YouTubers Are Upscaling the Past To 4K. Historians Want Them To Stop (wired.co.uk) 136
YouTubers are using AI to bring history to life. But historians argue the process is nonsense. From a report: The first time you see Denis Shiryaev's videos, they feel pretty miraculous. You can walk through New York as it was in 1911, or ride on Wuppertal's flying train at the turn of the 20th century, or witness the birth of the moving image in a Leeds garden in 1888. Shiryaev's YouTube channel is a showcase for his company Neural Love, based in Gdansk, Poland, which uses a combination of neural networks and algorithms to overhaul historic images. Some of the very earliest surviving film has been cleaned, unscuffed, repaired, colourised, stabilised, corrected to 60 frames per second and upscaled to vivid 4K resolution. For viewers, it almost feels like time travel. "That is something that our clients and even the commenters on YouTube have pointed out consistently," says Elizabeth Peck, one of Shiryaev's colleagues at Neural Love. "It brings you more into that real-life feeling of, 'I'm here watching someone do this', whereas before you're looking more at something more artistic or cinematic."
But these vivid videos and images haven't wowed everyone. Digital upscalers and the millions who've watched their work on YouTube say they're making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested. "The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are," says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin's School of Art History and Cultural Policy. Peck says Neural Love makes clear to clients the huge difference the company sees between "the restoration aspect and the enhancement aspect." They see the removal of scratches, noise, dust or other imperfections picked up during processing as a less ethically fraught process to upscaling and colourising. "You're really returning the film to its original state," she says. That's not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson's 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. "It is a nonsense," he wrote. "Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."
But these vivid videos and images haven't wowed everyone. Digital upscalers and the millions who've watched their work on YouTube say they're making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested. "The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are," says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin's School of Art History and Cultural Policy. Peck says Neural Love makes clear to clients the huge difference the company sees between "the restoration aspect and the enhancement aspect." They see the removal of scratches, noise, dust or other imperfections picked up during processing as a less ethically fraught process to upscaling and colourising. "You're really returning the film to its original state," she says. That's not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson's 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. "It is a nonsense," he wrote. "Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."
A Blast from the Past (Score:3)
I like them and sometimes they feel like the future.
https://youtu.be/NjDclfAFRB4?t... [youtu.be]
WTF are they on about? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not as if these remastered videos are destroying the originals in the process. Viewing them in a different way does absolutely nothing to devalue the originals, and helps people contextualise them and themselves.
What a load of bollox. These people need to stop pissing on the man's work simply because they're purists.
Re:WTF are they on about? (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. Historians should mind their own business and stop trying to control others.
Re:WTF are they on about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. He's taking some art and putting his own spin on it. Not destroying anything. It would be like getting pissy that people were making memes with the Mona Lisa. The original is still there, and the purists can go see it. They can even ignore all of the memes.
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Funny you should mention the Mona Lisa-- one of his other demonstrations was turning old paintings into live people. I think he overdid the "modern" versions a bit, but it was fascinating to see the Mona Lisa and others come to life.
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The Star Trek deepfakes by Futuring Machine [youtube.com] are well done too.
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It really depends how good a job they do, how accurate, how well they can give you a taste of the past, the interactions of all those on display, the expressions of emotion, how they are relating to each other. Of course if they distort that with content they add from their imagination, rather than trying just to enhance what was there, well that is bad. How accurate their efforts to enhance our taste of the past is what it is all about.
Re:WTF are they on about? (Score:4, Interesting)
This was exactly my conclusion after thinking about it for all of 15 seconds. I've never heard of this film, I have no love or hate for the machine learning algorithms and have absolutely no skin in this game in any way. The fact that the originals are in no way harmed by the edits (and may actually act to preserve the originals, since the edits are *much* less interesting on their own without reference to the originals) seems to make the case that this is much ado about nothing. Case closed.
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I've never heard of this film, I have no love or hate for the machine learning algorithms and have absolutely no skin in this game in any way. The fact that the originals are in no way harmed by the edits (and may actually act to preserve the originals, since the edits are *much* less interesting on their own without reference to the originals) .
