VidFIRE
Encyclopedia
VidFIRE is a restoration technique intended to restore the video-like motion of footage originally shot with television cameras now existing only in formats with telerecording as their basis. The word is both a noun
and a verb
.
. Each field can be loosely seen as half a frame, but each field is also a discrete image separated from the previous field by 1/50 second. This difference in the rate of change of the image is one of the factors contributing to the "video look", familiar to viewers as the more immediate, "live" feel seen in many soap opera
s and sports programmes.
When videotape
technology was first created, in the 1950s, tapes were extremely costly; but their reusability meant that the cost of a single tape could be spread across several productions, with each successive production erasing and then reusing the tape from a previous one, with the result that relatively few programmes produced on videotape in the 1950s and 1960s still exist in their original format.
The expense of videotape and the various mutually incompatible television standards around the world made it impractical at the time for programme makers to sell their productions to foreign broadcasters in their original video form. Film, however, was considered a universal medium, and most broadcasters had the facility to broadcast from it. Before the development of usable video tape, programme makers such as the BBC
developed the technology to record programmes—either live or for prerecording—from specially adapted monitors with a film camera. The resulting film recordings are called telerecordings in the UK and kinescope
s in the United States.
Programmes often were copied in this way for rebroadcast or overseas sale before the original videotapes were reused. Most live- and videotape-originated television from this era exists today only as film recordings. However, the film recording system "locks" two video fields, previously separated by 1/50 second, into a single film frame. When the film is played back, the original video-like motion is lost.
software to create an intermediate image, which exists temporally between two film frames. For example, if all frames of a twenty-five minute film recording were processed, the result would be double the amount of frames and a new running length of fifty minutes. Playback at this stage (at 25 frame/s) gives smooth movement at half speed, due to the presence of interpolated images.
The programme is then further processed by interlacing adjacent frames, which halves the running time back to the original twenty-five minutes. The final result is video with fifty fields per second, alternate fields being sourced from the original film frame or the new interpolated image respectively. This has the effect of restoring the "video look" to the production.
, and the film should be cleaned, digitally noise-reduced
, and repaired, before processing.
A further, self-imposed limitation is that VidFIRE is used only to process material that originally was produced using video cameras. There is no technical reason why film-originated material cannot be processed, but it is not considered to be "in the spirit" of restoration. It is also possible that the difference in lighting and picture balance on film may mean the final processed images look subjectively "wrong".
routinely VidFIREs 1960s episodes of Doctor Who
when preparing them for release on DVD
. The process has also been applied to a number of other programmes, including two previously lost episodes of the BBC sitcom Dad's Army
, which were rediscovered in 2001. The episodes, "Operation Kilt
" and "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage
," were VidFIREd in preparation for their broadcast as part of a "Dad's Army evening" on BBC Two
. The remainder of series one and two of Dad's Army was later processed and released on DVD. Episodes of Sykes
and Public Eye have also been treated for DVD.
A slightly revised version of the process, with an improved motion-estimation engine, was first used on the BBC's 2005 DVD release The Quatermass Collection(Quatermass and The Pit only.) and then on all subsequent relevant Doctor Who DVD releases.
Beyond this, the technique (although critically applauded) has seen relatively little exposure, perhaps because of a belief within the broadcasting industry that public interest in the kind of archive television that would benefit from VidFIRE is insufficient to justify the cost of processing.
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
and a verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
.
Background
Film recorded for the purposes of United Kingdom television production is usually recorded at 25 frames per second; there is an unrecorded temporal gap between each frame and the next. In contrast, video pictures are recorded as a stream of video fieldsField (video)
In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame...
. Each field can be loosely seen as half a frame, but each field is also a discrete image separated from the previous field by 1/50 second. This difference in the rate of change of the image is one of the factors contributing to the "video look", familiar to viewers as the more immediate, "live" feel seen in many soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
s and sports programmes.
When videotape
Videotape
A videotape is a recording of images and sounds on to magnetic tape as opposed to film stock or random access digital media. Videotapes are also used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram...
technology was first created, in the 1950s, tapes were extremely costly; but their reusability meant that the cost of a single tape could be spread across several productions, with each successive production erasing and then reusing the tape from a previous one, with the result that relatively few programmes produced on videotape in the 1950s and 1960s still exist in their original format.
