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AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

nytimes.com

11–20 of 270 posts

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#11

AI will be applied to every possible thing it can be.

And re-packaged and re-sold, and people will re-buy and re-watch/re-consume.

Imagine "Lord of the Rings - the full trilogy in three 8-hour movies, now with new AI-generated content that fills the gaps left from the 'extended' releases. I know people that will definitely renew their HBO subscriptions in order to watch them (if/when they re-release one movie per year)

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#13
post #6
post #2

looks like it made everything darker

I wonder if there was a conversion between HDR and standard image format to make the images look so dark, I'm not too familiar with this technology.

Yeah i’m guessing whoever pulled the images for the article didn’t correct for the newer versions being HDR.

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#15
Wow, that tweet they link to with a super punched in shot looks really really bad! Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better than just a normal 4k transfer, yikes. Was really looking forward to a UHD release of The Abyss but now I'm not so sure...

https://twitter.com/RazorwireRyan/status/1735753526167347232

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#17
post #9

I think this kind of AI "enhancement" is where CGI was in the 90s. It might be state of the art tech, but it's still very unrefined, and in ten or twenty years these remasters will look painfully dated and bad.

People who knew what they where doing could pull of some timeless art with 90s CGI and a decade of improvements did not stop people from ruining otherwise good movies with bad GCI either. AI is just another tool that needs to be used correctly.

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#18
post #2

looks like it made everything darker

It's quite strange, because the article text talks about how the "colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky" and the problem is that the surface details look off. But then on the screenshots all you can see is a difference in the color grading, and no details of any kind.

Like, the problem with the closeup of Jamie Lee Curtis isn't the skin texture like suggested in the subtitle. It's that she is blue.

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#19

My biggest gripe with these AI film enhancements is that they are adding information that was never there. You're no longer watching the original film. You no longer have a sense of how contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations were, how the director dealt with those limitations, etc.

I don't think that's universally true of all AI enhancement though. Information that is "missing" in one frame might be pulled in from a nearby frame. As others have pointed out, we are in the infancy of video enhancement and the future is not fundamentally limited.

If that takes away from the artistic nature of the film I understand the complaint, but I look forward to seeing this technology applied where the original reel has been damaged. In those cases we are already missing out on what the director intended.

Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

#20

AI will be applied to every possible thing it can be.

And re-packaged and re-sold, and people will re-buy and re-watch/re-consume. Imagine "Lord of the Rings - the full trilogy in three 8-hour movies, now with new AI-generated content that fills the gaps left from the 'extended' releases. I know people that will definitely renew their HBO subscriptions in order to watch them (if/when they re-release one movie per year)

I would pay to see the missing Scouring of the Shire even as a poorly done AI render.
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