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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

#261

Post by crazygringo »

eru wrote: post #250
crazygringo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Making a Blu-ray super high quality involves no additional marginal cost. The disc space is there to begin with, so might as well use it. But every time a movie gets streamed, it costs the streamer twice as much if the file is twice as large. So streaming bandwidth will generally be minimized as much as possible to a "just barely good enough" quality level. It's not about technology improving or how old Blu-…

Duh, of course. But as bandwidth becomes more available (ie cheaper), it makes more sense for streaming services to stream in higher and higher quality. Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

> Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.

In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720p or 480p streams when they used to show 1080p by default.

Sure, a tiny handful of videos have 4K versions available, but that's only for a tiny proportion of streams. And YouTube even removes higher resolutions after a video has been published a bit. Which is why you see lots of YouTube VR videos described as 8K but there's no 8K stream anymore. There was when it was uploaded, but YouTube removed it.

So, no. Even if bandwidth gets cheaper, streaming twice the bits is still twice as expensive. Streaming services aren't going to stream more bits -- they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.

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

#262

Post by eru »

crazygringo wrote: post #261
eru wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duh, of course. But as bandwidth becomes more available (ie cheaper), it makes more sense for streaming services to stream in higher and higher quality. Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

> Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago. I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago. In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720…

> Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.

Oh, 1080p indeed been introduced in 2009, eg 15 years ago. I thought it was younger. However, just pretend I was talking about the next higher resolutions, or 60fps.

> [...] they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.

Competition will take care of that extra profit.

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

#263

Post by incorrecthorse »

dml2135 wrote: post #183
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 mi…

I guess 1080p was the big shiny edge thing back at the time. 35mm can supposedly be scanned beyond 8K, so you could theoretically consider 4K filming not good enough neither.

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

#264

Post by orbital-decay »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #244
orbital-decay wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remast…

You can't tell what specific textures it's trying to replicate when it's enhancing detail. It's not magic, but the specifics are uncontrollable.

Sure, my point is that proper remastering is not just applying a couple ML filters. If you're doing that you should either do this selectively or fix the result by other means, i.e. the same thing you would do with dumb processing. This is a labor intensive VFX work, feasible for a new movie but not feasible for a remaster.

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

#265

Post by mauzy »

actionfromafar wrote: post #130
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…

Next up: AI-improved Poor Things (2023), all black and white scenes converted to 60 fps full color.

Ai stabilized Blair Witch Project for those who got motion sick the first time.

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

#266

Post by rullelito »

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.

Do most people care? I just want to eat popcorn and watch a movie.

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

#267

Post by yreg »

dusted wrote: post #260
lesuorac wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bl…

>And even STILL, you can't be SURE.

That's why I said "with reasonable accuracy and consistency". Human can't be SURE either. Nothing is ever SURE if we want to stretch it to absurdum.

My entire point is that computers can be better than people at a given visual recognition task. Therefore we might discover that some information is present in the data even though we previously thought that information was not recorded.

That's literally the entire argument. I'm not sure what you are opposing.

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

#268

Post by crazygringo »

eru wrote: post #262
crazygringo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago. I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago. In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720…

> Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago. Oh, 1080p indeed been introduced in 2009, eg 15 years ago. I thought it was younger. However, just pretend I was talking about the next higher resolutions, or 60fps. > [...] they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer. Competition will take care of that extra profit.

> Competition will take care of that extra profit.

No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops.

That's my point -- bandwidth getting cheaper is not leading streamers to increase the quality of their 1080p. Because not enough people care. Not enough people will switch services. Competition ceases because it's not a significant factor of differentiation.

(For the niche people that do care, that's why YouTube premium exists, but it's niche.)

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

#269

Post by eru »

crazygringo wrote: post #268
eru wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago. Oh, 1080p indeed been introduced in 2009, eg 15 years ago. I thought it was younger. However, just pretend I was talking about the next higher resolutions, or 60fps. > [...] they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer. Competition will take care of that extra profit.

> Competition will take care of that extra profit. No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops. That's my point -- bandwidth getting cheaper is not leading streamers to increase the quality of their 1080p. Because not enough people care. Not enough people will switch services. Competition ceases because it's not a significant factor of…

> No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops.

Huh, why would it stop? People can freely switch between streaming services.

> Because not enough people care.

Yes, competition improves what people care about. That's a good thing. You don't want society to waste resources on stuff people don't care about.

Btw, your argument might demonstrate that video quality won't go up, if people don't care. Yes, I agree. But what does that have to do with profit?

People always eg care about price; and they will switch for price.

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

#270

Post by gdubs »

Arainach wrote: post #88
gdubs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno – I look at the original Jurassic Park and it still looks pretty amazing to me. Same with Terminator II. In many ways I feel like as directors got more and more capabilities with the tools they became comically overused. I don't think it's the sophistication of the tools, but the way that they're wielded that will make them look dated, or timeless.

The original Jurassic Park made extensive use of practical effects and models rather than relying primarily on CGI.

Yea but I was obsessed with that movie so I know what's what lol.
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