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AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

nytimes.com

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

#51

Post by ClassyJacket »

cout wrote: post #19
dmitrybrant wrote: post #10

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 origin…

> Information that is "missing" in one frame might be pulled in from a nearby frame

Yeah - does anyone know if anyone is actually doing this? Like some sort of DLSS for video? I'd love to read about it.

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

#52

Post by dwighttk »

furyofantares wrote: post #48
dvh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

ai will be promoted to it's level of incompetence just like people in "organizations of the late 60s" (or today)

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

#53

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

AlienRobot wrote: post #41

I think it's insane that the main argument for AI boils down to "everyone has 4K now so we need to upscale the videos."

The main argument for AI is for the rich to find a way to employ far fewer of the poor. Everything else is misdirection.

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

#56

Post by JoyousAbandon »

great_psy wrote: post #34

The issue I see with the screenshots from the article is that it changed the contrast and overall feel of the scene. I think there’s plenty of opportunity to exchange old videos, but I think it requires some human touch or deeper understanding of the movie to maintain its message. The light and contrast and color is made a certain way on purpose, usually to convert whatever the scene is meant to convey. You can’t jus…

The main issue is the totally invalid and ignorant comparison of compressed-to-hell streaming versions and Blu-Ray.

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

#58

Post by QualmsAplenty »

crazygringo wrote: post #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 di…

The shame is in comparing compressed-to-hell streaming versions to Blu-Ray in the first place, and commenting on how the Blu-Ray is "sharper." ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming.

The NYT isn't free. I don't respect such shoddy feature-writing.

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

#59

Post by Solvency »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #33
procflora wrote: post #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

> 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.

[flagged]

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

#60

Post by jacobolus »

crazygringo wrote: post #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 di…

The upscaled versions also screwed up the camera focus blur by artificially removing it, and unnecessarily took out the film grain. Even leaving the grain and blur aside, the texture of the objects depicted is also getting seriously screwed up, with unrealistic looking smoothing and weird places of heightened contrast unrelated to the original scene.

More generally, automatically second guessing the artistic choices of whoever originally color graded the film, for the sake of adding narratively gratuitous features like HDR or extremely high resolution, is a nasty thing to do. There might be moderately more dynamic range in the original physical film than there was in a digital copy; if so, by all means try to capture it in a new digitization while trying to match the visual impression of a theater projection to the extent practical. The "AI" features demonstrated here are incredibly tacky though.

People put in charge of making new versions of beloved artworks need to have good taste and exercise some discretion. Art from different times and places looks different due to changes in both the medium and the culture, and we should enjoy those differences rather than trying to erase them all.

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