The "originals" aren't. Frequently, they're 360p uploads of videotapes. Going back to the original negative-- should it exist-- and digitizing that would produce improvements that actually had some basis in reality. But that's expensive. If the "4k upscale simulation" supplants any serious interest in going back to the best archival copy, then arguably some preservationist goals are harmed.
Or, as a reader of this site might quip "Garbage In, Garbage out."
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The "originals" aren't. Frequently, they're 360p uploads of videotapes. Going back to the original negative-- should it exist-- and digitizing that would produce improvements that actually had some basis in reality.
Especially the one where Han shoots first.
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Nope. The originals and all the efforts to preserve and promote them are in exactly the same state as before the new versions were made. I believe you're conflating preservation with viewing. No one was looking at the originals to begin with (aside from preservationists) and now some people are.
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Re: A Blast from the Past (Score:2)
The video part looks like a well preserved movie from the 1930s, and the audio sounds modern.
There is a bit of disconnect because of these differences, but it still does a good job of conveying what the actual scene was like for those who were there and living in that time period.
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"The video part looks like a well preserved movie from the 1930s, and the audio sounds modern."
I find the sound more normal than some guy playing a badly tuned piano in the background.
Art vs. 'watching' (Score:5, Insightful)
I read that statement and something in the back of my mind jumps up and down screaming like a toddler that just had his sucker taken away. Somebody making that statement without thinking about what it means just doesn't sit right.
There's a discussion there about whether art, cinema, etc, should be screwed around with. Now, as long as the original still exists? Sure, whatever, knock yourself out. Just make sure you always point out that you are showing viewers an "enhanced, reprinted, digitally altered" experience. Otherwise you end up "enhancing" the history itself, and will be able to increasingly get by with altering actual events that happened in the view of people in the future.
Re:Art vs. 'watching' (Score:4, Insightful)
No amongst Star Wars fans there's not. :) In that case, I'm of the view that Han shot first, and I'd rather take that version in grainy VHS quality over remastered 4K (and probably 8K as soon as Disney thinks it can sell it) any day. At least the people who are doing this are normally pretty clear about what they are doing and that it's not the original footage (in many cases they also show a side-by-side comparison as well), so as long as the original footage is still readily available and you have a choice, then as far as I'm concerned they can clean up, convert to colour, and upscale as much footage as they can get their hands on.
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Han had his life threatened, and then fired his blaster and successfully defended himself.
That's the order of events in every version.
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So am I. However, while original photographs are, at least unless sold, the property of the photographer for a limited period of time, the right to do whatever the heck we want with older photographs is not something, IMHO, that we want to let "historians" or anyone else, for that matter, define.
When people try to take control of a person's actions on property they have a right to, either by legal means or via some pr
Re:Art vs. 'watching' (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm of the view that Han shot first,
This view is slightly misleading. Han didn't shoot "first", Han just shot Greedo. Greedo never fires a weapon. So there is no second shot, only "the shot".
Hence, you should have the view that "Han shot" or "Only Han shoots".
Of course this is the whole point of changing history, by introducing a second shot in later versions we introduce confusion. Really wasn't Han suppose to be a smuggling scum who just took on the job for some fast cash to save his own skin? Now you introduce some element to make it seem like self defense, blahh!
Back to the main topic, I'm not so concerned about up-scaling old footage, but the altering of modern footage to insert fake history.
Re:Art vs. 'watching' (Score:5, Funny)
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Was there artistic intent with the original film stock beyond cataloging city streets?
Re: Art vs. 'watching' (Score:2)
"therwise you end up "enhancing" the history itself, and will be able to increasingly get by with altering actual events that happened in the view of people in the future"
As long as they don't alter the footage itself and they try to keep the audio as close
to reality as possible, this is not really
a big issue.
However, if they altar the content and/or context, that would be a big problem.
