Phil Collins: Flaming Youth (Color Decoded) Broadcast May 14, 1970

Flaming Youth Ark 2 - TROS Dutch TV broadcast 14 May 1970 Mimed songs in the Dutch TV Studio: Earthglow (0:06) Weightless (2:57) Changes (5:31) Space Child (11:07) From Now On (16:06) (Flash) Gordon Smith - Vocals & Guitar Ronnie Caryl - Bass Guitar & Vocals Brian Chatton - Organ & Vocals Phil Collins - Drums, Vocal & Organ Technical Details: The color recovered in this Flaming Youth film is entirely thanks to the painstaking work of Richard Russell and Peter Crocker. Richard Russell, a former BBC research and development engineer, pioneered software for recovering original television color from surviving black-and-white film recordings. His work helped restore classic Doctor Who material, including Planet of the Daleks and The Mind of Evil. He brought his expertise to this Flaming Youth footage, working alongside fellow restoration specialist Peter Crocker. I worked with Richard off and on for four years, doing tests and trying to obtain a transfer of sufficient quality for his color decoding process. This performance survives on black-and-white film by recording (telerecording) the television picture directly from a screen. Broadcasters used these film copies primarily to allow expensive (at the time) videotapes to be erased and reused. Despite being in B&W, this film retains traces of the original television color signal as a fine pattern known as “chroma dots.” So decoding these patterns allows actual recorded color information to be recovered. But in the case of this Flaming Youth footage, extracting that information was more difficult than normal. The archive's cropping, digital enlargement, and processing had damaged the delicate patterns needed for accurate decoding. Richard worked to recover the surviving information, while Peter undertook the demanding work of correcting how the decoded colors were assigned. Their combined technical skill and persistence brought back color that would otherwise be impossible with the Dutch TV archive's current transfer. The result is a partial recovery of genuine color. But this should be considered the best restoration possible from the available material, rather than definitive. There are still some missing color and artifacts from the chroma patterns that the partial color-decoding process could not eliminate, but they are significantly reduced. A new, uncropped and uncompressed high-resolution scan of the original film could allow the full range of recorded colors to be recovered. But convincing/paying the Dutch television archive to do this is unlikely. At least the color recovered so far gives us a massive improvement over what was previously available. genesismuseum.com