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AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

nytimes.com

41–50 of 270 posts

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

#43
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.

I think it's worse than bad CGI. With bad CGI, you can use your imagination and interpret as what it would have looked like if they had unlimited time and budget. You can't do that with bad AI "enhancement", because it's an automation of that same imaginative process. You'd have to somehow mentally reverse the AI processing before imagining a better version, which is much more difficult.

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

#44
The "AI" versions of the movie stills are darker and "greener" or "bluer" in all cases in this article, which is NOT the case when you watch the movie. It's a mistake on the part of whoever put together the image comparisons.

The culprit here is that the non-AI screenshots are taken from presumably 1080p non-HDR sources, while all the AI screenshots are taken from presumably 4K HDR sources. The "AI" images are all displayed in the completely wrong color space -- the dark+green/blue is exactly what HDR content looks like when played on software that doesn't correctly support decoding and displaying HDR content.

It's a shame that the creator of the comparison images doesn't know enough image processing to understand that you can't grab stills from HDR content from a player that doesn't properly support HDR.

On the other hand, the state of HDR support is a mess right now in software players. Playing HDR content in common players like VLC, QuickTime, IINA, and Infuse will give you significantly different results between all of them. So I can't actually blame the creator of the images 100%, because there isn't even a documented, standardized way to compare HDR to non-HDR content side-by-side, as far as I know (hence why each player maps the colors differently).

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

#45

Critics will always be critical.

Agree. Though today it's sharper, tomorrow you ask for the plot to be changed or for everyone to be wearing spinny hats. At least there's a shared experience now. If people find this outrageous, just wait until tomorrow. Better to accept the infinite progress unfolding before us than to spend another moment angry or enraged. All I ask for is choice.

Check Arnold's hair: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg

Almost looks like rotoscoping.

> Better to accept the infinite progress unfolding before us than to spend another moment angry or enraged.

Some would say this is infinitely regressive. From the twitter picture, it looks like a justified criticism, from the examples in the article, it's hard to tell whether there's a merited criticism or if it reflexive anti-AI'ism

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

#46

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

> Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better I doubt he even looked, he's too busy with his blue monkeys these days. Most likely someone duped him on taking on the AI upscaling and he signed off on it without looking and the movie studio just shipped the output without QA to save time and money, because they're going to streaming not in cinemas.

He’s insanely detail oriented. I’m almost certain he either approved everything, or, he no longer has right of refusal.

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

#48
post #14

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

Time to update "software Peter principle" to "ai Peter principle"

Didn't the Peter Principle have to do with organizations of the late 60s, and not anything to do with software?

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

#49
post #2

looks like it made everything darker

didn't you notice that most movies and series in the last 5 years have been dark to the point of not even being able to to notice which eye color people have? not enough to ruin all the newly produced stuff, they also need to ruin all the old stuff now...

It's big OLED conspiring to force us to buy more expensive TVs with better blacks. /s

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

#50

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.

> how contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations were, how the director dealt with those limitations, etc. Non-film buffs, i.e. most viewers, don't care about this.

They do but they dont know.

See new Netflix show Ripley.

All shot in B&W, beautifully shot.

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