The expense of videotape and the various mutually incompatible television standards around the world made it impractical at the time for programme makers to sell their productions to foreign broadcasters in their original video form. Film, however, was considered a universal medium, and most broadcasters had the facility to broadcast from it. Before the development of usable video tape, programme makers such as the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
developed the technology to record programmes—either live or for prerecording—from specially adapted monitors with a film camera. The resulting film recordings are called telerecordings in the UK and kinescope
Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor...
s in the United States.
Programmes often were copied in this way for rebroadcast or overseas sale before the original videotapes were reused. Most live- and videotape-originated television from this era exists today only as film recordings. However, the film recording system "locks" two video fields, previously separated by 1/50 second, into a single film frame. When the film is played back, the original video-like motion is lost.
Restoring the video look
VidFIRE was developed by Peter Finklestone to address the motion differences caused by the telerecording process. It uses motion estimationMotion estimation
Motion estimation is the process of determining motion vectors that describe the transformation from one 2D image to another; usually from adjacent frames in a video sequence. It is an ill-posed problem as the motion is in three dimensions but the images are a projection of the 3D scene onto a 2D...
software to create an intermediate image, which exists temporally between two film frames. For example, if all frames of a twenty-five minute film recording were processed, the result would be double the amount of frames and a new running length of fifty minutes. Playback at this stage (at 25 frame/s) gives smooth movement at half speed, due to the presence of interpolated images.
The programme is then further processed by interlacing adjacent frames, which halves the running time back to the original twenty-five minutes. The final result is video with fifty fields per second, alternate fields being sourced from the original film frame or the new interpolated image respectively. This has the effect of restoring the "video look" to the production.
Limitations
Depending on the quality of the film stock and how much care has been taken of the film in the years since it was first recorded, film recordings can be very grainy, dirty and scratched. The appearance of these film artefacts on the processed programme would break the illusion that the viewer is watching a videotape recording, therefore to maintain the VidFIRE effect it is imperative the image be as clean and stable as possible. The best available copy of the film-recorded programme should be used, preferably the original camera negativeNegative (photography)
In photography, a negative may refer to three different things, although they are all related.-A negative:Film for 35 mm cameras comes in long narrow strips of chemical-coated plastic or cellulose acetate. As each image is captured by the camera onto the film strip, the film strip advances so that...
, and the film should be cleaned, digitally noise-reduced
Noise reduction
Noise reduction is the process of removing noise from a signal.All recording devices, both analogue or digital, have traits which make them susceptible to noise...
, and repaired, before processing.
A further, self-imposed limitation is that VidFIRE is used only to process material that originally was produced using video cameras. There is no technical reason why film-originated material cannot be processed, but it is not considered to be "in the spirit" of restoration. It is also possible that the difference in lighting and picture balance on film may mean the final processed images look subjectively "wrong".
Commercial use
The Doctor Who Restoration TeamDoctor Who Restoration Team
The Doctor Who Restoration Team is a loose collection of Doctor Who fans, many within the television industry, who restore Doctor Who episodes for release on DVD....
routinely VidFIREs 1960s episodes of Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
when preparing them for release on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
. The process has also been applied to a number of other programmes, including two previously lost episodes of the BBC sitcom Dad's Army
Dad's Army
Dad's Army is a British sitcom about the Home Guard during the Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft and broadcast on BBC television between 1968 and 1977. The series ran for 9 series and 80 episodes in total, plus a radio series, a feature film and a stage show...
, which were rediscovered in 2001. The episodes, "Operation Kilt
Operation Kilt
-TV episode:Operation Kilt is an episode in the British comedy series Dad's Army which was originally transmitted on Saturday 1 March 1969.-Synopsis:The platoon have to defend the church hall from a platoon of Highlanders on an exercise.-Plot:...
" and "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage
The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage
-TV episode:The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage is an episode in the British comedy series Dad's Army, which was originally transmitted on Saturday 8 March 1969.-Synopsis:...
