Restoration
During the original colour restorations, the team were keen to present the episodes as close to the original broadcast master tapes as possible, as explained by senior Restoration Team content producer Steve Roberts:
One thing which the team had to constantly be wary of was the temptation to not just restore, but to also improve on the original ... This would not be in the spirit of restoration, and the viewer would not be seeing a fair representation of the story as it originally was.
In 1997, whilst working on the VHS release of The War Machines, the approach of straight restoration, that of returning the episodes to their original state, became compromised by the desire to improve upon what was originally broadcast. Sound engineer Mark Ayres explained the difficulties:
There are some difficult decisions as to how far I should take my work. Because the original video has been transferred to film, I've tried to remove anything which was added during the process of optical copying – in other words taking it back to its condition on original transmission.
The War Machines featured a couple of instances of sound effects being faded in at the wrong points during the original studio recordings. Ayres:
It would be very easy to 'grab' a sound effect, and put it back where it's supposed to be. I haven't done it, because it was wrongly done at the time, and that's the way it should stay. All I've tried to do is correct technical defects which have occurred later with the film, I haven't corrected things which were done wrongly on the original tapes. Except in two places.
Ayres edited two instances of the original sound engineer on the serial fading the audio up and down quickly and creating uneven sound levels.
Since work on the Doctor Who DVD releases began, the frequency of these edits and revisions has increased. The earliest releases had the colour graded to appear more consistent. Later releases have had their opening and closing credits remade using modern software and Adobe fonts, untidy transitional frames have often been removed resulting in a fractionally shorter running time, miscued sound effects are routinely adjusted and visual effects considered substandard are adjusted. The colour grading is often noticeably different from the broadcast originals.
For example, when recreating effects for the serial The Pirate Planet, the Team explained that "in the remade version, we took the liberty of allowing the wrench to be blasted back towards the camera at this point to help 'sell' the effect better."
Read more about this topic: Doctor Who Restoration Team
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)