1957 CBS Cinderella kinescope: possibility of colour recovery!

[Aussie Bloke]

G'day all.

I was previewing the kinescope recording of the 1957 CBS colour broadcast of Cinderella https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1F4YhBOA14 and I can literally see chroma dots in the picture which means the colour information in this kinescope film recording is present. I've attached a snapshot strongly showing chroma dots.

So I think it is quite possible the colour can be digitally restored using the colour recovery method developed in the UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ which was used to successfully restore colour on BBC programs like Dr Who, Dad's Army etc. that were in colour but recorded to B&W film. More info on colour recovery can be seen here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery

Does anyone know which CBS archive or independent archive holds the original film print of this program?

I personally think the original print of this film should be scanned at 4K upwards quality and that chroma dot colour digital colour recovery method applied, I'm sure much of the colour will be recovered! I wonder how many other B&W kinescopes of colour programs out there have the chroma dots too?

[old_tv_nut]

Sad to tell you that an attempt was made to do this, and while the technique would have worked, there is a problem in that the dot pattern fades out in the highlights, perhaps due to kinescope spot size. The result is that the important well lighted areas, like Julie Andrews' face, have no chroma dots to recover, so you would be going to a colorization process instead of chroma recovery. At that point, you may as well just do artificial colorization of the whole thing.

More details: Ed Reitan initially saw this on the DVD, and enlisted me to take a look at it, in 2005. I determined that the MPEG-2 encoding on the DVD scrambled the dots badly, so that a scan of the original film would be needed. We discussed it further around 2009, including the successful work that was done in England to recover color from monochrome kinescopes of PAL programs. Ed passed away in early 2015 before being able to obtain access to the film.

In 2015, I discussed the project with some people at ETF, to find out that he had never mentioned it to anyone. They looked for anything in his effects, which they were curating, but nothing turned up. I also talked to a colleague of Ed's who had worked on video tape restoration - still nothing. The father of one of his colleagues on the quadtape list, age 97 in 2016, had worked on the show, and had his hands on a copy of the kinescope at CBS when he worked there, but nothing in 2016.

Then in August 2016 I contacted the Library of Congress. They had only a Betamax copy, and suggested contacting the Paley center and UCLA. This got me in touch with Jane Klain at the Paley Center, who connected me with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who hold the rights to the program and held copies of the Kinescopes. She informed me that she had spent years searching for a copy of the quad tape, but none had been found.

At this point (Sept. 2016) I was put in touch with Ted Chapin, President and director of R&H, and Dan Wingate, a well known film/video restoration expert. Everyone was excited about the possibility of restoring it in time for the program's 60th anniversary in 2017.

Then began a search for where to do some test scans, arrange shipping, etc. Finally in January of 2017, scans were done by Deluxe on the Sony Pictures lot.

The samples were sent to me, and the very simple processing I was able to do on my computer at home showed color of good amplitude (very much out of sync, but not noisy like the DVD) on darker objects, but alas little or nothing on brighter areas like actors faces. It was verified that this was the case on the film, and not any error in scanning.

And that's where the project ended. I think proper color could have been recovered without the advantage of phase insensitivity that PAL has, but there was no use proceeding any further when important areas of the scenes had little or no chroma. The last email I have is from Dan Wingate in early March, 2017, agreeing that we were at a stopping point.

[old_tv_nut]

Note: compare the dots on the King's tunic and face to the lack of them on the Queen's dress and face.
In the high resolution scans you can alse see there are dots on the Queen's lipstick.

Edit: Dan Wingate had an idea that another program might have dots, but when I examined it, it turned out not to be the case.

Another note: Jane Klain at the Paley Center was well acquainted with Ed Reitan, and even went to dinner with him and his wife on some occasions, but he apparently had never mentioned this idea to her.

[Aussie Bloke]

Thanks for letting me know in detail, it's a real shame that it can't be completely colour restored. I do notice the highlights you can't see the chroma dots but I thought it was the way the film was scanned.

