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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

#211

Post by crazygringo »

mort96 wrote: post #122
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…

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

But it's not all. Just a lot of the ways. Too many of them.

That's the point I'm making. You can buy expensive HDR displays that actually display correctly where it's not dark.

They're just expensive, and so most people aren't buying those ones.

So I will repeat, the problem is not with HDR content. It's with displays advertising themselves as HDR when they're simply not.

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

#212

Post by mort96 »

crazygringo wrote: post #211
mort96 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But it's not all. Just a lot of the ways. Too many of them. That's the point I'm making. You can buy expensive HDR displays that actually display correctly where it's not dark. They're just expensive, and so most people aren't buying those ones. So I will repeat, the problem is not with HDR content . It's with displays advertising themselves as HDR when they're simply not.

Maybe people should stop publishing HDR content if it worsens the viewing experience for almost everyone then?

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

#213

Post by crazygringo »

jorvi wrote: post #179
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is finding all of those settings. They're all under different submenus (there's certainly no global "enhancements off" toggle), and even figuring out the "no filter" setting is often non-obvious.

E.g. on my Epson projector, there's a "sharpness" setting that goes from 1 to 10, and IIRC the only way to turn off sharpening is to set it to 3. Because values 1 and 2 wind up applying a blur filter. It's not documented. You have to figure out the "3" value from trial and error with a calibration image.

Similarly you need to figure out whether each of your connected devices is outputting RGB 0-255 or RGB 16-235, and set the toggles for your TV to handle the correct input range.

And so forth. The calibration images aren't for figuring out perfect color accuracy with a colorimeter. They're for basic things like displaying smooth gradients from black to white, and are the blacks or whites being cut off? Is the gamma totally off when compared to a checkerboard? Are saturation gradients displaying normally or does it show the image is over-saturated? Is a series of alternating black and white lines displaying as simple lines, or is there a crunchy halo around them (from sharpening) or blurring?

So it's not "eh" at all. In my experience it takes 15 to 30 minutes, as you hunt around the submenus to try to find all the relevant settings, and try to figure out what each setting even means since the documentation is useless. Like, on a power-saving display, should the main color setting be "Natural" or "Cinema" or "Bright Cinema"? You're going to have to experiment.

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

#214

Post by account42 »

eru wrote: post #133
QualmsAplenty wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming. That should change over time: Blu-Ray is a format released about 20 years ago, and our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.

> our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.

Streaming isn't limited by the available bandwidth but by the margins the streaming service doesn't want to spend on it.

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

#215

Post by tstrimple »

planede wrote: post #157
janalsncm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what I meant by option 3?

How do you differentiate between "stretch" and "upscale"? Or how would "stretching" by exactly 2x would make the image blurry?

Upscaling algorithms vary from the extremely basic to the ML models we see today that straight up replaces or adds new details. Some of the more naive algorithms do indeed just look blurry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_gallery_of_image_sc...

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

#216

Post by acuozzo »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #94
spacecadet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Abyss in only good on VHS, or laserdisc if you have the setup...

Really? VHS with its grainy 240 x 320 resolution is better than a blu ray?

352x480, not 240. The Abyss, being shot on film, is 24fps. A VHS of The Abyss would achieve 29.97fps by using 3:2 pulldown which is lossless since it duplicates fields to make up the difference.

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

#217

Post by acuozzo »

samsk wrote: post #144

Maybe I'm old, but do we really watch the movies because they are sharper, have vivid colors, etc or because of the story ? On the other hand, I would probably pay for an AI that will 'undark' that new super artistic movies, because some of them, have worse lighting than the Blair With Project...

> Maybe I'm old, but do we really watch the movies because they are sharper, have vivid colors, etc or because of the story ?

Where would, e.g., Koyaanisqatsi fit then?

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

#218

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nottorp wrote: post #132
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.

> Non-film buffs, i.e. most viewers, don't care about this. ... consciously ... Assuming competent cinematography, it will have an effect on the viewer whether they can analyze it or not.

The film grain will have no effect if it's not visible due to image/stream compression such as when the viewer sees the film on a video streaming service. HDR wont show up for most viewers. Details you need more than 1080p to see won't show for many (most?) viewers ... so I'd dispute your "will have an effect" here.

Good storytelling (and probably blunt spectacle) is the only thing common to all viewers that can win them over. For mainstream media everything else is gloss that may have no effect.

Most people don't even have their sound/brightness/contrast well-adjusted. Some free-to-view services regularly air content with the wrong ratio (and I've seen people happily sit watching the wrong ratio seemingly oblivious to it).

Yes, media nuances can have an effect on the unwitting, but I suspect much doesn't even have opportunity to.

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

#219

Post by account42 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #156
dontupvoteme wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on if he cares more about his current movie project(s) than his old ones. He still needs $$ I bet even Kubrick would have been tempted if the situation came about.

To me, thinking of it as temptation is an issue. Society collectively deciding for creators what is supposedly the right thing to do with or the right way to think about their work is so strange.

What is strange is the notion that the original creator should retain full control of a creation once released.

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

#220

Post by Cold_Miserable »

incrudible wrote: post #159
chefandy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the case of Aliens, James Cameron is explicitly saying he just went with Kodak film that was available at the time, which everyone was using. I will submit that directors are not generally the right people to call the shots here. A director can never watch his own movie the way the audience does. They always see an unfulfilled vision, a compromise being made here and there because of technology being limited, and…

??? The best action sci-fi ever made is a "goofy 80's movie".
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