If you go back from more modern Doctor Who to the Classic run, you will find it looks different – more low definition, and occasionally inconsistent in terms of quality. Why is this? Find out why here!
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Footage used from:
Several Doctor Who episodes (all cited in video)
Charles Park Seward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeXOH_JNo8U
ADAPT Television History https://youtu.be/O7m3CfxR6bI
Instert Name Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmPoqPGitEc
imagewatom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDhHJD0y0-s
I’mFairlySureThat’sChroma https://youtu.be/yqbSbiBJEJE
zman953 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtmA4HR46V8
Time tunnel asset in title sequence by @lothahn8332
Music:
None. I… forgot to add some.
Theme Song:
“Doctor Who Theme” by Ron Grainer (arr. David Arnold)
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:14 Film vs Videotape
05:06 Frame Rate
06:56 Restoration in Black and White
09:51 Restoration in Colour
11:46 Reverse Standards Conversion
13:19 Chroma Dot Recovery
15:11 Manual Colourisation
16:08 A Blended Approach
18:12 Conclusion
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Watch the Doctor Who: Classic channel! Travel in the TARDIS with full episodes dating back to the Doctor’s first incarnation on SloppBoxx.Com.
*Michael’s Correction Corner*
Per @MuchWhittering , the switch to 625-line PAL tape happened in late 1967 with “The Enemy of the World, Episode 1” rather than at the end of the black and white era as stated here.
Per @johntomlinson6849 , the last serial to have any location work filmed on 35mm film was _The Tomb of the Cybermen_ in 1967 rather than them using it until the end of the black and white era as I stated (I’ve also seen some say that 35mm film might have been used as late as _The Web of Fear_ but I’m not certain at this stage). I was conflating location filming with model work, some of which was still done on 35mm film on occasion until the 70s (my understanding is that the models for _The Space Pirates_ were done on 35mm film.)
There are also a lot of exceptions to the general rules I laid out for the production of Doctor Who, but if I listed them all this would have been half an hour long. Believe me, I was tempted to dork out about which serials had videotape shot on location and why.
Per @MarkHevingham – I described telecine very, very badly. His comment also has a couple of other details, but those are details I omitted on purpose for the sake of keeping this video simple and under 30-45 minutes long.
Technically, Enemy of the World to War Games is 625-line tape, but not PAL. PAL is just the name for the way the colour information is encoded. Therefore 625-line b/w is not PAL because there is no colour information to Phase Alternate by Line. 😉
2:30 – Quad wasn’t just the standard for the BBC, it was the *only* broadcast videotape standard anywhere in the world, until 1” was commercially released as a joint effort by Ampex and Sony at the end of the 70s.
3:46 – film wasn’t phased out entirely in 86. It was still used for model shots (like the Dalek shuttle entering the mothership in Remembrance part 4 from 1988).
@stickytapenrust6869 the one about film being phased out was a more generalised point on purpose. I was worried I would have been getting pedantic if I went “except for some model work”
12:25 – they didn’t go back to the original machine that did the conversion, but they studied its principles (as the technical documentation and schematics still existed, while most of each converter was long since dumped), did the maths (quite literally! There’s a *LOT* of advanced mathematics in standards conversion!) and used this as the basis for building bespoke software to “unpick” the work of the original converter.
What I love about passionate restoration efforts like those on doctor who is that they literally pioneer video restoration techniques that can then be applied to video recordings around the world. Like just because you’re a superfan you casually figure out new previously undocumented ways to increase FPS and recover colours from black and white footage. It’s amazing!
I noticed on season 12 of classic doctor who, for example on ark in space that the colors trail
There is no need to specify “classic” in that sentence.
And the word is “colours”.
Yep! Artefact of the old videotape cameras – if a light was bright enough, it could over excite the camera’s photosensors, leaving those lovely trails. You can see that in the Fawlty Towers episode “The Germans” too, when Manuel sets himself on fire
It was the era of Howlaround and Slit Scan intro of both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.
One other formats worth noting that isn’t mentioned in this video is the use of Stored versus Suppressed Field recordings. Essentially, Stored Field recordings have the normal 50-field interlaced structure mentioned in the black and white restoration section of this video.
Almost all surviving 60s episodes are Stored Field copies; however, the overseas prints for the first two seasons were distributed as “Suppressed Field” recordings. This was an early method of reformatting 50-field interlaced video into 25 fps progressive film. It did so by recording only the first field line and skipping the second. The result was that these Suppressed Field prints only have half the resolution of Stored Field prints (188 instead of 377).
This is why you’ll notice substantial video quality drops on The Daleks episodes 5 & 7, the last five minutes of The Edge of Destruction episode 2, The Reign of Terror episodes 1 & 2, and The Crusade episode 1 compared to the rest of the 60s era. These are episodes for which the only known surviving copy is a Suppressed Field recording. If we were ever to recover any new missing episodes from Marco Polo, The Reign of Terror, or The Crusade, we would probably find them as Suppressed Field recordings because that’s how they were sold overseas. The copy of The Crusade episode 1 that survives, for example, is the print that was sold to New Zealand.
The BBC phased out Suppressed Field recordings for Doctor Who around the time when The Time Meddler and Galaxy 4 were airing.
I lived through all of those processes, and when a new VHS / DVD arrived, whilst I was keen to see the resultant footage, I was also hoping for a behind the scenes doco to explain the magic used to bring us the new image. The Restoration Team – I agree – Absolute Wizards!
Another thing with the black and white episodes is that they also lost the sound. But fans had make off air recordings at home, often by pointing the microphone of a cassette tape recorder at the TV speaker.
7:52 only 95 now! 😀