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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

This is contradicted directly in the article re the BBC logo. It says the globe and mirror setup was rotoscoped/traced over to create the final cartoon look that was broadcast. Or is the article wrong?

Edit: The article is wrong! The colour was added to the camera's output live!

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There's an update at the bottom of the article for this:

> UPDATE: It turns out the BBC Globe ident wasn’t rotoscoped or animated, instead it was recorded live using the Noddy camera system and the color was created by adjusting the contrast. Thanks, Gene!

That's good. Although that's a bit wrong. You can't take a monochrome image and add colour just by adjusting the contrast. I'm also not sure you can say it was "recorded" at all if it was broadcast directly, but that's a language question.

I believe the contrast adjustment was likely to get rid of any unwanted shades of grey before colouring the two extremes.

I suspect 'coloring the two extremes' involves something more like 'wiring the luminance signal up to the chroma'. Again, try not to think digital. This isn't photoshop, this is signal processing.

Or it could be a filter over the camera lens.

Once you have a mostly Black, and White (with no greys) image - it's relatively simple via basic electronics to colour replace those with alternate colours - much like the old analogue chromakey 'blue-screen' techniques.

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