Computer colorize a B&W movie clip

[rijir2001]

Is there any program available that would allow me to colorize a short video clip? This would be similar to what that guy Ted Turner does to old B&W movies. I want to colorize a clip that I want to add into a color film. The footage I have is in B&W and I want to get it to match the rest of the film as close as possible. I know they developed this technology back in the 80's. So I find it hard to believe it isn't available to us in PC form now.

Russ

[MOVIEGEEK]

"This would be similar to what that guy Ted Turner does to old B&W movies"

And I still haven't forgiven him.

[teegee420]

"This would be similar to what that guy Ted Turner does to old B&W movies"

And I still haven't forgiven him.

God forgive me, but I actually enjoyed a particular colorized(I've seen two) version of It's a Wonderful Life. Blasphemy, some would say. :P

[gll99]

rijir2001

Is there any program available that would allow me to colorize a short video clip?

We wish Russ!
Do a site search.. I recall that this has been asked before. Don't get your hopes up, I believe that it's practically a frame by frame painting and editing job. Unless something very new is out there, also search offsite on the net under "colorize video" (or film or movie etc..) and you'll basically find the same thing and be disappointed.

I remember seeing a vdub filter that is called colorize but if I think it makes eveything one color and another (maybe the same) takes all the color out of a clip.

[presto]

Virtualdub has a plug in that lets you colorize black and white video but it seems to have been designed for adding color to weather maps or other maps. I doubt you could do a realistic colorization but maybe.

gll99 beat me by one second!

[housepig]

Is there any program available that would allow me to colorize a short video clip? This would be similar to what that guy Ted Turner does to old B&W movies. .... I know they developed this technology back in the 80's. So I find it hard to believe it isn't available to us in PC form now.

go back and take a look at some of the Turner colorized movies - you'll see that in the backgrounds, everyone is wearing the same color suit... it's a couple of hot spots of color, and then big washes of color everywhere else.

you can do it, but it's not going to be a plug-in that does everything - you would have to go in with a digital paint program and hand-color it, frame by frame.

how long is the clip?

[rijir2001]

The clip in quesion is only about 60 seconds. I thought of extracting each of the 30 frames as bitmap files and using the layer option on Photoshop to do the coloring. I would sample some of the actual colors from the color footage of the rest of the film to make the best match.

Does anyone remember the TV show from the 80's called That's Incredible? That was the first place I saw the computerized process. They colorized some Laurel and Hardy clips. It looked okay at the time. They explained how it was a computer process by which you colored the first frame in a scene and the computer calculated the rest of the frames in that scene. It was brobably Turner's company at the time. And now there are other compies that do the very same thing. It is just surprising that 20+ years later with all of the remarkable programs we have that someone hasn't put one out there that does just this.

And I do understand all of the opinions on the issue of colorization. Don't get me wrong. I have feelings both ways on the issue.

Russ

[Gazorgan]

It's not something the home consumer would 'normally' do. A photograph, sure and there are many programs to do that. But a B&W movie is pretty old. I mean at least 30 years old? Most people don't have something that old (it would have to be home 8mm film or and old movie on tape/disk) in need of colorization.

[haloblack]

The clip in quesion is only about 60 seconds. I thought of extracting each of the 30 frames as bitmap

A 30-frame, 60-second clip?

[rijir2001]

Yes. 30 frame 60 second clip.

Russ

[rijir2001]

Here are some links to information regarding this issue in case anyone is interested.

Just a few links to information about this somewhat controversial process:

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/amia-l/2000/06/msg00029.html

http://www.reelclassics.com/Articles/General/colorization-article.htm

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0412/4_27/59599089/p1/article.jhtml?term=capra+colorization

http://www.tvacres.com/jargon.htm (see "Colorization")

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/C/htmlC/colorization/colorization.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/65/co/colorizat.html

http://web.uvic.ca/philosophy/sophia/sophia2002/lodto.htm


Russ

[haloblack]

Yes. 30 frame 60 second clip.

If you mean 30 frames as in 30 -total- frames, then yeah - do it by hand in Photoshop.

