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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

#121

Post by tedunangst »

spacecadet wrote: post #105
kstrauser wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal preference is fine! Describing VHS as “periodic accurate” as though that was these films’ original format is the silly bit.

Silly to you. Again, to you. Since the film does not run in theaters indefinitely and at the time VHS was a common format, among others. Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me! than rescans(4k, which super35 barely supports) and up-resing. Again IMHO because I guess people…

So I guess you just never watch movies from before 1980 or so?

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

#122

Post by mort96 »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
moomin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you pointed that out, because literally all the “after” images look dreadful. But then im also of the opinion that most HDR content is too damn dark anyway.

> 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…

If all ways to play HDR content makes it too dark, it's too dark.

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

#123

Post by globular-toast »

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

Cameron doesn't give a crap. He just needs his latest shot of money.

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

#124

Post by janalsncm »

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.

If there is a movie which is only shot in 1080p and I have a 4k TV, it seems like there’s three options. One, watch it in the original 1080p with 3/4 of the screen as black border. Two, stretch the image, making it blurry. Three, upscale the image. If you give me the choice, I’m choosing 3 every time.

Sorry if it sounds crass, but I feel the process of shooting the movie is less important than the story it is trying to tell.

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

#125

Post by shiroiushi »

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.

One somewhat funny example of this is in the first ST:TNG episode "Encounter at Farpoint". In one shot, the captain asks Data a question, and the camera turns to him to show him standing from his seat at the conn and answering. At the bottom of the screen, it's plainly visible (in the new Blu-Ray version) that a patch of extra carpet is under the edge of the seat. It was probably put there to level the seat or something. At the time, this was ignored, because on a standard SDTV screen, the edges are all rounded, so the very edge of the frame isn't normally visible.

Another thing that's plainly obvious in TNG's remastered version is all the black cardboard placed over the display screens in the back of the bridge, to block glare from lights. In SDTV, this wasn't noticeable because the quality was so bad.

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

#126

Post by janalsncm »

caconym_ wrote: post #90
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sho…

Well there are movies which were technically well executed with poor stories, and great stories with poor execution. And there were movies which did well in both areas.

For example Tenet. Cool story, poor audio mix. (I don’t buy the explanation that Nolan had any reason other than expediency for this.) If we use “AI” to fix the audio after the fact, that’s a win in my book.

I’m not a film buff or a purist though. I watch movies with subtitles which is certainly not what the director had in mind, but that’s ok.

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

#127

Post by jstummbillig »

globular-toast wrote: post #123
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

Cameron doesn't give a crap. He just needs his latest shot of money.

It seems little wild to assume the maker of a movie would care less about the movie than a random mob on the internet (instead of maybe just having a different opinion) but the assumption does feel very internet.

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

#129

Post by zo1 »

moomin wrote: post #64
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…

Glad you pointed that out, because literally all the “after” images look dreadful. But then im also of the opinion that most HDR content is too damn dark anyway.

That is a matter of opinion, and in all the comparison images, I think the AI upscaled one always looks better.

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

#130

Post by actionfromafar »

chefandy wrote: post #114
jacobolus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

Next up: AI-improved Poor Things (2023), all black and white scenes converted to 60 fps full color.
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