Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 270 posts

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

#81

Post by tio4j32oi434324 »

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…

It's not surprising. The usual quality metrics that video-encoder people use tend to be positively correlated with saturation (and in fairness, this is what people think is better 'quality').

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

#82

Post by fnordpiglet »

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 get how a film buff might care, and agree the original version should be available, but isn’t there space for people who just want to see the story but experience it with modern levels of image quality? The technical details of technology at some point of time is definitely interesting to some people, but as say the writer or others associated with the creative and less technical aspects of a film I may find the technical limitations make the story less accessible to people used to more modern technologies and quality.

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

#83

Post by orbital-decay »

mrob wrote: post #39
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would you draw the line though? What is acceptable non-AI remastering? I'm 99% confident that similar issues were raised with e.g. recolored films, HD upscales, etc.

I draw the line at edits that consider semiotic meaning. Edits are acceptable if they apply globally (e.g. color correction to compensate for faded negatives), or if they apply locally based on purely geometric considerations (e.g. sharpening based on edge detection), but not if they try to decide what some aspect of the image signifies (e.g. red eye removal, which requires guessing which pixels are supposed to repre…

Easy counterexample: dumb unsharp masking will ruin close-up scenes that are shot for softness and/or have bokeh. ML upscalers can do this too when applied mindlessly. But you can also train an upscaler on the same type of footage, or even on the parts of the same footage available in higher definition. Even if you don't, matching the upscaler with the intent behind the content is your job.

The separation you're talking about is imaginary, the line doesn't exist. Any tool will affect the original meaning if it doesn't match the execution. Remastering is an art regardless of the tool, and it's always an interpretation of the original work. It's fine to like or dislike this interpretation.

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

#84

Post by orbital-decay »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #82
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 get how a film buff might care, and agree the original version should be available, but isn’t there space for people who just want to see the story but experience it with modern levels of image quality? The technical details of technology at some point of time is definitely interesting to some people, but as say the writer or others associated with the creative and less technical aspects of a film I may find the te…

The problem with that is the content is usually shot with the certain definition in mind. If you don't film certain scenes from scratch, they can end up looking weird in higher definition, simply because certain tricks rely on low definition/poor quality, or because you get a mismatch between old VFX and new resolution, for example.

It's a widespread issue with the emulation of old games that have been made for really low resolution/different ratio screens and slow hardware, especially early 3D/2D combinations like Final Fantasy, and those that relied on janky analog video outputs to draw their effects.

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

#85

Post by crazygringo »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #80
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most HDR content is too damn dark anyway. It's not, though -- it's entirely the problem with players. Not just software players but also TV's. There are lots of TV shows now that are available in 1080p SDR and in 4K HDR. When you play them both on any player or TV, they should have the same brightness in "regular" scenes like two people talking in a room. They're meant to. HDR is only meant to make a handful of ele…

Also just to piggy back on this, every television I have ever purchased has been calibrated like HOT, SICK ASS from the factory. Step ONE every time I buy a TV is to spend a half an hour or so using tons of calibration images to get it dialed in to a sensible setting, and it's shocking how much a lot of them need changed. Almost every TV comes calibrated to be used as a display unit in the store which means contrast…

It's so true. Honestly I will never understand it.

Even just talking about SDR for the moment, films and TV shows have a lot of work put in so that their color, brightness, sharpness and contrast are just right.

And then modern TV settings apply all sorts of filters that just destroy it.

It's bizarre. I do the same thing you do in terms of calibration and it takes forever. All just to get it to act like a dumb monitor for my Apple TV. I just want it to display the signal and nothing more.

So many people are watching TV and films with weird color, weird contrast, and weird swimmy frame interpolation. And that's before you get to HDR where it's weird dark on top of it all.

It genuinely makes me want there to be either a government regulatory body or else some kind of private-organization seal that guarantees you get a normal-color, normal-contrast, normal-brightness, normal-motion image as filmmakers and TV producers intend. You can have all the other options too, but either make them non-default, or provide a single-click "director's choice high-fidelity (TM)" option to undo all the garbage they add. Or something like that.

Because it's completely out of control.

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

#86

Post by caconym_ »

nostromo wrote: post #66
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.

The originals still exist and you’re free to watch those instead. This just provides a new way to watch older movies should you choose to do so. Or not.

> The originals still exist and you’re free to watch those instead.

This is far from certain, unless "you" are willing to engage in piracy. It's often difficult or impossible to legitimately buy (or even rent) the original, unadulterated versions of older films.

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

#88

Post by Arainach »

gdubs wrote: post #62
chilmers wrote: 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 dunno – I look at the original Jurassic Park and it still looks pretty amazing to me. Same with Terminator II. In many ways I feel like as directors got more and more capabilities with the tools they became comically overused. I don't think it's the sophistication of the tools, but the way that they're wielded that will make them look dated, or timeless.

The original Jurassic Park made extensive use of practical effects and models rather than relying primarily on CGI.

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

#89

Post by mhh__ »

chilmers wrote: 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.

Even now some CGI still looks very poor despite big spending (e.g. most marvel movies)

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

#90

Post by caconym_ »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #32
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.

> 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.

Any art and/or media production executed well enough to be culturally significant rests on an enormous depth of artistic and technical choices that most audiences have zero awareness of—and yet, if you took them all away, you would have nothing left. Every change takes you further from the original artist's vision, and if all you want to do is Consume Slop then that's fine I guess, but the stewards of these works should aim higher.
Post reply on HN