But another problem is people believing that some scratchy, jumpy film is proof of it being authentic, when this can be ve
It's more accessible... to me at least (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's more accessible... to me at least (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. I met one guy once who was moved to tears when he saw a colorized / cleaned up / enhanced documentary on the holocaust, whereas he was mildly bored "watching those old black and white pieces of footage we've seen a thousand times already" on the same subject - by his own admission.
Modernized material does have value. It does create a connection to the past for most people of today. It does for me too.
The beef historians and other purists have with the process is easily solved: just stick "Warning: this material is digitally enhanced" somewhere in the photo of video, and/or show the original material alongside it, and Bob's your uncle.
Re:It's more accessible... to me at least (Score:5, Interesting)
The beef historians and other purists have with the process is easily solved: just stick "Warning: this material is digitally enhanced" somewhere in the photo of video, and/or show the original material alongside it, and Bob's your uncle.
Don't be so sure about that. The headline here is misleading. Its art historians (not history historians) that are complaining. They want people to focus on the medium as that's part of their specific area of expertise (as possibly is restoring old prints). There is a bit of buggywhip makers complaining about cars here. So don't expect that a warning that settles it for "unbiased" and/or reasonable folks will satisfy some of these folks. PS the actual historians love this stuff as it "brings the past live" to younger folks and that brings in money and resources.
yep they're hypocrites (Score:3)
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When I watch a good black and white print, eventually I barely notice that it's black and white. Maybe there is a neural network in my head that colorizes it. :-) I think I would prefer a sharp black and white print to a fuzzy or poorly colored color one. Of course, this may due to the fact that for most of my childhood, we didn't have a color TV.
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What about the history where there were no contemporary films? That would be most of history. Are we not allowed to have artist's impressions of historical events?
If you are not just a dry academic determined to stick to the evidence, then surely it is a worthwhile task to bring history to life, for the sake of people like me, that do not do history for a living. Of course, outright falsification would not be acceptable, but I would say there are many more ways to falsify history than mere image enhancement
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I met one guy once who was moved to tears when he saw a colorized / cleaned up / enhanced documentary on the holocaust, whereas he was mildly bored "watching those old black and white pieces of footage
And yet Spielberg made a modern film on the subject and chose black and white because he didn't need colour to tell that story.
Some cunt being bored of old black and white footage is no excuse for trying to jazz it up. Anyway, if people want colour footage of the holocaust it exists already - captured in colour at Dachau, possibly others. I saw footage in the late 70s or early 80s, bulldozers pushing literal piles of bodies into pits.
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You're not wrong, I'd argue that these videos brought back some much needed detail and context. Having said that, though, I did notice a couple of occasions where kids were juggling balls, and the motion of the balls are just wrong. The AI reconstructing the frames didn't know how to handle that.
I feel like maybe you just add a disclaimer. Doubt you need anything more extreme than that.
Re: It's more accessible... to me at least (Score:5, Interesting)
This. To me, colorization/stabilization/higher FPS removes the novelty of the old technology, letting me watch like I'd watch any other modern movie. That lets me focus on what's happening in the scene, like looking at people's faces, how they're moving, how they're interacting. Isn't that what the photographer would want me to be doing? It's possible that early movie viewers were used to the bad film quality, slow frame rate and of course B&W, so it wasn't a distraction. But it is for me, and removing those distractions lets me focus on the content rather than the medium.
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Early viewers. Fuck. I grew up watching film in black and white.
Fucking kids.
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Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it diminishes the gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it creates wholeness.
You misrepresent your feelings about an experience as being the medium of the experience.
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The vast majority of the color screens that you interact with have similar color palette and resolution to CGI.
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We've colorized in the past. It's a fad that comes and then fades away because it really hasn't made things much better. What it does it take a modern conception and try to apply it to the past. What you get is not what the past really was but just a different view of it. In a few years people look at the updated version and think "that just looks funny". Meanwhile the person in the past that made the painting or photo may have taken great care to get the effect they wanted just right, only to have som
There's a difference (Score:3)
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http://calvin-and-hobbes-comic... [blogspot.com]
It's fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
The past is gone.
