Solved Old Black and White Footage

Hi all,

While in France in 1991 I have old footage as an mpg file which is in black and white. These days old black and white footage can be restored in colour. Am I able to do this in Magix VP16 please.

Thanks
BobH

The simple answer is no.
The process of converting B&W film into colour cannot be done with consumer grade software.
As far as I am aware, the process is extremely expensive and takes a huge amount of time to do.
When it is done, the colours are "guessed" and approximated.

Hi Derek, I expected this but I thought I would ask.

Very best wishes
BobH

Hi BobH
Dr Zen is correct, there are no affordable consumer or prosumer software options for colorizing monochrome video.
Definitely a long shot but if your clip is not too long, it mmaayy be possible to export the clip to a sequence of images and then use the new Colorize feature in the recently issued Photoshop Elements 2020 to colorize each frame and then import the sequence back into Vegas. Despite Elements automation though its likely that there would need to be some manual tweaking of each individual image. Given that the process wouldn’t involve any temporal analysis I’m also not sure what the consistency would be like between frames. George Peirson of the How to Gurus provides a nice look at the colorize feature from 8:58 to 13:00 in his review of PE 2020 which might give a sense of the manual effort that would be required .

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Cheers, Robbie

Hello Robbie and thank you for your reply.

The video dates from 1991 and was shot in Secam in France, hence the black and white. I have the memories of family members and friends which is the important thing but I thought I would ask if there was a relatively simple way to add colour. Obviously not so I will just leave it as it is.

Thanks for your comments.

BobH