Black & White To Colour

[Red Raven]

I got some video footage which starts in colour then goes to black & white.Does anyone know of a script that can change black & white video into full colour?

Thanks

[krtek]

Good joke :D

[Red Raven]

Since it has been done within the film industry (there have been cases where old black & white films have been brought to full colour),i thought maybe it was possible.

[stickboy]

Those films are colorized by hand, and they look far from natural.

To go from black-and-white to color would be mapping a smaller colorspace to a larger one, and there's no way to do that without ambiguity.

To automate that sort of thing, you'd need a good AI that does image recognition to do the guesswork.

[mf]

Of course you can. Export your black and white parts to uncompressed BMP. Then open them in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, and paint in the colors using the "Color To Target" tool (in PSP this is located under the retouch tool(finger icon), setting the retouch mode in Tool options, I don't know where it's located in Photoshop). Then import your BMP files back into an AVI file (VirtualDub can do this), open it in avisynth and write this:

AVISource("yourmovie.avi")
withbw = last

withbw.Trim( insert settings here that cut out before the first black and white segment )
part1 = last

withbw.Trim( insert settings here that cut out after the first segment )
part2 = last

withbw.Trim( you get the point already )
etc = last


AVISource("coloredsegments.avi")
colored = last

colored.Trim( cut out the colored segments )
color1 = last


return part1+color1+part2+color2+etc

My point here is that these black and white movies were coloured by hand. It was done more efficiently than the PSP method (although you could probably optimize it by using layers and the "Color" blend method, so you can recycle already colored parts for static scenes), but it was still hand work similar to Disney animations. So feel free to invest the work in it, but still I would recommend buying the DVD instead of downloading a crippled screener :rolleyes:.

Edit: bah, stickboy beat me to it :D. Well I wrote it out more extensively, so I'm excused for taking longer to write the post :p.

[Red Raven]

ok i get the point :D

if it was as easy as buying another dvd i wouldnt have asked the question,it is old video footage from camcoder not some downloaded movie :rolleyes:

thanks anyway :(

[morsa]

You could try using the colorize filter for GIMP.
Take note that it would be a hard work.Another way may be using a comercial software like Combustion( to extract the color palette from the last color frame and try to add it to as many B&W frames as posible.
After all the hard work you'll need to apply some temporal color filter.
Hope this helps.

[r6d2]

Red Raven,

While you are at it, please try to find out how to convert the footage to 3D. :D

[Add:]
Actually, you can convert a B&W movie to Colour. You just have to choose which colour ;). This (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57643&highlight=sepia) thread may be of use. It has given me great results.

[mf]

Originally posted by Red Raven
ok i get the point :D

if it was as easy as buying another dvd i wouldnt have asked the question,it is old video footage from camcoder not some downloaded movie :rolleyes:

thanks anyway :(
Sorry for my mistrust. Often, on the internet are versions of movies that are not out on DVD yet. These are releases for film critics to watch (screen), and usually contain black and white parts to "cripple" the video so people are more motivated to watch the movie in cinemas. Your case sounded strangely familiar to that :rolleyes:.

[Mug Funky]

hmm. how much of this clip is b&w?

on VHS caps i've had runs of 1 or 2 frames that are b&w because of crap cables...

you can fix this with freezeframe() and mergechroma with reasonable results

[cweb]

I think some movies (Laurel and Hardy) were colorised using computer programs actually.. so it is theoretically possible to do (but difficult!).

[Mug Funky]

there's some experimental stuff out there that works with neural nets, actually.

you give it a sample pic with the correct colours for that scene and it maps it to the video and follows it. ingenius, but not quite there yet.

i can't find the links right now... there was something about it on www.maxforums.org a while ago.