We are what remain of it.
The artifacts that remain to remind us of it are valuable - but are subject to entropy.
Often, we do need to recreate them as best we can to avoid repeating mistakes - but however we do it, it's going to be a faint echo with a limited ability to relate to it.
So - keep both versions. It's fine to 'translate' it, so that it can be used, and comfortably understood.
Better than locking it off from the greater populace, to protect them from misunderstanding it.
Offer the clarifications for those that care to learn more, and value those that do want to keep the past relevant and useful in their memories.
Ryan Fenton
Nothng wrong if originals are kept also. (Score:4, Insightful)
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We have cases where only the colorized version of a film exists, because the old one deteriorated. And it deteriorated because the effort and money was spent on colorizing rather than preserving or making an accurate copy.
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The problem with colourisation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, chum, that's exactly what photos are. They are literally nothing more than a snapshot of what the visible environment looked like. That they may - or may not - evoke emotions or nostalgia is a separate topic entirely. There's a reason why most people cringe when "hey, who wants to see the slide-show of our vacation" comes up. Most pictures have zero value to anyone but the photographer. Yes, yes, "wanna see my baby" gets a lot of people excited. Sure, "look what my cat did" is interesting to some. Granted, "here's a spectacular shot of some major tragic/inspiring event" will get looked at time and time again. But the vast, vast majority of photos are pointless preservation of photons. Pretending otherwise is egotistical at best.
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And a painting is just some pigment smeared onto a canvas. And of course it follows that the less true to life a painting is, the less relatable is becomes. Hopefully AI will "upscale" some of these blurry crappy French paintings and make them more relatable for modern audiences. They are clearly nothing special, and even completely pointless, unless the internet gods determine them to be.
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Lacking a basic understanding of art isn't a virtue.
Admittedly most of the black and white romance-dramas aren't art in that there is little their creators are trying to express except maybe to spin a good yarn. The directors and producers used the technology that was readily available, and were probably not particularly tied to a medium. For anything that is primarily made for entertainment value, we don't need to worry too much about artistic integrity and the creators intended image.
For worked made for t
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Absolutely. For every film maker who shot in black and white for artistic effect (like Some Like it Hot, Young Frankenstein or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid), there are dozens, if not hundreds, who used it because there was no alternative at the time, and would have used colour if it had been around. So the idea that some visual purity has been debased because the film now looks like it was shot yesterday is pomposity of the highest order.
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Sorry, chum, that's exactly what photos are. They are literally nothing more than a snapshot of what the visible environment looked like.
You seem to miss the detail that the colorization is not a snapshot of what the visible environment looked like, but is a contemporary fictional creative act that proposes what a person thinks it might have looked like, and replaces what was actually recorded from the environment with that vision.
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No, I didn't gloss over that, I addressed it directly, you merely can't comprehend words.
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You could spend some time at a photographic art museum. Photos are very good at creating illusions.
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So, colorizing the Wizard of Oz opening from the original black and white is ok, fine, no big deal, and should be done to bring it up to current standards?
I took great pains to make clear that there are exceptions. There's obviously a difference between parts of a production being black & white to denote fantasy versus reality, and a production being black & white purely because colour photography didn't exist yet.
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Your point?
Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that, when the first photos were made, there was some curator in some museum that said that photographs should not be made from paintings, because:
"Photography does not bring us closer to the artwork; it increases the gap between us and the artist. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."
Or something to that effect. Lack of useful things to do, I suppose.
It's valid. It's translation. (Score:2)
The process is no more nonsense than translating an historical foreign language text to make it accessible to a wider audience. There is inevitably something lost in translation, and there are good translations and bad translations. But accessibility is huge. Would these same historians poo-poo the same process done to films that were shot of the liberation of concentration camps in 1945? I imagine such a treatment would have fantastic value in getting the attention of younger generations and educating them
Partially misleading headling (Score:5, Interesting)
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As I was saying before racist death worshipers tried to downmod the truth about what piece of vaguely human-shaped scum Peter Jackson is...
