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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

#201

Post by yreg »

dml2135 wrote: post #176
yreg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reprodu…

I'm talking in the context of the quoted statement

>"zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trope in movies

You can have e.g. a picture of a blurry piece of paper, that humans can't read, but I imagine software might be able to read it (with reasonable accuracy and consistency). The information might be recorded, but hidden.

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

#202

Post by pokerface_86 »

moomin wrote: post #180
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…

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

[dead]

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

#203

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

Almondsetat wrote: post #181
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

So if I have vision issues, I'm also the problem, right?

The first time I saw Blade Runner was on a CRT TV from VHS tape and it was still faithful to the original, which I've seen on the big screen and various digital formats too. Poor reproduction doesn't add something that isn't there in the original, it just degrades the image. That generally can't be controlled and is a lot different to intentionally changing the image.

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

#204

Post by J_Shelby_J »

echelon_musk wrote: post #153
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

The automated HD 'remaster' of Buffy is the prime example of how badly this can go wrong. A great breakdown of the problems is on YouTube here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

Great video and a travesty. I’m not a huge fan, but I respect that people are. That they ruined the show and it’s hard to find in it’s not ruined form…

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

#205

Post by incrudible »

MrVandemar wrote: post #190
incrudible wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, there is something intrinsically goofy about space marines going out to fight the insectoid aliens, even when it is not as much on the nose as e.g. Starship Troopers. It is also not meant as a negative, I really like the movie for what it is.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

MrVandemar wrote: post #190
incrudible wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #109
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…

Where do you get the reference images, how do you display them on the tv, and to what do you compare them? I guess I should just search how to calibrate a tv.

These are my go-tos: https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ Don't cover everything and will be useless for HDR, but they're a good starting point IMO for SDR.

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

#208

Post by pimlottc »

yreg wrote: post #201
dml2135 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 reprodu…

I'm talking in the context of the quoted statement >"zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trope in movies You can have e.g. a picture of a blurry piece of paper, that humans can't read, but I imagine software might be able to read it (with reasonable accuracy and consistency). The information might be recorded, but hidden.

That’s not really true though. Unless you’re talking about a trivial distortion, like inverting the colors, there’s always some loss of information. In the case of blurry text, we’re still making an assumption that the paper holds some form of human writing, and not literally a blurry pattern. Maybe there’s external context that confirms this. But solely based on the image itself, you can’t know this. It’s basically a hash function; there are multiple possible “source” images of what’s on the paper that may end up looking exactly the same on the blurry/low-res/degraded etc output video. Human readable text is likely the most plausible but it’s not 100%.

You can’t reverse an operation that loses information with absolute certainty unless you are using other factors to constrain the possible inputs.

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

#210

Post by pimlottc »

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…

There’s also the laws of large numbers here. When you make hundreds and thousands of guesses, even with really high accuracy, you’re going to get some wrong. For a 4K movie at 24 frames a second, you’re talking millions of guesses per minute, perhaps billions or more over the length of an entire film. It’s inevitable you’re going to get weird glitches, artifacts, or just parts that look “off”.

It’s better to use a light touch for techniques like this rather just blindly applying it to the entire film.

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