I think this would be amazing for jank 90's CGI. The movie "Event Horizon" terrified me as a child. I went to rewatch it as an adult, I could not get past the jank CGI, it pulled me out of my suspension of belief.
AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
251–260 of 270 posts
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#252Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#253Earlier 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…
Doesn't your TV have a filmmaker mode which is pre-calibrated?
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#254I prefer the originals. Warts and all
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#255I find it really odd that they’re comparing the streaming version vs the new Blu-ray, rather than previous Blu-ray vs new Blu-ray. (Not to mention the HDR & color space issues mentioned already).
The streaming copy is compressed so terribly that it contains at least 2x less information, and normally much worse. (A great UHD disk can be up to 120mbps, compared to 10-20 on streaming if you get lucky.) So when we’re trying to compare the minutiae in each frame, it makes no sense to compare to a copy that already had a lot of information removed via compression. Also, the 4k streaming copy is nearly always worse than the 1080p Blu-ray.
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#256Earlier 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…
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Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#257Earlier 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?
Yes, that’s exactly right, and that’s why people still go to the movies when almost everyone has a screen they could watch movies if they so desired.
Despite the hyperbole of “original sin” or “crime against humanity”, what people are saying is that AI filtered movies are crappy just like watching a good movie in a shitty screen; but I would argue that our social outlook is worse because nobody would say that they’re improving movies by using a shitty screen and shitty audio system, yet we do see that with all the AI hype.
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#258It 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…
> 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.. Which is horrible and gross already in principle. That's essentially how the brain works, too.
The difference is that people can express why they made a decision
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#259I think it's insane that the main argument for AI boils down to "everyone has 4K now so we need to upscale the videos."
Everyone has 4K is a dumb argument. Most have 1080p. The sensible upgrade path for PCs is 2K. Legal streaming services only support a few devices, so a 4K device may be stuck in 720p. HiDPI is also, somehow, still an unsolved problem in this day and age? Same thing with HDR, especially since many self-proclaimed HDR TVs aren't even good enough to achieve what any layman would expect from a HDR TV. So HDR certificatio…
Afaik the problem with HiDPI is that fractional scaling sucks, so you have to jump from 1x to 2x to have good quality. For 1080p, that means 4k. So you should end up with the same screen size as you have now, except with four times the pixels, and four times the electricity bill because your hardware needs to render all those extra pixels, and this for some marginal semblance of an improvement in image quality when you look closer at your monitor than you're recommended to if you want to keep your eyesight.
Re: AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> You can’t reverse an operation that loses information with absolute certainty unless you are using other factors to constrain the possible inputs. Ok, but there are other factors you can use to constrain the possible inputs. For example with license plates. You know the possible letters and how they appear when "blurred" so you can zoom-enhance them.
> For example with license plates. You know the possible letters and how they appear when "blurred" so you can zoom-enhance them.
And even STILL, you can't be SURE.
Let's imagine some license-plate system optimized to give the biggest hamming distance for visual recognision (for example, no O and o in, only one of them, and no i and 1, only one of them, and so on) to make it as good as possible.
Now, you take some blurry picture of a license-plate and ask the ai to figure out which it is, well, one of the symbols are beyond the threshold of what can be determined, and the ai applies whatever it's learned to conclude (correctly) that the only allowed symbol is X.. Now, thing is, the license-plate was a fake, and the unrecoverable symbol didn't conform to the rules of, it was actually a 1 printed there, but the AI tells it's an 'I' since that's the only allowed symbol.. It just made up stuff that was plausible..
You cannot extract what's not there. You can guess, you can come up with things that _COULD_ be there, but it makes no difference, it's not there.. It's the same with colorized vintage videos, we can argue that it'd not be wrong to assume this jacket was brown since we have lots of data on that model, but we _CAN_NOT_ know if that particular jacket was indeed, brown, it might have been any other color that made the same impression on the monochrome film. The information is _GONE_.