Crossroads was recorded in Birmingham, UK, first at the Alpha Studios and then at ATV Centre using electronic television cameras. To begin with, the 405-line standard was used, before switching to 625 lines in 1969 when production moved to ATV Centre. Both formats used a standard of 50 images a second (called fields) to give the smooth motion we generally associate with live television and soap operas. This was either recorded to videotape or in the early days, was recorded straight onto 16mm film (essentially a film camera was pointed at a high-quality screen). This could be easier and cheaper than tying up an expensive and scarce VT machine for a daytime soap. In later years, the colour videotapes were copied over to 16mm black and white film for sale to other stations around the world that didn’t use the British TV standard.
As with a great deal of television, the original videotapes and films were lost, and Crossroads was no exception – surviving episodes are sporadic up to the mid-seventies, and even then, a continuous run doesn’t appear until the end of the decade.
Network DVD has released all surviving ATV episodes in “The Noele Gordon Collection” box set – and this included a handful of surviving episodes that only existed on film-transferred recordings, called “telerecordings”. These include the earliest, 126 from 1965, the week of episodes from 1966, and a handful of international sales copies from 1973.
These all look visibly different from the other episodes, the image looks more film-like having lost half of the temporal resolution in the film transfer process, the film has picked up 50 years of dust, dirt and scratches, and the image weaves around the screen as a result of the film moving through the sprockets of the original film recorder and the later telecine. The earlier 405-line episodes have visible bands across the screen (the original 405 lines), and the 1973 episodes look dark and filthy. This meant that these stood out from the rest of the video-based episodes.
Doctor Who, the BBC sci-fi serial, has a similar history, with missing episodes and those surviving doing so on telerecordings. Fortunately, a dedicated team of video technicians have restored them all, rescanning the film, removing the damage and artefacts, and restoring the video look using their proprietary process called VidFIRE. This takes the 25 frames per second of the telerecordings and uses computer software to recreate the missing 25, creating a new version with 50 images per second.
I thought, if it’s good enough for Doctor Who, it’s certainly good enough for the nation’s favourite motel.
Back in 2004, I trialled recreating the process by manually painting out film damage in Paint Shop Pro, and generating the missing frames with software called Motion Perfect, and it did work to an extent, but at the time I used a multi-generational VHS copy of episode 499 from the trading circuit and felt there was significant room for improvement.
Jump forward to 2023, and the new box set, there was finally a high-quality video source to work with.
The Process
The episodes were first extracted from the DVD, and the video and audio split up. A software package called Film9 was then used – a free front-end for multiple Avisynth filters to clean up old film. Each video file was loaded and set to fix issues with stability (resulting from the film wobbling during the initial film recording and subsequent telecine), removal film noise and scratches, flickering between frames, and a degrain process added to remove the noise from the film transfer. The last step was to tell the software to interpolate the 25 frames per second input to 50fps output, using mathematics to calculate the position of all the objects in the frame in between frames.
This was set to run on a quad-core i5 Windows PC, running in roughly real-time, outputting to an Apple ProRes file. Watching the file back, the image was now clean, and stable and the video motion had returned, however a slight problem arose.
The Crossroads credits were renowned for having the cast sliding on and off from each side of the screen. This movement proved too complicated for the stabilisation software to cope with, causing the image to break up at each credit change. The solution was to run the credit section through the software again, this time with no stabilisation enabled. Both were loaded up into the editing software (OpenShot), and the non-stabilised credits were switched to during the classic sliding motion and stabilisation was only activated once the cast name had finished moving. The editing software also allowed me to splice the ATV idents back onto the 1973 episodes, (these had been switched with ITC idents for international sales). To further sell the illusion of videotape, the film footage played into the episodes, including the ATV idents and footage on location used in the episodes (such as Carlos and Josephina visiting a boarding school) was not motion interpolated, leaving it as 25fps, as close to as it would have appeared originally.
The audio file also was cleaned up, with noise reduction and click reduction filters ran in Audacity, to remove noise from the film recording and damage. I did toy with using Adobe’s new AI voice enhancer software, but this was only partially successful – quite often the voices would warble and pitch bend.
The cleaned audio and video were joined together, and voila, a 50fps MPEG4 video file was created for playback on TV and computer. The Lunchbox episode on the boxset was also put through the process. Given that the process used on Doctor Who is called VidFIRE, this inferior version could perhaps be called CrossFire? Of course, I can’t release these onto DVD, and they were created for my amusement, but potentially online may be an option should people want to see Crossroads in its former glory. All copyrights still belong with ITV Studios.
Safety Curtain 