, that the location work has less detail despite being filmed on film because of generation loss.
Not all of my clips came from my highest quality sources. I tried to source from my Blu Rays where I could (and from the documentaries on the Blu Rays too) but occasionally I used footage from UA-cam because it was all I had.
On that point, same goes for my clip demonstrating generation loss. It was the most useful UA-cam clip I could find to explain the concept quickly. It's a bit of an extreme example, but for a fast and loose definition it fitted my purpose.
Didn't know that about the production of _Robot_ - glad I do now! But the overall point I was headed for, that the location work was done on VT, was I hope communicated nonetheless.
My statement that "film is 25 FPS, video _looks like_ 50 FPS" was supposed to be a summation of why it looks that way on a DVD, not a description of the result of telecine.
When I talk about "reversing" the conversion, that was how RSC seemed to be described in the feature on RSC packaged with The Claws of Axos. I'm only repeating the information from that doco as I understood its presentation.
This was not something I ever imagined that people who worked on this restoration process would ever see, so my intent was to be fast and loose with general simplified facts - if the viewers were curious about the specifics, they could then use this as a launch pad to get more involved. I'm stunned that you and BabelColour have seen this, and I want to say again how much I admire your work in restoring Doctor Who. Meant it when I said you're all wizards.
Many thanks for both your reply and the article. I was impressed that you mentioned Keith, was that info found in an article by Ian Williams?
You and I should have mentioned Ian Levine who found and provided the incredibly dreadful betmamax multi gen 525 color tapes !
Re meta data on unused lines. This was never recorded on Quads as it did not exist at the time. It only got on to 1inch tapes if recorded from an off air transmission. I realy can't remember seeing any during production. Most of the stuff on those lines was Teletetx - but only in the age of computers :-)
By the way, We were all in our early 20s when this happened. The stuff you do online these days is utter magic ! I do it too :-) TortyTalks podcast. Keep it up ! @@michaelinlofi
@@tortysoft You at the studio end may not have added metadata (and I too am fascinated to "meet" someone involved with the conversions), but of course it _was_ added to what was _broadcast_ , from when teletext was invented - initially something mainly for and thus of interest to transmission/distribution engineers (transmitter ID and the like), eventually of course the teletext system, especially subtitles. Agreed, it certainly didn't exist in the 405-line era - or early 625! Lofi has already replied to me that he just used the term to mean anything non-video (an unfortunate choice of term, but he's younger than we are! and he didn't mean to mislead).
I agree - as I said above :-)@@G6JPG
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't 1 inch tape actually have a slightly lower quality to 2 inch tape, but 1 inch had trick play functions such as freeze frame, in vision rewinding and fast forwarding etc which Quad couldn't do thus making it easier to edit with?
When AI upscaling, I tend to use PAL when possible. 576i/p is more than half of 1080i/p. I can't believe Americans were given the L of 480i/p. As an American I despise 480i/p.
That’s also why 720p wasn’t all that popular in the UK - it just wasn’t that big of an upgrade over 576i/p compared to 480.
So long as you compensate for PAL speedup when appropriate (when it’s a cinema film, or an American property), PAL DVDs are usually the best source for these older properties.
I can't find my original comment...anyway, those EMI tube cameras from the 70s look SO much nicer than the later chip cameras they started to use in the early 80s. There is no comparison.
Yeah I've had problems with comments disappearing from my videos recently. I'm baffled honestly
@@michaelinlofi I sometimes find a comment I _know_ is there - especially if it's one I know I added a few minutes ago, but I've been away and come back - reappears if you reload the page!
it was shot on analog pal videotape.
I'm waiting for AIs to finish the job of complete restoration of everything to 4K.
I think AI can help with picture quality, upscaling and recolouring, but right now it would be pretty resource intensive. However that stuff improves by leaps and bounds.
It would also probably look a bit shit. If you look up the discussion about the remastering of Inland Empire by David Lynch, you'll see that current AI software just isn't up to the job at the moment
@@michaelinlofi agreed, to do anything but a short clip, and then edit out the imperfections by hand as well, would be horribly work intensive right now. It's difficult just getting a hand with five digits lol.