I suppose a hybrid process of chroma dot recovery on the darker areas and colour tint painting on the higher lighted areas could be an option but I guess you guys are probably not keen on doing that. But it is an option. I know with some Dr Who episodes, some scenes which colour couldn't be recovered was colour tinted while other scenes colour recovered.

I notice with British kinescopes of the late 60s and early 70s seem to be more precise in sharpness and lighting levels which is probably why they've had better success in recovering colour for them.

[old_tv_nut]

I really don't know why the dots are lost in the highlights. They may not be lost in the original (which does not seem to exist). The R&H films are 16mm release prints, so the loss of highlight dots may be due to highlight compression in the copying process. The British material may be closer to the source.

As far as I know, no one has been working on this since. If other sources do show up, hopefully someone who's aware of this effort will notice them.

[old_tv_nut]

FYI, if you look carefully at the King's upper right shoulder (viewer's left) you can make out square blocks of stronger and weaker dot patterns. This kind of thing is due to the video coding/compression (which also distorts the phase of the dots on a per-block basis), and does not appear in an uncompressed scan.

[old_tv_nut]

Before anyone asks for examples of what we did, I have to disappoint you, because even if I had them, the rights to the material are strictly controlled by the R&H organization.

[Aussie Bloke]

Thanks for the info. When you were sent samples from R&H, what was the video quality of them?

I am wondering if R&H were to scan their 16mm film print at 4K+ quality with no compression or low compression, would the chroma dots in the highlights remain?

I am seeing films on YouTube at 4K and the detail is just mind blowing even with 8mm home movies.

[pallophotophone]

Has anyone considered the fact that lenticular color film could have been used for color kinescope recording? I asked the folks that did the reissue of Mary Martin's Peter Pan
NBC broadcasts that were transferred from kinescope recordings and no one responded.
I still believe there is a lenticular print surviving.
Unless you are aware of the process and have the 3 color lens mounted filter, lenticular color film projects as any ordinary monochrome film.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Aussie Bloke

Thanks for the info. When you were sent samples from R&H, what was the video quality of them?

I am wondering if R&H were to scan their 16mm film print at 4K+ quality with no compression or low compression, would the chroma dots in the highlights remain?

I am seeing films on YouTube at 4K and the detail is just mind blowing even with 8mm home movies.

As I said, sample frames were scanned at very high resolution, uncompressed, at DeLuxe on the Sony Pictures lot. There were no dots remaining in the highlights. I definitely asked them to double check that nothing odd was done that would have suppressed the dots. Sadly, they just aren't there.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by pallophotophone

Has anyone considered the fact that lenticular color film could have been used for color kinescope recording? I asked the folks that did the reissue of Mary Martin's Peter Pan
NBC broadcasts that were transferred from kinescope recordings and no one responded.
I still believe there is a lenticular print surviving.
Unless you are aware of the process and have the 3 color lens mounted filter, lenticular color film projects as any ordinary monochrome film.

CBS did not have color kinescoping or lenticular film at that time. The dots only got recorded because they failed to insert a chroma notch filter in the video feed. That was apparently fixed soon after, and no further dotty kinescope films were made, as far as anyone knows.

Side note: Ed Reitan was interested in restoring some lenticular recordings. He kept promising to send me a frame of color bars to work with, but never got around to it. Apparently, he was very close-mouthed about any ideas of his and only revealed them to maybe one person he thought could help. He had an idea that the lenticular film might be scanned on a flatbed scanner or dedicated slide scanner at high resolution and the stripes separated by computer processing. I tried to convince him that a slide projector and color filter would not only be simpler, but would work better. I had read about someone who was involved with lenticular and gave talks demonstrating it with a slide projector and filter. At the dramatic point, he would put the filter on the projector, changing the image to color. Whatever samples Ed had, got lost after his death.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

From what I understand kinnescope color recovery has only successfully been done on PAL color kinnescopes. PAL has the advantage of the chroma subcarrier phase reversing every line so phase (hue info) can be recovered by comparing adjacent lines relative phase.
NTSC keeps color carrier phase constant so without the sync burst there is no relative reference like what PAL gives.
Can NTSC kinnescopes practically be recovered using this method?

