
Color Film of London From 1902 Now Fully Restored - McKittrick
http://exp.lore.com/post/31664092832/researchers-at-the-uks-national-media-museum
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chime
I wish someone like the creator of Curiosity Descent footage (
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esj5juUzhpU> ) could get their hands on the
three separate RGB channels and combine them manually. The frames did not seem
to be overlaid properly and combining 1R + 2B + 3G as 1F, 2B + 3G + 4R as 2F
etc. caused offsets in every frame.

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ComputerGuru
That Curiosity descent video was amazing. Here's an even better side-by-side
with "director's cut" captions explaining what's being done:
<http://youtu.be/pjeHZ9poew4>

Thanks for sharing. But in answer to your question - the RGB channels are
there - you can download the h264 vid and decompose (sure, you'll some
quality, but that's not the real blocker). The real issue is the time - if you
believe him, the Mars Curiosity guy says it took him a month to pull that off:
_"It took 29 days from start to finish, working full-time on it for the last
week. This was the most laborious media project that I’ve ever done. But I
don't regret a minute of it. "_ , so you'd have to convince him to do it..

But you can probably PM him on Reddit if you're serious enough ;)

<http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=bard_canning>

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bardcanning
Thanks - someone just did which is how I found this post.

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omegant
Great job! really amazing what you could extract from that footage!. There is
only one thing that I find could be improved a bit ( I am no expert by the
way, just a video aficionado): at 1´50" when the jet from the rockets hits the
floor, you can clearly see that in the original footage but you can not in
your version till 4 or 5 seconds later, but the impressive first burst is
lost(I imagine that is a trade off of the morphing). Any way really impressive
work! Nasa must hire you!

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geuis
Direct link:
[http://nationalmediamuseumblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/edwa...](http://nationalmediamuseumblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/edward-
raymond-turner-discovery-re-writes-history-of-early-film/)

Also previously submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4513662>

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bane
Amazingly, not that different from the first color TV prototyps and modern-ish
DLP tvs in how they render the image.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television#All-
mechanical...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television#All-
mechanical_color)

[http://www.amazon.com/Color-Wheel-Samsung-DLP-H-
Series/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Color-Wheel-Samsung-DLP-H-
Series/dp/B001CTNRX0)

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JoeAltmaier
Funny: while the Macaw and the director's children were in brilliant color,
the panorama of London was black-and-white. Why? Because London was black-and-
white. Black cars, black clothes, grey stone buildings. Not the best subject
for a color film, but interesting historically.

Also: not only first color film, but first color-film director, actors.

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phreeza
Am I misunderstanding something or is the animation in the video clip at
around 3:00 wrong? There it looks as if a single frame is exposed to all three
colors sequentially, while really the color disk should be rotating in a way
that ensures that a frame always represents the same color while moving?

~~~
delinka
The animation is incorrect: The color wheel has the colors "moving" up and the
film moving down. When a red frame enters from the top, it should be projected
as red for all three of its appearances on the screen.

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WalterBright
After looking at the film, I suspect that some more restoration work could get
rid of the color smearing.

~~~
dredmorbius
If you watch the explanatory video, you see that successive frames were
subject to different filters. A spinning color filter (blue, green, red) ran
in front of the film, and within each set of three frames, you had successive
shots filtered for blue, green, and red. In any scene in which there was
motion of either the subject or the camera, you'll then see a slight mis-
registration of each of the three component colors. It's an artifact of the
process.

Modern film works by combining all three colors on a single spool of film and
bringing out the color through the development process. An alternate method
would be to shoot with three separate lenses onto three separate frames,
though you'd then get parallax color artifacts (as with the Prokudin-Gorskii
process, posted to HN recently).

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WalterBright
I understand why the color mismatch exists. I just think that can be corrected
for, even if it is done by hand frame by frame.

Since the information _is_ on the film, I don't think this would be false
restoration.

I see it as akin to projects that try to remove scratches and damage by
merging in undamaged sections from previous and following frames.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Progressive-scan DVDs do precisely this kind of correction.

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delinka
This film is very different from interlaced video. Interlaced video fields
(the two parts of a single frame) are captured at different points in time.
This film has frames captured at different points in time. The similarity ends
here.

With interlaced video, the two fields make a single frame. With this film,
every frame is displayed three times: First, with the two frames that precede
it; next, with the one that precedes it and the one that follows; lastly, with
the two that follow. Every frame (with the exception of the beginning and the
end) would be displayed three times.

Now, we can certainly create our own "full color" frames by successively
combining every three frames (1-2-3; 2-3-4; 3-4-5; 5-6-7; e-t-c) but now, I
believe, we either have to have some intelligence in software to find parts
from other frames that can be moved and morphed to align with preceding
frames; or we need a human to manually move and morph these bits of each of
our new "frame."

Not precisely the same as converting interlaced to progressive scan.

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JoeAltmaier
Ok, the frame construction is different. But the video processing issue is the
same. Captures from different points in time need to be integrated to avoid
the edges blurring (or feathering with interlacing). Signal processing
algorithms attempt to do feature and edge detection and realign them in the
composite frame.

