During the original
colour restorations, the team were keen to present the episodes as close to the original broadcast master tapes as possible, as explained by senior Restoration Team content producer Steve Roberts: "One thing which the team had to constantly be wary of was the temptation to not just restore, but to also improve on the original ... This would not be in the spirit of restoration, and the viewer would not be seeing a fair representation of the story as it originally was." In 1997, whilst working on the VHS release of
The War Machines, the approach of straight restoration, that of returning the episodes to their original state, competed with the desire to improve upon what was originally broadcast. Sound engineer
Mark Ayres explained the difficulties: "There are some difficult decisions as to how far I should take my work. Because the original video has been transferred to film, I've tried to remove anything which was added during the process of optical copying – in other words taking it back to its condition on original transmission."
The War Machines featured a couple of instances of sound effects being faded in at the wrong points during the original studio recordings. Ayres: "It would be very easy to 'grab' a sound effect, and put it back where it's supposed to be. I haven't done it, because it was wrongly done at the time, and that's the way it should stay. All I've tried to do is correct technical defects which have occurred later with the film, I haven't corrected things which were done wrongly on the original tapes. Except in two places. ==Members==