Clever Fellows and Computers Means Restored Television Programme

For years, decades even, the pilot episode of the British programme 'Are You Being Served?' was only retained as a black and white telerecording (simply put this is a means of transferring video to film by pointing a film camera at a flat television screen and filming it) of the original colour videotape. It existed, which is more than can be said for a number of programmes, but always stuck out as it was the only episode not to be retained as the original colour videotape.

A few years ago, a clever fellow worked out a way to have a computer look at the frames in a telerecording and generate a frame between two existing film frames. By adding this extra information to the recording, it gave it more of the look of the original video.

A couple years ago another clever fellow realized that the fuzzy quality of some telerecordings was due to the colour information being retained on the telerecording in the form of dots. He whipped up a way for a computer to decipher the dots into colour information, testing it with telerecordings that still had an original colour videotape in existence so that he could hone the technique.

I believe both processes have been applied to the pilot episode of 'Are You Being Served?' and it was broadcast in Britain around Christmas time. The motion still looks a bit like film but the colour is impressive indeed.

Ah computers and clever fellas. If they could only get all those bored fellas that write computer viruses to work on restoring old Television, who knows what they could accomplish?