Colourisation of black and white classic films on TV

The other day I taped a classic film from 1951 of one of those free movies channels on SKY digital, Actionmax I think it is called. Tom Brown's School Days, with Robert Newton and John Howard-Davies. Howard-Davies was a child actor, who later became a TV producer for the BBC (Fawlty Towers etc) and then at Thames. I recall this film in black and white from Saturday cinema days.

But the version shown on Actionmax appeared to have been "colourised" - giving it the appearance of seaside postcards of Frances Frith type scenes from the 1890's with pastel colours added on. The sky was all one shade of blue and grass one shade of green. It surpised me. I think the film looked better in its orginal black and white presentation.

I was then reliably informed on another forum that imdb database makes it clear that there are both the classic blackand white and a colourised version are in circulation, and an industry "expert" then said that Ted Turner of TCM movies etc, had colourised many classic black and white films some years ago, presumably, thinking this would be easier on the eye, or popular with movie channel viewers. However the film industry rightly complained about it and the process was stopped.

Does anyone have a view on this. Should old classic movies, now mainly only shown on TV, all works of art in their original form, be tampered with to make them appear more attractive in an age of colour? Some great black and white films were made in recent years, Elephant Man with John Hurt being one, and Shindler's List (bar some red) another. I would think it sacriligious to colourise these, and the same should go for older films. What do you think, honest opinions please! :

There are such things as GOOD colourisations (done digitally using highly advanced image tracing and palette matching software), however these are very expensive. Most colourisations aren't that advanced (even those that are digital, which are usually much simpler 'find and replace' types).

A good colourisation can breathe new life into a film - I saw some screen shots of "Supercar" (the Gerry Anderson puppet thing) that had been colourised to great effect - also the original B/W VT of The Beatles performing "All You Need Is Love" was colourised and simply looked like it had been originally recorded in Colour PAL.

So I wouldn't go so far as to say it should never be done, but if it is to be done, it should only be if it is going to be done to the highest standards and doesn't compromise resolution, contrast or feel in any way. Any process that just invents large areas of colour washes and estimations, (which Turner's generally are) are a definite no-no.

Some Jon Pertwee episodes of Doctor Who have also been recolourised after the original colour recordings had been wiped. I believe the way they did this was by overlaying a poor quality off air colour recording of the programme over the black and white original frame by frame. I haven't actually seen the finished effect on tv, but from the clips I've seen of it on the internet it seemed fairly effective.

I remember seeing the restoration of The Daemons on Tomorrow's World. They took the chroma information from a poor quality VHS copy and combined it with the luma information from a black and white higher quality film copy. The results were pretty good, and I think the result was broadcast in full on BBC2. It'd be interesting to see what they could do with it now.

If there's no colour information though, it has to be invented, usually done by an operator painting broad splats of colour in a program and the computer applying it to what it thinks are the right objects - so you get grass that's all one green, or sky that's all one blue. It's quick but it's not very pretty.

David

I always thought the process simply took every shade of grey, matched it with it's correct colour and the rest was history, obviously I was wrong.

Anyway, can anyone post any captures of good/bad/awful colourisations, so we can either just see what they look like, or maybe even compare?

That's rather a different situation though. In these cases, the programme was originally produced in colour, and a colour copy (albeit only a sub-broadcast standard one) continued to exist. The chroma signal from the colour copy was then used to re-instate the colour onto a programme source ultimately originating from a broadcast quality B/W film print. The result was a restored broadcast quality colour version.

In the case mentioned earlier however, we're talking about colourising material which was not made in colour in the first place. As was said earlier, the result of these colourisations is usually guessed colour washes which don't look at all natural. Only recently has it been possible to accurately colourise material based on the greyscales of a B/W source.

I recently watched a couple of MGM (and Warner) films on TCM which were originally shot in black and white, but had been obviously and dreadfully colourised - I presume that they were the ones Ted Turner did in the mid-1980's; though why TCM didn't show the original copies is beyond me.

If anyone's interested, there is further information on the Dr Who material at this site :

http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

There is also a connected forum at this site :

http://www.rtforum.co.uk/

but, a word of warning, they won't allow you to use false names / nicknames on there. (You get a very snotty reply from one of the moderators or 'teacher's pets' on there, saying 'Please use your real name' ! I stopped posting on there out of protest, espicially as I never caused trouble on there anyway, honest ! I was only praising a video release & all ! )

Some example colourisation clips from Legend Films:
http://www.legendfilms.net/demos/demos.html

Their philosophy:
http://www.legendfilms.net/philosophy.html

Surely it's not at all possible to colourise material from their grayscale, as grayscale isn't a representation of colour, just how light that colour is.

Looking at any picture on a YUV scope, you will see that one Y signal (luminance or greyscale), can not only refer to something being actually gray, through to any hue when mixed with the relevant U and V signals.

In most paint packages you can see that yourself. You would normally pick your colour from a colour grid, and then the brightness of that colour from a slide bar which goes from black, through all the brightness levels to white.
The slide bar is the grayscale, just with the colour information laid over the top.

If you pick your colours backwards and set the grayscale first, you will see that you can pick pretty much any range of colours for that level of grayscale.

As such, going backwards from grayscale to colour would never produce a different colour for each level of gray...
But then I have no personal experience of colourising in itself, just broadcast engineering - or logical thinking as it could be called!

Colourising is the devils tool

no you're a tool.

dubbing foreign TV shows is far worse.