You are correct. Areas that have significant energy on the axis that is in phase from line to line can be a reference. Then it is a matter of resolving which quadrant the chroma is in, which is relatively easy.

The people who did the PAL recovery have surmised that it would be impossible for NTSC.

I still strongly believe it could be done, but in the NTSC kinescope, you have several compounding (and confounding) issues.

1) The dot phase changes 180 degrees as you go from one line to the next in a FIELD. Since the film frame contains two fields, the dots in two vertically adjacent lines in the FRAME are the same phase. The vertical "switching" of phase means that the geometry of the recovery scan must be corrected to match the geometric distortions of the original image within very tight tolerances. Any vertical jitter must be compensated. I think the recovery scan has to be done with a pull-down mechanism rather than continuous film motion, since continuous scans can have "Jello" effects if the film has variable shrinkage or doesn't move at an absolutely constant rate.

Working on this at home, I was only able to set overall height and width, so there was an area near the center of the image that roughly tracked the right phase, but you were 90 degrees off by the time you deviated more than 20% or so away from the center. This resulted in concentric rainbows of hue, getting more closely spaced as they went toward the edges of the image. Also, they were worse on the left side than the right, due to horizontal non-linearity in the kinescope tube.

One hopes that the geometry would not vary hugely from frame to frame, but I really don't know. If the image size breathed due to tolerance on high voltage regulation of the kinescope tube, that might require tweaking of the recovery scan size on a frame by frame basis. I don't believe the BBC encountered this problem, but we would surely have tried to pick their brains if our project went forward.

2) The PAL kinescopes were made at 25 frames per second, so each film frame contained exactly one video frame. NTSC used an inverse 3:2 pulldown, so some film frames had fields mixed from different video frames. Because there is a four-field sequence of chroma phase vs. line number, this messes up the vertical tracking of phase discussed in #1 above.

3) Because the NTSC phase cannot be resolved down to a quadrant decision, the phase adjustment would have to be manually aided. Due to film weave (horizontal placement variation) from film frame to film frame, the phase would also need to be tracked from frame to frame. A way of doing this might be to correct the first frame in a scene by eye (or selecting a skin tone area for automatic adjustment) and then assisting a hue tracking algorithm by pointing to a selected colorful object in each successive frame; or automatically tracking a colorful object with a motion detection algorithm.

So, there was still a lot of experimenting to do at the point where we gave up due to the unsuitability of the film.

[NewVista]

Don't see the point of all the work they went to for early 'Dr Who'? - unless there were some B&W-only copies of shows with Lala Ward, in which case, yes, go to work!

[Electronic M]

This may be a dopey question but are you sure the subcarrier dots were completely absent from the bright areas. The human eye is less sensitive to tiny differences in brightness than a machine. If you rescaled the brightness contrast of the image such that grays are black and full white is white I wonder if any near white subcarrier dots could be found hiding in the full white of the image?

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

This may be a dopey question but are you sure the subcarrier dots were completely absent from the bright areas. The human eye is less sensitive to tiny differences in brightness than a machine. If you rescaled the brightness contrast of the image such that grays are black and full white is white I wonder if any near white subcarrier dots could be found hiding in the full white of the image?

I asked the same question about the high quality scans. Everything on the film was well within the dynamic range of the scanner. I wish there were some dots left, but I tried increasing the highlight contrast until all that was left was noise. The scans were high bit depth, not tweaked to look good on a DVD, not an MPEG-coded version, but recorded as they would be for movie intermediates. So, if there was anything on the film, it would be in the digital file and we would have been able to pull it out.

Since these were dupes, there is still the possibility that the dots were on the original, but it has never been found and probably doesn't exist.