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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

#111

Post by MyFedora »

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."

Everyone has 4K is a dumb argument. Most have 1080p. The sensible upgrade path for PCs is 2K. Legal streaming services only support a few devices, so a 4K device may be stuck in 720p. HiDPI is also, somehow, still an unsolved problem in this day and age? Same thing with HDR, especially since many self-proclaimed HDR TVs aren't even good enough to achieve what any layman would expect from a HDR TV. So HDR certifications became a thing, amazing. But 1080p SDR remains the king for now.

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

#112

Post by michaelbrave »

When I was a kid I had a classic playstation (PS1) it had multiple kinds of video outputs, one of which was S-video, which was a lot sharper than composite, problem was sharper wasn't better, it made pixel games have sharp edged pixels and the blur and scanlines that blended were missing, it also made the motions of 3D things just look clunky and disconnected. In almost every way possible the higher resolution output made it look worse.

So yeah, making a movie sharper could very likely make it worse.

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

#113

Post by fnordpiglet »

crooked-v wrote: post #107
orbital-decay wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

For a specific simple example: multiple Star Trek TV series were shot with the assumption that SDTV resolution would hide all the rough edges of props and fake displays. Watch them in (non-remastered) HD and suddenly it's very obvious how much of the set is painted plywood and cardboard.

Actually I would expect AI up scaling of SDTV in this case would perform better. It would assume semantically the props were real and would extrapolate them as such.

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

#114

Post by chefandy »

jacobolus wrote: post #60
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…

Right. That director almost certainly chose that particular film because that particular grain lent the film the vibe they were looking for. Directors always look for ways to implement their artistic vision within the bounds of the medium, but the end results is almost certainly their artistic vision. A lot of that missing information is missing for a reason. Surely someone could use AI to invent things that go in all of the little shadows in Nosferatu, or steady the handheld video camera footage David Lynch was into for a while, but those things serve a purpose.

If people want to AI-enhance movies for their own viewing pleasure, then great. Watch it in reversed color or with a face-swap for all I care. But "improving" the original by inventing detail that the director probably never wanted to show to begin with is a parlor trick devoid of any artistic merit.

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

#116

Post by MyFedora »

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.

Most people don't care. Photographers had a real great time pointing out that Samsung literally AI replaced the moon, but some Samsung S21 Ultra users were busy bragging how great “their” moon pictures turned out. Let's judge AI enhancements like sound design: Noticeably good if done well, unnoticeable if done satisfactory and noticeably distracting if done poorly. The article shows a case of noticeably distracting, so they're better off with the original version.

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

#117

Post by efilife »

cchance wrote: post #115

Feel like the AI Upscaling was either done shitty or the screenshots they used are really bad examples, no reason AI upscaling should make all the images darker for some reason lol

The AI source was HDR and the author of this article had no idea you can't just take a HDR screenshot and display it on non-hdr displays

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

#118

Post by sandspar »

pimlottc wrote: post #27
cout wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In part, we need more vocabulary to distinguish different techniques. Everyone is just "AI" right now, which could mean many different things. Standard terminology would help us discuss what methods are acceptable for what purposes and what goes too far. And it has to be terminology that the public can understand, so they can make informed decisions.

I also think we already have a bunch of old words for the techniques, like "upscaling" or "statistics". It's "AI" everything now but the old words for the old techniques are waiting to be used again.

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

#119

Post by Dylan16807 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #83
mrob wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 talk…

Remastering can screw up intent with something as simple as color grading.

But there is a line here. An editor that's using simple tools knows exactly what they're changing, and if they're using simple frame-global tools then they're not introducing anything that wasn't already there.

If you throw an AI at things, it will try to guess what things in the image are, and make detail adjustments based on that.

So that's three categories of edit, easily distinguished: human making frame-global changes, human deliberately changing/adding details, AI changing/adding details in a way that's basically impossible to fully supervise.

It sounds like they accept category 1 in remastering, even though it's not foolproof, and reject 2 and 3.

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

#120

Post by actionfromafar »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #99
spacecadet wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to you! I like to watch the content in its period accurate format.

Wouldn't that be the original film?

It depends. A large movie - yes. But many movies were made with less of a focus on the cinema and more on the video rental ("direct-to-video") or TV syndication.

TV content like Star Trek the Next generation were definitely never meant to display in high definition, and such things can show in props etc.

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