Two absolute geniuses, they certainly don't make shows like this anymore.
And both recovered episodes have had the colour recovery process applied to them......Both the M&Ws are being shown in colour on Boxing Day on BBC2.
Richard Russell posted this
Illustrated using a frame from one of the Morecambe & Wise episodes, the main stages in the Colour Recovery process: 16 mm B&W film scan, measurement of geometric distortion, determination of the signs (+/-) of the U&V chroma, recovered original-colour image. Coded in BBC BASIC!
Episode 5 is slightly warped, which means that it doesn't lie flat against the 16mm gate on the Spirit telecine it was transferred on.
For the BBC2 repeat, we scanned the film at R3store on their Scanity. It has a 180 degree film wrap which means we can retain focus edge to edge even if the film is warped. The 1920 x 1440 files we created weren't compatible with Richard Russell's colour recovery software and initially we didn't think the colour could be recovered, but Richard came to the rescue and solved the problem.
Paul
On the day of Eric Morecambe's death, his comedy partner Ernie Wise visited the TV-am studio to talk about his great friend. Eric and Ernie were one of the greatest of all British comedy duos.