Great to tackle the subject but I must disagree with how you explain or at least interpret some basic facts. 1) Aside from Spearhead from Space all interiors for classic Doctor Who were originated on electronic cameras. Initially 405 lines and from Enemy of the World 625. 2) Aside from Spearhead from Space NO classic Doctor Who was 'shot' entirely on film. A few episodes originated on VT cameras (such as Power of the Daleks 6) were recorded to 35mm film in the gallery session, to be edited and transmitted. A few of these survive as 35mm copies, and a few of them as 16mm prints with the 35mm copy of Power 6 along with its 5 stable mates having been destroyed. 3) Film was not filmed off a TV monitor and transferred into the episodes it was done via telecine with a flying spot technique. All classic Doctor Who aside from Spearhead and the few recorded to film for editing episodes were originally 2" Quad tapes up to and including the Five Doctors; after that the 1" tape format took over and is generally thought of as inferior not better quality than 2" 4) Film was still used for certain FX scenes from season 23 onward such as the opening scene of Trial of a Time Lord featuring the Time Lord station, Shots of the Ice World for McCoy's Dragonfire and so on. 5) The process of selling episodes abroad included transferring episodes to BW film was called telerecording and this is the process of pointing a film camera at a TV monitor and is why many episodes have an inferior look. Thankfully the BBC engineers didn't always do their job correctly and left the colour signal switched on leaving the Chroma Dots that allow partial (Invasion of the Dinosaurs) or full gamut recovery. Pertwee episodes were converted to NTSC colour (color!) as well as being telerecorded, and some have returned over the years allowing either Reverse Standards Conversions (creating ugly jaggy images) or the marriage of 16mm film prints and the chroma NTSC signal to make a colour episode. Some episodes utilised a domestic recording notably those recorded at the behest of Ian Levine in the late 70s. 6) Telerecording at 25fps looses the "live" feel of the VT scenes and this is recreated by the VIDFire process or interpolating and reinterlacing the subsequent output. 7) PAL TV was always 25frames per second but with 50 interlaced fields (50i). This is not the same as 50 progressive frames to recreate the the video look. Official releases use interlaced video at 50i or 60i outside PAL regions.
The key here was this was vastly simplified to be a beginner's look at why Classic Who looks this way, so I did omit some detail. So:
1) Yes. This is pretty much what I was going for.
2) This is where I was headed with the statement that 7 episodes were finished on 35mm film. I may go back and cut my line about "The Space Pirates, Episode 2" being filmed entirely on 35mm film though, as while one source told me that was so it didn't look like the case when I was editing this. I kept the line in more or less out of anxiety. Lol.
3) I described telecine very, very poorly, no doubt there. I tried to correct myself with that text on screen over the video of an actual telecine machine.
4) I didn't go into film use for models here because simplicity. Everything presented here is a _general_ case.
5) Yes. This is pretty much exactly what I was saying, fully agree.
6) Same as 5.
7) I didn't say 50i is the _same_ as 50p, my statement was that it _appears_ that way on old CRT TV. The bit I describe as 50 frames per second is the result of modern day deinterlacing algorithms, not the PAL video itself. It's why I emphasize the word "appears" a couple of times in that segment.
@@michaelinlofi I did not read this comment before adding my correction list :-)
> "1) Aside from Spearhead from Space all interiors for classic Doctor Who were originated on electronic cameras."
Rot. There were loads of interiors done on film at Ealing, right from the first story onwards.
Actually the video originally used is actually fine. You should have mentioned that if you you watch them in original sets at the time they look fine.
I don't know shit about Dr.Who. my sister is a big fan of it. but this was a good video.
Also, this all is one of the reasons I never had gotten around to watch Dr Who. Because if I do, I want to see it in chronological broadcast order. And holy carp, the old Dr Who is a labyrinthian maze of missing, partially restored and fully restored episodes of all shapes and sizes.
I guess I shouldn't be that dogmatic as these shows were pretty episodic as it was meant to be seen on a weekly basis and if you missed an episode or two it shouldn't ruin a show as reruns weren't as standardized. But... Yeah. Oh, and living outside the UK I would have to find how to stream the episodes legally as well... :/
Fortunately Classic Who is pretty loose with its continuity so its pretty easy to jump in and out with it. I think most young Classic fans have watched it with a sort of scatterbrained jumping from serial to serial rather than starting from 1963.
As for finding it, I'd take odds on your local library having a copy or two lying about. Otherwise finding it online is a bit of a hassle
I had to laugh at 1:50 - "376 lines were used for video information, and the rest for metadata." Just the idea of using metadata in the 405-line era (starting before WWII)!
(For those that don't know, it was for "flyback time" - returning the beam to the top of the screen; the vertical circuitry was less powerful than the horizontal.)
Even towards the end of the 625-line era, only a very few of the 625-576=49 lines were used for metadata.
And 625 doesn't equate to colour. (405 was never colour [apart from a few experiments], but 625 certainly wasn't always colour by any means!)
Metadata was meant to be shorthand for "not video information". This was meant for less technically knowledgeable people so at the time I felt that would communicate the idea quickly to non techy people my age.
Beyond that, yes B&W 625 line tape was also used on Doctor Who. Mentioned that in my pinned comment bc that was already pointed out to me
@@michaelinlofi Ah, gotcha. I see what you were trying to do, for simplicity - just "metadata" (because it contains "data") might give the wrong impression. You might just not say _anything_ about what the other lines are for, or just say something like "for technical reasons to do with how an old TV worked" or something like that. (But don't remake the video just for that!)
Similarly, when explaining about NTSC being 525/480 rather than 625/576, you didn't _mention_ the different frame/field rates; I think this was just genuinely forgetting, as you _did_ mention that when talking about conversion in the other direction.
Great to meet another old-formats enthusiast!
