- Reverse engineering Dr. Who into color
Slashdot links to an effort to work on some monochrome prints of Dr. Who episodes for which the color originals were destroyed. The technique in question is a refinement of one used before on an episode I need to track down to get a sense of how this stacks up to the notoriously bad colorization efforts undertaken by Turner years ago. From the description, it sounds like it is make using of an artifact of the film, a chroma dot, which makes me optimistic about the quality of the end product. - Are shorter forms of content increasing appeal for longer forms?
Mike Masnick at Techdirt weighs in on the series of posts, from Nick Carr through Clive Thompason to Anil Dash, that I mentioned in the intro to the transcription/edit of my Social Gravity Well monologue from a year ago. Masnick’s post helps establish a bit more context around the conversation and highlights some interesting if unsubstantiated questions to ponder. - MIT Media Lab prints playable flute
Far and away the most exciting 3D printing projects are the ones that yield functional objects of some sort. In this instance, Slashdot points to Amit Zoran’s first attempt, an acoustically successful one, to produce a wood wind instrument. The instrument in question is more than a tube with holes, judging by the photos, including working valves and promising much bolder experiments to come. - Microsoft loses appeal in patent case, may affect future damage calculations , Bloomberg via GrokLaw NewsPicks
- Android Honeycomb to require dual core processors, Slashdot
- First PS3 custom firmware created after crack of master signing key, Slashdot
- Android ported to Chrome OS prototype laptop, ReadWriteWeb
Exploring digital citizenry as a creator and a consumer.
I remember reading the theory behind the color recovery process back on the usenet Doctor Who groups in the late 90s, but I think at the time it would have needed too much CPU power to do in software and specialized hardware was cost prohibitive. It isn’t colorization (which is also vastly improved from what you may remember) but recovering the original color signal.
I know there was one recent-ish Who DVD that they had digitaly colorized, then tried this recovery process as a proof of concept. I think in the end they blended the two for the final product. I’ll see if I can dig up the link.
Here is the article on the DVD I referred to above. It gets into a bit more of the technical details than you find elsewhere. There’s even more technical information on the process at the Colour Recovery Working Group wiki.