Mind of Evil - DVDs arriving in the nick of time NOW!

[SiHart]

Interesting news...

This was posted today by xxiworld' on GB:-

"According to Steve Roberts, interviewed at Gallifrey by Radio Free Skaro, we should be able to expect ALL episodes of Mind of Evil in color! He said that we should expect the results of color recovery to be better than Invasion of the Dinosaurs, but not as good as Planet of the Daleks (actually, now that I think of it, I can't recall if he was talking about Mind of Evil or Ambassadors of Death or both with this comment) . . .

But the big news is that episode one, which has no chroma dots, is being colorized by Babelcolor of youtube fame with a little technological help. Apparently, rather than having to color in every single frame by hand (as he did for his youtube showreels) he is coloring in one out of every X frames, and motion-estimation software fills in all the frames in between."

[Rob McCow]

I hope the B&W versions are included as well, so we can have a huge argument over which version you'd rather watch.

[Stuart Wallis]

That's fandom for you!

[Si Hunt]

Fantastic!

But I'm going to ask the obvious question - could they not have done this with Dinos then?

Si.

[SiHart]

I suppose they could have if there was time and money. You can do anything if you've got those.

[Simon R]

All this money can't buy me a time machine.

They've a good excuse to re-issue Dinos now.

[J.R. Southall]

I think the reason they didn't do this with IotD is that they did have the chroma-dots there, so it probably never occurred to them not to do it that way. Once the process was complete and the results were under-par, it was probably too late to push the boat out and pay for it to be done manually, as there wouldn't have been enough budget left. The Mind of Evil 1, on the other hand, doesn't have the chroma-dots anyway, so it will always have been in their minds that they needed to budget for a manual recolourisation if it could possibly be afforded. Evidently talks with Stuart Humphryes (Babelcolour) and Pete Crocker (who's in charge of filling in the frames between the ones that Babelcolour will work on manually) proved positive.

Incidentally, Stuart has confirmed that he will have to manually colour one in every five frames, which is quite a job. And there's no "motion-estimation software" to do the rest, either (that was a mis-quote, apparently); Pete Crocker will have to fill in those other four frames by moving that colour about manually too, it seems.

Stuart has told me that in the outdoor scenes, he's colouring all the trees in pink. (He also said he wished he'd known about IotD, as he'd have loved to have worked on that one, too.)

[Si Hunt]

They'll have to re-issue Dinos!

Si.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Why is he colouring the trees in pink? And why is that quote all in horrible American zpelling?

[J.R. Southall]

Um, he was just joking with me about colouring the trees in pink.

And the reason the quote has American spelling is because it was posted by an American on an American website.

[Stuart Wallis]

Um, he was just joking with me about colouring the trees in pink.

The trees are going to be yellow - it's Pertwee's hair that's going to be pink...

[Rob McCow]

What people don't realise about The Mind of Evil is that the prison walls are a hideous shade of yellow with a green stripe. We'd be better off if they left it in B&W!

[Ssarl]

What people don't realise about The Mind of Evil is that the prison walls are a hideous shade of yellow with a green stripe. We'd be better off if they left it in B&W!

I suspect the truth might actually be somewhat like this. We are talking about a story that was made between Terror of the Autons and The Claws of Axos, after all!

I've heard the Chinese Dragon is a ludicrous shade of pink, and the Keller machine effect is quite psychedlic...

[Andrew Curnow]

Presumably, most of the sets in part 1 are reused in part 2, which has been chroma-dottically recovered I believe... so I guess there will be a fairly good template to base the 'invented' colour on for part 1.

[Antony Cox]

chroma-dottically

Quick - someone contact the OED immediately!

[Rob McCow]

The Restoration Team should offer courses in Chromadoticology!

[Stuart Wallis]

And they say they failed their exams - you got an ology, you're a scientist!

[Jason Thompson]

Oh no you're bloody not! *cough*astrology*cough*

[Andrew Curnow]

Quick - someone contact the OED immediately!

What's wrong with chroma-dotically, that's a word surely? It's not like I'd said 'Vidfire-icated' now that would be silly...

[Dirk Gently]

It's not like I'd said 'Vidfire-icated' now that would be silly...

It wouldn't be silly, It'd be an Americanism.

[Andrew Curnow]

Surely that's a contradiction in terms, Tim? How can it be an Americanism but NOT be silly?


(Sorry Jeff... )

[SiHart]

Wellity, wellity, wellity...

Wanna see some colour frames from the currently being recolourised Part 1? If so click the link!

[Si Hunt]

This is hugely exciting. I wonder how it will look? Manually recolouring a frame every few seconds then "extrapolating" the colour digitally to the surrounding frames is quite an ambitious effort. It's good they are utilising talented fans, and no doubt this is how they afforded to recolour Episode 1. If it's good, I wonder if they could go back and re-do "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" Episode 1 using the same guy in the future?

Si.

[Stuart Wallis]

If the photos at the bottom of the page are samples of his work, it should go well if it all works out.

[SiHart]

Absolutely! I think he's doing fantastic work.