Restoration
While the original 625-line PAL videotapes of some serials starring Jon Pertwee were wiped for reuse and a few episodes are only held as 16mm black and white telerecordings, some colour versions survived in the form of 525-line NTSC colour videotapes that were sent for broadcasting overseas. In the early 1980s, some of these tapes were returned to the UK from the BBC's office in Toronto, Canada, including all seven episodes of Inferno (1970) just after it was aired in colour by CKVU in Vancouver; other colour material had been aired in the late 1970s by Toronto-based TV Ontario. As well as this, some off-air colour videotape copies recorded by an American for a British fan in the late 1970s were recovered in the early 1990s, and their colour signals were used (along with colourisation techniques where necessary) to colourise the higher-quality 16 mm monochrome film copies.
The serials that were restored in this way, and thus no longer incomplete, were Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons, and The Dæmons. Off-air NTSC colour tapes are held for all seven episodes of The Ambassadors of Death, but are too badly damaged to permit anything more than a partial restoration, with the cost of repair being prohibitive.
A new Reverse Standards Conversion process was used for the first time on the 2005 DVD release of The Claws of Axos. This process can be used on NTSC version master tapes to restore them to something closer to their original PAL colour state. Another digital image processing technique used for the DVD releases is VidFIRE, which restores the fluid video look to telerecorded episodes only held on film.
The colour of Planet of the Daleks Episode 3 was reconstructed using a combination of classic colourisation and a new method using the chroma dots in the black-and-white copy.
The colour of Invasion of the Dinosaurs Episode 1 was reconstructed using the chroma dots in the black-and-white copy. Because this copy has only the information of two colours, the third (blue) was included manually. The DVD includes both the reconstructed colour and the black-and-white version.
Read more about this topic: Doctor Who Missing Episodes
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“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)