Question about capturing Doctor Who VHS tapes

[Deter]

This project is a complete waste of time.....


Let me explain....

Just get a good VCR and watch them that way....How Many times do you plan on watching them?

The Doctor Who restoration team fixes up all the videos and puts them on DVD, they do amazing work!

The DVD's are so much better quality, it is not even funny. Something like Planet of the Daleks, they re-coloured one of the episodes. All DVD's are remastered and some have CGI special effects.

All the titles will be out on DVD in the next few years, they knock out a bunch each year.

DR WHO VHS Tapes:

The CBS home video VHS tapes have macro vision, the picture and colour is normally crap. With the VHS Doctor Who stuff you needed to purchase The Time Warner videos, they re-did all the titles with no macro vision and the picture quality was a night and day difference.

The Playhouse videos were cut to full films, no macro vision, but the quality on these were only ok, the later revised Time Warner re-releases of these recordings were better quality.

The Playhouse videos were better quality than the CBS/FOX macro vision videos.
(The colour & picture on the CBS stuff was always a little bit off)


With a Panasonic AG1980, they will play perfect !



'Doctor Who and the Silurians'
(The restore job they did on this video was amazing, just watch 5 minutes of the VHS tape and than this on DVD)


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


'Doctor Who and the Silurians' was the first Doctor Who story to be made on colour videotape, the previous story 'Spearhead from Space' being made entirely on 16mm colour film. Unfortunately none of the videotapes survive, with only 16mm monochrome film recording negatives being retained by the BBC Film and Videotape Library. Domestic off-air colour NTSC Betamax recordings, made during mid-seventies US transmissions do exist however, and we previously combined these with the film recording prints way back in 1992 to create broadcastable colour copies- see the article here. Technology and our own skills have moved on a long way in the past decade and a half however and so for this DVD release it was decided to go right back to the raw elements and rebuild the episodes from the ground up. This would include application of the VidFIRE process to attempt to recreate as closely as possible the studio video look of the original transmission.

Although the basic principles of the restoration would need to be similar to the 1992 recolouring work, as usual we returned to the best available sources. This meant using the 16mm FR camera negatives (rather than prints taken from them, as previously used), which in keeping with many from that time were recorded for BBC Enterprises at the time of transmission (effectively a recording of what the viewer would see at home, albeit a feed direct from the transmission suite, not "off-air" as such). This is interesting insofar as it shows just how many tape dropouts and visual disturbances would have been part of the original, authentic viewing experience in 1970. For the colour source, it was decided to use the Betacam SP recording made in 1992, on the basis that the passage of a further 15 years and the scarcity of professional standard NTSC Betamax recorders would make it extremely unlikely that a better playback could be obtained now.

There were several possible ways of approaching the restoration, but which to do? Combine monochrome and colour, then clean-up? Clean up the monochrome and colour individually and then combine? VidFIRE the monochrome alone, or once the colour had been added? Grade the monochrome and colour elements before or after the clean-up?

In the end, to maximise flexibility, it was decided to start with a one-light ungraded Spirit transfer of the film, and a DVNRed, "ball-park graded" colour videotape copy for the basic clean up. This work was undertaken by Jonathan Wood at BBC Resources, then the tapes handed on to our cleanup team at SVS in Manchester. They tackled the video defects in the usual way, with frame-by-frame deblobbing on each episode. Although this meant that 14 episodes had to be worked on in this way, it meant that the peculiar problems inherent to the different source formats could be tackled independently.

After clean-up, the monochrome film was VidFIREd giving a 50 field per second interlaced picture. The colour Betamax conversion was overlaid, with some episodes (or sections of episodes where different tape sources were used) shifted by 20 milliseconds to maintain field sync (which wasn't a problem when the previous version was produced in 25 frame per second film mode).
Tests were done to see if the high resolution film could be warped to match the (more) correct geometry of the VT, but was unsuccessful due to the very low resolution of the colour tape. Therefore, as in 1992, the colour was warped to match the (fairly minimal) distortion on the film recording. This was done predominantly in After Effects, with final tweaking done at the final overlay stage in Shake (to overlay the chroma from the videotape onto the luminance of the film in YUV colour space).
The final combined episodes were then returned to Jonathan Wood for a fine grade, and subsequently returned to SVS for a final check/clean-up pass and audio layback. Mark Ayres had already fully remastered the audio, using the off-air videotapes as his source material, during his work on the BBC Audio release of the same stories for the 'Monsters on Earth' CD release. Most of his work for this project involved matching up the remastered sound with the new pictures.

Some sections required special attention. The end of episode five and start of episode six were missing from the two available NTSC recordings, and had been computer coloured in 1992 by American Film Technologie. One option was to obtain a new computer colourisation of this section, but given that the surrounding sections are comparatively ropey (certainly compared with the rest of the story) it was felt that if this section was too good, it might only highlight the weakness of nearby colour – and there would not be the budget to recolour another five to ten minutes of material. Therefore the previous work was retouched, adding extra colour at the edges (as usual, there is more image visible in the new transfers) and regrading the section to correct a few small errors in the original colour palette.

Another missing section on the colour tape was the start of episode three, where the Silurian approaches the Doctor. In 1992 this was patched by slowing down a previous shot, but this rather stuck out like a sore thumb. Instead, the scene was manually coloured and motion-tracked back onto the original.
Opening titles and closing credits were remade from the 35mm background films as usual.