@@G6JPG the NTSC field rate does come up in my description of NTSC, at about 10:50 in the same breath as the number of fields. I did kinda blitz through it there though.
And you're deffo right that my choice of the word "metadata" probably wasn't my shining moment in terms of writing, but we live and we learn
The first extra line starts with the vertical sync pulse that triggers the flyback. That *is* metadata, albeit only one bit's worth! =;o}
(The rest of course is just thumb-twiddling time while things settle down... At least, until TeleText was invented.)
I think AI would be very helpful in remastering the video parts. Certainly the McCoy era needs it.
I'd hold off on that personally. The AI aided remaster of Inland Empire (shot on DV camcorder) was pretty shocking in places so if the tech isn't there I say wait until it is before we start plugging Doctor Who into it
@@michaelinlofi Oh that's a shame.
TL;DR They used 16mm film, 35mm film, or videotape depending on the location and budget constraints.
BBC budgets and scrimping with Camera's and tech at the time. I've been watching Dr Who for 40 plus years
If you have never watched it in B&W at 405 lines on a rental set from behind the sofa you do not know Classic Dr Who :)
Mate not even my mum was alive yet back when it was on 405
Sounds like possible field of work for AI technology.
I have my doubts about that field for several reasons, but on a technical level I'd wait. David Lynch and Janus films attempted to use AI to remaster Inland Empire (which was shot on a digital videotape camcorder) and the results were far from impressive
For some reason, my Mum thought I was a fan of this show. She was always calling me a WHOer, but I was far more into Star Trek.
I'm a proud fan of both. Trekkie and Whovian for life (literally, I've watched both since I was a baby probably)
@@michaelinlofi Nice. I do appreciate a fellow Sci-fi nerd 🤓
The BBC wouldn't have this problem if they had respected the shows produced. All those episodes lost to stupidity.
16mm film is not a higher quality format than PAL SD video. You'd have to be blind & deaf not to see & hear that. Robot (video) has better sound & picture quality than Spearhead from Space (film), that's indisputable. You said it yourself, video has a higher frame rate, giving it a smoother look. In addition to that, the video cameras have 3-chip sensors (one chip for every primary colour), which is why the colours look better in the video footage than the film footage. If DW had continued until today while retaining the way it was shot, it would look & sound as crisp as Eastenders does, instead of the blurry, muffled mess it has been since 2005. The production tries to use lower quality to hide the flaws in their FX.
Watch the 16mm film trims from The Visitation or Earthshock. When scanned to HD 16mm film is absolutely of a higher quality than PAL SD video - much finer detail, for one. 16mm film has been good enough for feature films like Black Swan too, so there's that.
Also Doctor Who from 2005-2008 was shot on videotape. They switched to digital on Planet of the Dead. And I don't know what you mean when you say it's a blurry mess, series 5 and 6 of NuWho (digital) are amazingly crisp
@@michaelinlofi You don't think I've seen The Visitation or Earthshock? The restoration team were able to clean up all the grain, jitter & dust that usually accompanies film, yet The Sontaran Experiment still looks & sounds better, why do you think that is? Are you telling me not to believe my eyes & ears? Even as a child I could recognise video's superiority. Might as well tell me the Carry-On films look & sound better than the BBC's Chronicles of Narnia series.
The difference isn't between video & digital, it's between film-mimicking & video-mimicking. 2005-present has been film-mimicking, with low frame-rates, single-sensors & mono-directional mics - all of which deliberately compromise quality.
Have you never seen/heard Eastenders? You don't know what crisp is until you have.
Goodness, such vehemence!
Film and video each have their own strengths and weaknesses. The main specific strength of 16mm film over SD video is the higher resolution of the captured image. When that image is converted to SD video, of course, that advantage vanishes, and only film's disadvantages become apparent. However, when preparing materials for an HD release, the extra resolution available by going back to the original film, rather than using the original SD transfer, is well worth the effort of first professionally cleaning the film and then running it through a well-maintained telecine system... Especially if the original transfer was done in a hurry by a very busy BBC tech on worn-out equipment, as was all too often the case in the 1970s!
Film only has weaknesses. You can claim that the resolution is higher all you like, but the evidence of your eyes & ears say otherwise. It's plain for even the biggest n00b to see. As long as the number 50 is higher than the number 24, the video footage will be superior via it's higher frame rate, & as long as the number 3 is a higher number than 1, then the video footage will be superior via the higher number of sensors. There is no shame in admitting to preferring lower quality footage, but what's the point in patronisingly lying & pretending it's higher quality footage, eh? If there is a small house & a big house, & you prefer the small house bc it is small, then just admit that you like it bc it is smaller. Why tell me the obvious lie that the small house is actually bigger than the big house?
Can you at least admit that film audio is garbage compared to the video audio?
@@somethingsomething7205 [SMILE] I know what the evidence of my eyes and ears tells me, thankyou. Also the evidence of my analysis software, my 30 years experience as an amateur videographer, etc, etc.
Enjoy your version of reality. =:o}