About recoloring from absolute Black and White

Hi team,
I´m a newcommer to video editing aiming to get really relly into it.

Question: how do I colorize a clip that was originally black and white. A clip lacking any RGB or any other color mode/info when brought into Resolve.

What happened to me: I produced a totally B&W image in GIMP, intentionally. Brought it with no color info into Resolve as a clip, then tried adding color into it via Color tab and ofcourse, it does not react at all, as I expected.

But then, found no way to fix this in Resolve - I can not find an approach similar to image editing (passing the image back to RGB, adding layers, colorizing these) in resolve.

I googled a lot but everything I get is "how to make B&W videos in resolve" or color grading in general, but nothing about passing a B&W clip back to colors.

Also tried here in the forums, but "black and white" results in many many norelated threads.

Any guiadance or poitining will be appreciated.

You can't get the color back in GIMP?

I think doing it in Resolve will be...time consuming.

The short answer is: You can't. Once the color information is lost, it's lost forever.

The slightly longer answer is: IF (and it's a big if) you have the time, you can individually track each surface and add color to that power window.

The long answer is: There are a few recoloring machine learning projects (https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/colorizer came up at the first result, no idea about how good it is. Another option is deoldify) where a program can statistically guess what color a thing is, but it will never be accurate or perfect.

Since bw image is a representation of luminance, you need to restore the chroma channels. This is traditionally done by rotoscoping all different areas and coloring them as necessary. In Resolve you should be able to do it with lift operators on specific channels and channel combiner + colorspace transform in the end to form RGB data from luma-chroma representation again.

Does anyone know a FX plugins for Davinci Resolve that can add colour to B&W footage?

how do I colorize a clip that was originally black and white.
…
I produced a totally B&W image in GIMP, intentionally.
…
tried adding color to it in Color tab
…
I can not find an approach similar to image editing (passing the image back to RGB, adding layers, colorizing these) in resolve.

Can you be more specific in what effect you’re looking for? Since you purposely made a black and white image I’m assuming you’re not looking to just “fix” it, restoring natural color that you could have had easily in the first place.

Colorizing B&W movies is a very labor-intensive process, basically like animation. It's done as a series of hand-drawn masks and layers and mattes. Skilled artists create the "Key Frames" (the main references for each scene, and then animators and "in-betweeners" (lower-paid technicians) stitch it all together and continue that same look throughout each shot. Because every shot in a live-action movie happens in three-dimensional space, you might have a woman on the street with a blue coat walking in front of a guy wearing a red shirt... so the problem now becomes stopping the colors from one object (or person) interfering with the other. There's lots of animation and VFX software you could use to colorize a movie, including Fuson or After Effects, but not Resolve per se. Automation can help with the tracking, but I'm not convinced A.I. is ready to actually colorize an entire film yet.

Colorization is a very, very difficult and expensive process. If you've seen the recent CBS color reruns of the classic 1960s B&W Dick Van D*ke Show or I Love Lucy, both were colorized by West Wing Studos in Valencia, California and also in Goa, India. I believe the cost for each show is said to be about $20,000 per minute, so an average episode is about $350,000 or so.

I worked on the colorized version of Night of the Living Dead released by Legend 3D about 20 years ago, supervised by George Romero (who came in for a day or two). The Legend exec told me they took more than 3 months and spent about a million dollars colorizing that film, then basically had me even it out with daVinci 2K in post. Surprisingly, Romero was thrilled, because he was paid for his time and he told me "I never made a dime on this film because of the crooks who distributed it, so it's good to finally see some money at the end of the rainbow." And he was fine with the color because we didn't make it too garish or crazy. Romero also said, "we would've shot it in color, except we blew most of our $100,000 budget on 16mm film stock, effects, and actors, so we couldn't afford color."

Yes but that was 20 years ago. Not saying it is easy but with todays tech and AI increasingly prevalent in editing softwares its not impossible a plugin would allow coloriazing B&W footages.

Yes but that was 20 years ago. Not saying it is easy but with todays tech and AI increasingly prevalent in editing softwares its not impossible a plugin would allow coloriazing B&W footages.

Presently, colouring B&W footage is a highly specialised process. There are no simple plugins that do it. Maybe in a few more years.

If it’s just single images, use one of the free/cheap ai re-colorizer things like this

https://imagecolorizer.com/colorize


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Yes but that was 20 years ago. Not saying it is easy but with todays tech and AI increasingly prevalent in editing softwares its not impossible a plugin would allow coloriazing B&W footages.

And yet... the I Love Lucy and Dick Van D*ke Shows were done in the last 5-6 years. A.I. is not all that people think it is, nor is machine learning. Everything has limits. If they could do it that way, every Disney and Pixar animated film would be done by robots.

A.I. is not all that people think it is, nor is machine learning.

Care to elaborate on this, what kind of AI are you talking about here which is not machine learning?

If they could do it that way, every Disney and Pixar animated film would be done by robots.

This is a literal equivalent of "if computers are so great why does anyone have to work". Why do colorists exist if there is Resolve? A tool by itself is totally useless, you can sit and stare at a hammer all day, no nails will get pounded in. Are you aware of all the ML tools used in film and animation production right now, yet robots aren't doing squat...

Theoretically, could we mimic the technicolor 3-strip process by splitting a clip into three nodes, and then use the RGB mixer in monochrome mode to adjust the luminance values of each node before converting them to individual RGB color channels and blending them together?

Theoretically, could we mimic the technicolor 3-strip process by splitting a clip into three nodes, and then use the RGB mixer in monochrome mode to adjust the luminance values of each node before converting them to individual RGB color channels and blending them together?

No, because Technicolor is a lot more than that, kind of a combination of lighting technique, nitrate film emulsions, and the unique organic dyes used in the release prints. To understand what Technicolor really was, read these books:

Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing
https://www.amazon.com/Technicolor-Movi ... 0786418095

Glorious Technicolor: The Movie's Magic Rainbow
https://www.amazon.com/Glorious-Technic ... 0964706504

The Dawn of Technicolor
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Technicolor ... 0935398287

Mr. Technicolor: The Autobiography of Dr. Herbert Kalmus
https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Technicolor-H ... 1882127315

Color Mania: The Material of Color in Photography and Film
by Barbara Flückiger
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Mania-Mate ... 3037786078

Color Cinematography (1951)
by Adrian Cornwell-Clyne
https://www.amazon.com/Colour-Cinematog ... B0000CI1FZ

Dr. Kalmus' book is particularly interesting -- though he did not live to finish it -- and what's there does reveal a little bit about the many guarded secrets behind how Technicolor worked.

For anybody trying to recreate the look: the lighting and art direction was a huge part of it. Merely splitting the colors into RGB (or YCM) won't do it. Don't forget that projected film is a reflected image, and the image you see on a monitor is a direct view image -- that alone changes things.

Something can be done with Ebsynth it’s an Ai assisted propagation of style.
You grab a frame from a sequence, color a frame, ebsynth propagate along sequence, sometimes you should correct or add newer frame hand made colored and you can do some work.
It was born to assist rotoscoping, was used to transform live in art painted picture animated, try if it can work for you. I don’t know if it work on B/w picture


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