And Jackson is a deranged sociopath with a HUGE hardon for that war and probably for imperialism too.
Adding how he helped screw over New Zealanders [stuff.co.nz] back during the making of that abortion called Hobbit...
Should he crash one of his many WWI original airplanes (at last count he had 70 WW1 planes [airspacemag.com]) on his whole family, murdering them all... I'd be sad he didn't get to suffer
Gives a clearer, more realistic view of the past. (Score:3)
" Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it."
Is saying the B/W flickering and jitter was real, not an artifact of primitive film making?
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Good point. These effects were due to limitations of the technology at the time - not artistic choices. Given the opportunity the original filmers certainly would shot in color in high resolution and at full frame rate if they could have. So we shouldn't treat artifacts from the limited technology as some sort of sacred artistic vision that must always be included with the original source material in order to appreciate it.
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Is saying the B/W flickering and jitter was real, not an artifact of primitive film making?
Indeed. The jitter was very real, it was caused by the limitations of the camera, it was not a decision the filmmaker made. And the things that the film misses because of it are also real, and if you understand camera artifacts you might understand the limitations of what you're looking at by the jitter. Without the jitter, when it has been replaced by some idea of what the missing image portions might be, you don't even have reason to suspect anything might have been left out. And yet, almost everything th
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So, an artifact of the primitive film making.
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"I didn't understand anything you said, there must not have been anything."
When you can't disagree, because you didn't understand anything, there is no need to attempt to disagree anyway.
I'm not even convinced you know the difference between nouns and verbs.
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" Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it."
Is saying the B/W flickering and jitter was real, not an artifact of primitive film making?
The ones I have seen are more grainy than they were in 1080p. The extra resolution of 4K is just spend encoding more noise, and then less bandwidth spend on encoding the important details.
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Story vs. Style (Score:2)
Idiot Historians (Score:2)
Roger Ebert's take on a colorlized Sinatra movie (Score:3)
There is some "knowledge-in-the-world" that sometimes doesn't get passed on to these restorers.
Seeing a badly colorized movie and riffing on Frank Sinatra's famous (to Ebert's generation) nickname, Roger Ebert quipped,
"Look! Ol' Brown Eyes is back."
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Ahem... As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by pathetic morons who try to downmod the truth...
Ever hear about that whole thing when Lucas kept changing Star Wars, particularly that one scene with Han shooting some guy?
That's colorization.
But why stop there?
Let's make it all 4DX HDR with 120fps AND let's add more stuff into every scene.
Also, let's jam every bit of discarded footage back into the movie. Make it 20 hours long.
That'll surely improve the viewer experience!
Next up - dubbing Charlie
When will they colourize ... (Score:2, Funny)
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"Ethically fraught"???? (Score:5, Insightful)
How broken do you have to be to see something like that as an ethical issue?
Seriously, you cannot possibly get more trivial than worrying about what people are doing with mostly-unwatched copies of obscure even-more-unwatched media.
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Its only obscure and unwatched if you haven't made it your livelihood to study and preserve them. Protecting their original view doesn't make someone "broken" it just means they care.
Conversely you (and I) don't seem to give a shit about original authenticity, but where we differ is that I wouldn't criticise or demean someone who does care about it.
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That's nice. Presenting it as an ethical issue isn't even just expressing discomfort. Pushing something like that as a matter of "ethics" amounts to trying to run other people's lives. It also cheapens real ethics. It is bad and they should feel bad.
And at no time has anybody in any way suggested taking away their preferred versions of this stuff.
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Nobody is happy (Score:3)
Even the film is not accurate. (Score:2)
Yes, the colorization is not completely accurate. But neither is the film. Regardless of whether it's a digital sensor or physical film, neither medium captures the full range of values or full range of colors accurately - and that's at a basic, physics/chemical level.