If you mean 30 frames as in 30fps = 180 frames total, then... well, I still think that doing it by hand is your only option. Maybe you could email one frame to each of your 180 closest friends and tell them it's a coloring contest.

[rijir2001]

>>Maybe you could email one frame to each of your 180 closest friends and tell them it's a coloring contest.

Good one!!

Sorry for the confusion. I do mean 30 frames per second at 60 seconds. I don't know what I was thinking.

Russ

[housepig]

If you mean 30 frames as in 30fps = 180 frames total, then... well, I still think that doing it by hand is your only option. Maybe you could email one frame to each of your 180 closest friends and tell them it's a coloring contest.

he better get more friends - 30x60= 1800, not 180.

what is the content of the clip?

I'm just wondering if there is not a lot of movement, if it's something that could be dropped to 15fps, colorized (that would cut your total number of frames in half) and then re-sampled to 30fps.

[DivXExpert]

If its a B&W film, then it was probably not even shot at 30fps. People didn't start shooting at 30fps until digital. All film cameras run at 24fps, and before that its was crazy frame rates like 15 18 and 20, most movies didn't even keep a consistent frame rate. Anyway, you should see how much of the movie is actually non repeated material as in, if it was shot at 24 and telecined to 30, or if it was shot 15 and doubled, something like that. Because I would be pretty sure that if it is an older film, that it is not actually 30 frames per second.

[housepig]

very true - if this is something that originally came from 8mm film or somewhere, IIRC that runs between 12-18fps. (I have a chart somewhere at home with the various formats and their frame rates, I'll post if someone needs it critically).

[haloblack]

he better get more friends - 30x60= 1800, not 180.

Oh, right. I'm not falling for that one!


Next you'll be telling me I can't burn this 47-gig video to dvd-r.

[lordsmurf]

Dump the video out to pure frames. Color them in Photoshop. Takes time.

[proggy]

Depending on how good you are in photoshop, you might want to look at a program called "blackmagic". It is written specifically for turning black and white photos into color photos.

[FOO]

It is possible with Avisynth to assign an arbitrary color to a
particular luma value. The problem is of course that 2 completely
different colors in the original scene will map to the same
color if they are the same brightness.

I played with it once. It does remarkably good and bad.

[DivXExpert]

Sounds like you could dump the movie to pure frames, batch run this blackmagic program (looks promising, http://www.neuraltek.com/bmagic/), then dump them all back to video.

[lordsmurf]

I'd still suggest Photoshop because you can transplant the color layer (if doing proper coloring techniques) and then use same "color template" from frame to frame. Saves time.

[DivXExpert]

Yeah, I just tried out Blackmagic, and I am still gonna say photoshop.
Do as lordsmurf says, and make a layer for each color, pait away, then when you get to the next frame you can copy the layers over and modify them slightly. It will take some time, and you'll be destroying the original clip, but I can see how can a sudden cut to black and white could interupt the flow of a movie.

[rijir2001]

Thanks for all the info guys. I did check the website on Blackmagic. They don't give you much time to try out the software before buying it. It seems worth a shot to mess with. I will have to check it out. Photoshop is probably best way. I can utilize a layer for each object. either way it will be a very big project.

Russ

[Nolonemo]

Of course, you could just desaturate all the color footage and have the entire video in B&W.

Seriously, I don't believe you'll be able to colorize well enough to prevent the colorized clip from being highly noticable anyway.

Good luck though, here's hoping there's not a lot of action in those 60 seconds!

[Richard_G]

I use Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.5 for all my video editing and it has a module called Video Paint for doing just this. I've never used it so don't know how easy or not it is to use, but you can download a trial of MSP from www.ulead.com (up to version 7 now I think).

[rijir2001]

I downloaded Media Studio Pro 7 Trial (95 MB) but it doesn't include the Video Paint application that it said it would. The website had no answers. Would have been nice to try.

Russ

[lordsmurf]

Of course, you could just desaturate all the color footage and have the entire video in B&W.

Seriously, I don't believe you'll be able to colorize well enough to prevent the colorized clip from being highly noticable anyway.

Good luck though, here's hoping there's not a lot of action in those 60 seconds!

Just sample colors from the color version for use on the B&W version. It will be close enough if that is done.