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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

#181

Post by Almondsetat »

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…

Most movies ever made were not meant to be watched on home TVs. Playing it on your crappy 50" Samsung with a soundbar is as much of a sacrilege as running it through an AI. I guess you have never done that, right?

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

#182

Post by dml2135 »

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…

What does "modern levels of image quality" mean in this context?

The article is about AI upscaling "True Lies", which was shot on 35mm film. 35mm provides a very high level of detail -- about equivalent in resolution to a 4k digital picture. We're not talking about getting an old VHS tape to look decent on your TV here.

The differences in quality between 35mm film and 4k digital are really more qualitative than quantitative, such as dynamic range and film grain. But things like lighting and dynamic range are just as much directorial choices as script, story, any other aspect of a film. It's a visual medium, after all.

Is the goal to have all old movies have the same, flatly lit streaming "content" look that's so ubiquitous today?

I think the argument against "isn’t there space for people who just want to see the story but experience it with modern levels of image quality" is that such a space is a-historical -- It's a space for someone that doesn't want to engage with the fact that things were different in the (not even very distant) past, and (at the risk of sounding a bit pretentious) it breeds an intellectually lazy and small-minded culture.

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

#183

Post by dml2135 »

incorrecthorse wrote: post #137

Many comments are missing the point here (although the article doesn't properly explain neither); it's not about resolution, but about fixing imperfections in filming: > The recent Cameron restorations were based on new 4K scans of the original negative, none of which needed extensive repair of that kind. [...] The A.I. can artificially refocus an out-of-focus image, as well as make other creative tweaks. “You don’t…

> The only movies which would require upscaling to 4K are those released between about mid-2000s to mid-2010s, the advent of native digital cinema, but filmed in 2K. Everything before was filmed in 35mm film, which can be scanned to 4K with information to spare; everything after is filmed in native digital 4K or more.

Good to call this out, I think this is something that's really lost on people.

It really blows my mind that George Lucas, for all of his apparent obsessive concern about his films supposedly looking dated, chose to shoot Star Wars Episode 2 in 1080p in contrast to Episode I on 35mm film.

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

#184

Post by kombookcha »

pimlottc wrote: post #22
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

Direct image link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg

Wild that somebody thought this was an improvement.

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

#185

Post by pera »

pixelesque wrote: post #151
ornel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "enhanced" image looks a lot like those retouched Russian photos from the Stalinist era

It's aggressively de-noised. Very much like modern phone cameras do these days: almost looks like a watercolour painting in some cases.

I really hate the result, they apply something like some gaussian filter followed by deconvolution which makes people's faces very uncanny: super soft skin with super sharp wrinkles

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

#186

Post by bmacho »

matteason wrote: post #134
Kranar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how these can be compared. They are totally different color schemes. It's possible that if you took the right image and displayed it using the same color scheme as the left image that it would look better than the left image.

Here's a quick and dirty attempt to even up the colours: https://www.matteason.co.uk/share/true-lies-colours.png And the full-size original for comparison: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg&name=... (I just overlaid the original on the left over the upscaled version on the right and set the blending mode to Colour in Photoshop)

Nice trick, I didn't know this

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

#188

Post by pera »

seadan83 wrote: post #45
seeknotfind wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Though today it's sharper, tomorrow you ask for the plot to be changed or for everyone to be wearing spinny hats. At least there's a shared experience now. If people find this outrageous, just wait until tomorrow. Better to accept the infinite progress unfolding before us than to spend another moment angry or enraged. All I ask for is choice.

Check Arnold's hair: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg Almost looks like rotoscoping. > Better to accept the infinite progress unfolding before us than to spend another moment angry or enraged. Some would say this is infinitely regressive. From the twitter picture, it looks like a justified criticism, from the examples in the article, it's hard to tell whether there's a merited criticism or if it…

That picture reminds me of all those horribly bad "HDR" pics 15 years ago

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

#189

Post by dusted »

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…

I tend to disagree, even with superhuman pattern matching, what makes a frame unique is everything in it which does NOT follow the pattern, the way the grain is distributed, the nth order reflections and shadows, is what makes it what it is.

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

#190

Post by MrVandemar »

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…

Curious, how is Aliens a "goofy 80s film"?

It contains very little of humour, all the cast and the director are taking it seriously. I'll buy Goonies as a goofy film, but Aliens? I remember someone glued to a wall and screaming in agony as a creature tears its way out of her chest. I remember the ratcheting tension of the motion-detectors getting more and more high pitched as nothing is happening but we're expecting it any moment now.

I know there's some don't-think-about-it plot-holes, but goofy?

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