," were VidFIREd in preparation for their broadcast as part of a "Dad's Army evening" on BBC Two
BBC Two
BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...
. The remainder of series one and two of Dad's Army was later processed and released on DVD. Episodes of Sykes
Sykes
Sykes is a British sitcom that aired on BBC1 from 1972 to 1979. Starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, it was written by Eric Sykes, who had previously starred with Jacques in Sykes and A... and Sykes and a Big, Big Show ....
and Public Eye have also been treated for DVD.
A slightly revised version of the process, with an improved motion-estimation engine, was first used on the BBC's 2005 DVD release The Quatermass Collection(Quatermass and The Pit only.) and then on all subsequent relevant Doctor Who DVD releases.
Beyond this, the technique (although critically applauded) has seen relatively little exposure, perhaps because of a belief within the broadcasting industry that public interest in the kind of archive television that would benefit from VidFIRE is insufficient to justify the cost of processing.
Miscellaneous
- Early in its development, the process was known jokingly as "Video Field Artificial Restoration Technique" or VidFART.
- The VidFIRE process is now owned by SVS Resources, a specialist archive film restoration company.
- An easter egg included on the DVD release of "The Tomb of the CybermenThe Tomb of the CybermenThe Tomb of the Cybermen is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who that originally aired in four weekly parts from September 2 to September 23, 1967 and is the earliest serial starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor to exist in its entirety...
" featured a brief clip from that serial with VidFIRE processing applied. This was an experiment by the Doctor Who Restoration Team to see how well VidFIRE would survive the MPEG-2MPEG-2MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...
encodingEncoderAn encoder is a device, circuit, transducer, software program, algorithm or person that converts information from one format or code to another, for the purposes of standardization, speed, secrecy, security, or saving space by shrinking size.-Media:...
process. The experiment demonstrated that the VidFIRE illusion was not diminished by MPEG encoding and so the next relevant DVD release, "The AztecsThe Aztecs (Doctor Who)-VHS and DVD releases:*The serial was released on VHS in 1992.*On 21 October 2002, it was released on Region 2 DVD. This release was the first Doctor Who DVD to use the VidFIRE process throughout the whole production.-External links:Fan reviews...
" was VidFIREd in its entirety. - The only '60s Doctor Who episodes not to undergo the VidFIRE process on technical grounds are Part Three of Planet of Giants-Crisis, Part One of The Crusade-The Lion and parts 1-4 of The Time Meddler, both starring William Hartnell.
- The Doctor Who stories that have had this process applied to them for DVD release are An Unearthly Child, The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction, The Keys of Marinus, The Aztecs, The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Only Episodes 1-4 & 6), The Rescue, The Romans, The Web Planet, The Crusade (only Episode 3), The Space Museum, The Chase, The Daleks' Master Plan (only Episodes 2, 5 and 10), The War Machines, The Underwater Menace (only Episode 3), The Moonbase (only Episodes 2 & 4), The Evil of the Daleks (only Episode 2), The Abominable Snowmen (only Episode 2), The Enemy of the World (only Episode 3), The Wheel in Space (only Episodes 3 & 6), The Dominators, The Mind Robber, The Invasion (only Episodes 2-3 & 5-8), The Seeds of Death, The Space Pirates (only Episode 2), The War Games, Doctor Who and the Silurians, & Planet of the Daleks (only Episode 3).
- The Doctor Who stories that have had this process applied to them for VHS release are The Sensorites, The Reign of Terror (only Episodes 1-3 & 6), Planet of Giants (only Episodes 1 & 2), The Gunfighters, The Faceless Ones (only Episodes 1 & 3), The Web of Fear (only Episode 1), The Ambassadors of Death (only Episodes 2-7) & Invasion of the Dinosaurs (only Episode 1).
External links
- Doctor Who Restoration Team
- The Pamela Nash Experience--"TV Technology" (highly detailed articles on quadruplex videotape, film recording, and the BBC's early VERA system)
- 'Memories are Made of This'--clear introduction to techniques used to restore archive TV, including VidFIRE and advanced PAL decoding
- Interview with Peter Crocker of SVS Resources