black & white to colour

[redaxx]

been editing some black and white footage was wondering if anyone can tell me of a fast and easy method to convert black & white film to colour? I've recently seen some old black and white films that have been restored to colour, these were retail DVDs and was sure if this is something that can be done on a home PC and if so which programs could be used, any help or advice is greatly appreciated, Cheers.

[anonymez]

hi redaxx,

if anyone can tell me of a fast and easy method to convert black & white film to colour?

colorizing video is a labourious task. there is always going to be motion between frames, and i'm not sure there is a consumer level program 'intelligent' enough to even roughly detect which part of the frame is to be which colour when there is motion.

you need to output the frames as still images (virtualdub can do this. the number of stills = length x framerate), colorize each one with photo editing software, then input back into virtualdub & encode

if you're familiar with colorizing, i'd estimate it'd take between 1 and 2 minutes per frame. lets say we're colorizing a 5 min video, wihch is 5x60x25 = 7500 frames. it'll take a very long time, you'll need a lot of patience