What I noticed as an artist is that in one of the clips, the contrast is actually greater than what the eye would really see. The midrange values are correct to some degree, but the shadows are far darker than they would be in real life.
They look good, the sound needs more work... (Score:2)
They look good. I like watching silent era films etc and I wouldn't want those touched, nobody should colorize Keaton or Chaplin, but for documentary style shots it definitely works, they become much more watchable. The sound is a bit too gimmicky though, e.g. car engine noises when I am pretty sure I am seeing electric cars. They are probably better without sound since we don't have anything to extrapolate from.
OK, Karen... (Score:2)
Glorious reporting! (Score:2)
Both my face and my palm are now swollen...
There was a time colorization was absolute shit (Score:2)
I think it was in the early 90's, Ted Turner decided to colorize a lot of old movies. I remember watching some of these, and it was so bad it looked like someone was just dragging a colored peice of cellulose across an actors face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It seems like the process has come a long way since Ted Turner's attempts, the AI assisted process seems to bring colors that are a lot more granular and realistic. I'm OK with it if it's done well.
As long as its tagged as modified its fine (Score:2)
As long as viewers know that they are looking at a modified video, not the original, I see no problem.
With no technology at all, its possible to choose subjects and sight lines to give very different impression of the same scene. The ability to edit photos and videos greatly increases the ability to modify the viewer's sense of reality, but it isn't fundamentally new.
Some uniform standard for describing the types of modifications done would be very nice though. There is a difference between correcting t
Produkin-Gorskii (Score:2)
I wonder how they feel about the Produkin-Gorskii archive, which is color** glass plates from the late 19th century, being digitized and made available in full-color today?
**Three B&W images taken with filters, originally projected the same way to produce full-color images.
Shame it's on youtube (Score:2)
Buggy whipping vs interpretation (Score:2)
I used to do photo restoration work professionally. One of the biggest challenges was interpreting what kind of information was there and how it had to be replaced. This was easy when it came to dust and scratches, not so much when parts of the photo were missing and colors had faded. We can flaunt "AI" all we want, but there is always an element of artistic interpretation at play, and computers don't always do a good job of that, especially when the user demands that details be "enhanced." You always l
Historians (Score:2)
These historians who protest are so obsessed with the historical aspect of it that I think it makes them a bit out of touch. A lot of people don't care about the authenticity. Why do you think so many people will see Hollywood war film but probably wouldn't read about the actual war? I think the upscaling might get people interested in it, and then they will seek to read about the history and find the original footage, but not the other way around. Sadly, history is often seen as boring (how many people in
I've done this... sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently digitized several *hours* of my family's 8mm footage as a gift to the family. The films were shot between 1959 and 1979 by my grandfather. I didn't up-scale, colorize, or apply custom neural networks to them, but I did motion-smooth them from 16fps to 24fps, stabilized them aggressively, reduced dust and scratches, and spent a ton of time tweaking the colors to account for film degradation. I also added title cards and audio commentary recorded a few years ago when we sat down and watched the original films with the family.
My mom and grandparents absolutely loved seeing their memories coming back to life in a way that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, including memories of many people who've died over the years. So there's a huge human benefit to using these types of tools.
But when I made copies for all of my family members, I also gave each of them a separate folder with the raw scans, with no edits. I don't want my "produced" version to be the only one that survives the next 50-100 years. Anything I've done to enhance the movies "looks" better now to the human eye, but those changes are incredibly lossy, and far better tools will be available in the future to re-process my scans, long after the original reels are lost or fall apart.
Media makes the art (Score:2)
Even remake a telecine could bring a different effect, like on ST:TOS where props looked more pro
Not a technical issue (Score:2)
Cool - but not History (Score:3)
fix newer movies (Score:2)
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Watching the modern establishment feels eerily similar to reading the Gospel dialogs between Jesus and the religious authorities.
It really doesn't.
Or did you need an excuse to insert needless religion into the discussion?
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They gave an analogy that resonated with them.
Clearly it doesn't for you. In fact, it seems to have offended you that it resonated for them. Why is that?