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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

#171

Post by orbital-decay »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #119
orbital-decay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, "AI" is absolutely not uncontrollable magic that does something you don't want sometimes. It's not an issue really, you always have arbitrarily granular control of the end result, with ML tools or not. You can train them properly, you can control the application, you can fix the result, you can do anything with it. It's the usual VFX process, and it's not the only tool at your disposal.

The problem is that remasters don't make a lot of money, so instead of a properly controlled faithful representation (or a good rethinking) it's typically a half-assed job with a couple filters run over the entire piece. Another issue is that you now have two possibly conflicting intents - one from the original and another from the remaster. ML haven't changed anything in here, it's always been like that.

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

#172

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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…

> second guessing the artistic choices

This is the original sin of this process. They are tampering with the artistic object, it's no longer what the artists intended.

Some might say this is being pedantic, but the quality of the image has a huge impact on the feel of a movie. For some films, such as Blade Runner, the mood and feel created by the (dark, obscured) look of the film is easily half of the impact. Changing that film would be a crime against humanity, yet I imagine it's only a matter of time before it gets regraded so people can see the film "properly".

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

#173

Post by dml2135 »

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…

> 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.

This is the main thing that has kept me from adopting HDR in my media library. I'd expect a feature like HDR would be progressive (if that's the right term that I'm going for), i.e., in a non-supported player, it would look exactly like the non-HDR version of the content, and simply adds more dynamic range when in an environment that supports it. Without that, I'm not going to grab a version of a media file that might look worse if I'm playing it in a non-ideal context.

Does anyone know why this isn't the case? Is it not technically possible for some reason I'm not thinking of, or was it really just a fumble of standards design?

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

#174

Post by fsloth »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #172
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…

> second guessing the artistic choices This is the original sin of this process. They are tampering with the artistic object, it's no longer what the artists intended. Some might say this is being pedantic, but the quality of the image has a huge impact on the feel of a movie. For some films, such as Blade Runner, the mood and feel created by the (dark, obscured) look of the film is easily half of the impact. Changin…

”Some might say this is being pedantic, but the quality of the image has a huge impact on the feel of a movie.”

Hardly pedantic, the quality of the image is one of the key variables in cinema.

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

#175

Post by dml2135 »

dusted wrote: post #158

It used to be that (rational) people would be fairly in agreement that one cannot extract information which is not there. That's why we laugh at the "zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trop in movies.. AI does not change this.. It adds stuff that's not there, sure, it adds stuff that might be there, or could have been there, but it literally cannot know, so it just paints in plausibility.. Whi…

It's frustrating that the article doesn't mention this relatively simple, well understood, and very relevant principle. (Unless I just missed it somewhere, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

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

#176

Post by dml2135 »

yreg wrote: post #166
dusted wrote: post #158

It used to be that (rational) people would be fairly in agreement that one cannot extract information which is not there. That's why we laugh at the "zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trop in movies.. AI does not change this.. It adds stuff that's not there, sure, it adds stuff that might be there, or could have been there, but it literally cannot know, so it just paints in plausibility.. Whi…

> That's why we laugh at the "zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trope in movies.. > AI does not change this.. It kind of changes it in some cases. The information might be there, but superhuman pattern recognition might be needed to extract it. And of course, in case factuality doesn't matter, the missing information can be generated and filled in. This obviously doesn't work when you are loo…

"Information" in terms of, what does this thing look like -- could maybe be determined from other shots -- yes, sure.

But I think "information" in the context of film here refers to the indexical mark of light upon the image sensor, and in that case no. If it's not recorded, you can't extract it. And whatever you do put there is of little interest to the film buff to whom "image quality" means a more faithful reproduction of the negative that was seen in theaters.

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

#177

Post by dml2135 »

MyFedora wrote: post #116
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,…

It's a fundamentally different concept of photography though, one that becomes more similar to a painting or collage than a captured frame of light. Regardless of the merits of one over the other are for the purposes of storytelling, it's a bit worrisome when the distinction is lost on people altogether.

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

#178

Post by jorvi »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #147
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…

I'm not really convinced by this argument. Isn't the actual issue that SDR content tends to be mapped so that 0 is the darkest colour the TV can display and 1.0 is the brightest colour the TV can display? When an HDR signal comes along, then of course the brightest element it can display isn't any brighter than 1.0 was in the SDR image. This has the effect of the scene being overall darker in order to give more headr…

The real problem is that 400-600 nits is allowed to be called a “HDR-certified” display.

For “real” HDR you want at least 800 nits, ideally 1000. Otherwise you have to do what is stated upthread, latch max brightness to whatever your maximum nits is and make everything else very dark to keep the relative contrast intact.

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

#179

Post by jorvi »

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…

> 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.

Eh. Usually you can flip it to movie + warm(2) + dynamic contrast off + enhancements off (think noise reduction) and you’re 90% there. You can get a smidge better picture with calibration images, but most midrange+ TVs come decently calibrated out of the factory these days. Not really worth the effort unless you go all the way and use a colorimeter.

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

#180

Post by moomin »

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…

So, are there any displays that do a decent job? How do you find them without investing a ridiculous amount of time?
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