[HN Gopher] YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historia...
___________________________________________________________________
YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historians want them to
stop
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 179 points
Date : 2020-10-01 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.co.uk)
| turdnagel wrote:
| > "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,"
|
| > "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."
|
| I don't find either of these stances intuitive, but the article
| doesn't help. A simple follow up question of "why?" would have
| gone a long way. The technology is clearly explained -- there is
| interpolation happening -- but clearly the opinions expressed by
| these historians are philosophical in nature. It's worth having
| the discussion but the article doesn't go far enough, IMHO.
| slx26 wrote:
| I'd like to see an actual survey with historians voting whether
| they oppose this or not. I just can't believe the headline.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| "historians" just means "at least 2 of them".
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| And even those 2 don't have any real arguments, just
| opinions. They really sound like they're trying to say
| something profound while they stroke their chin.
|
| "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."
|
| It's just an opinion. I can say the complete opposite and the
| opinion sounds just as valid:
|
| "Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it decreases the
| gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it removes
| differences."
| code4tee wrote:
| This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep
| making them.
|
| It's a great way to get a better idea of what things really
| looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage.
| Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more
| connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this
| doesn't make sense.
| Spivak wrote:
| That video of NYC is breathtaking. I don't care in the
| slightest that the colors might technically be wrong. The
| emotional impact of feeling like I could actually be standing
| on that street is genuinely amazing.
|
| Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the
| imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
|
| 10/10 best possible ad for these services.
| mcguire wrote:
| The emotional impact you are feeling, then, is a result of
| the image manipulation?
| redisman wrote:
| Yeah this article presents a really tiring argument. Learning
| should be boring! How dare you make it more exciting. These
| YouTubers don't claim to be some archivists for a national
| museum..
| detritus wrote:
| Likewise, I've personally been in awe at some of the upscaled
| Nuclear testing footage that's cropped up on YouTube recently.
| It's literally awe-inspiring. So what if it's not 100%
| accurate?
| mcguire wrote:
| You could likely use modern digital techniques to make up
| some new testing footage that is even more awe-inspiring. So
| what if it's 100% inaccurate?
| detritus wrote:
| I guess because it's known that the other is 95% truth vs.
| 95% fiction?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > It's a great way to get a better idea of what things really
| looked like
|
| It's not, though. It's a great way to get an idea of what a few
| people today think things looked like.
|
| Enjoying the videos is fine, but it's not great to think they
| are more accurate just because they look better.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| This was my first thought as well. However, I can think of at
| least one possible disadvantage --
|
| If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect
| there will be less desire for the original "source of truth"
| videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario:
| the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets
| 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially
| manipulated to look better gets 100k.
|
| Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and
| possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future
| historians will only have our grossly-artificial
| reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
|
| (but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd
| imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent
| this)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yes, and so what?
|
| If the "improved" version didn't exist, how many Youtube
| views would the original get? 110? 200? 1100? It sure
| wouldn't be 100,100. On what basis would you assert that 10
| or 100 or 1000 people viewing the original was _better_ than
| 100,000 viewing the enanced version?
|
| And eventually the original gets lost? What it if eventually
| gets lost _anyway_ , and we don't even have the enhanced
| version?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _...a better idea of what things really looked like..._ "
|
| But that's the problem. _Is_ it what things really looked like?
|
| I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you
| should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But
| don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.
| cooljacob204 wrote:
| Historians fill in gaps from partial information about what
| happened in the past all the time. I see this as no different
| then recreating a scene based on an old video.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be
| more connected with the past
|
| No, Historians have the job of creating an _accurate_ account
| of the past, their job isn 't to connect you to anything,
| they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes but that super accurate account is worthless if the
| accounts never actually get told to someone who isn't a
| historian. It's somebody's job to take those accounts and
| present them to non-historians/muggles and they care very
| much that you feel connected to the past.
| triceratops wrote:
| > It's somebody's job to take those accounts and present
| them to non-historians/muggles and they care very much that
| you feel connected to the past.
|
| Yep. That's the job of writers of popular history books and
| school history textbooks, which historians themselves
| sometimes write, and creators of historical entertainment
| such as novels, plays, movies, and TV shows.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| No, that's a cultural issue about the confusion between
| education and entertainment. If people aren't interested
| enough in actual history the solution is not to turn
| science into entertainment, it's to foster a genuine
| interest in actual science in the population.
|
| Trying to turn everything into entertainment is a race to
| the bottom, because people will more and more demand that
| their scientific education is 'engaging'. That's actually
| how the history channel went from well, actual history to
| ancient aliens
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's also how we got Titanic, Hamilton, Saving Private
| Ryan, and the entire genre of Westerns. Ancient Aliens is
| very dumb, granted, is it so bad that it's worth
| discarding the entire idea of historical entertainment?
| mcguire wrote:
| I don't believe any of those first four ever tried to
| portray themselves as true, non-fiction, history.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They can do whatever they want. It's a free country. But
| on day zero, they're on the same ground as the
| recolourizers. On day 365, they'll find that I'm willing
| to pay the recolourizer more. Because the utility of a
| historian to me is making me understand the past.
|
| They may not care that I redirect more funding towards
| more understanding of what happened. Or they may. Either
| way they are not in control. I am.
|
| Interpreting the past is literally a subjective process.
| Previously we used a human neural net - famous for
| assuming relationships between individuals that do not
| exist and for denying ones that do.
|
| In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't
| need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a
| place and time and its best possible interpretation of
| the evidence.
|
| After all, knowledge that does not adjust my actions is
| worthless. So if there is truth somewhere that I cannot
| access and some less accurate information that is well
| accessible and which will move me closer to the truth
| then the latter is superior every time. I'll just
| multiply it appropriately with my prior probability on
| how accurate an ANN reconstruction can be.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _They may not care that I redirect more funding towards
| more understanding of what happened._ "
|
| You may have more understanding of something, but you
| have to be very careful to remember that it's not "what
| happened". Adding another layer of inaccuracies does not
| make something more accurate.
|
| " _In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won
| 't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a
| place and time and its best possible interpretation of
| the evidence._"
|
| I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, if you do get an
| "artificial neural net" to do that, you might want to
| start worrying about what impressions it wants you to
| take away.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's just a machine. People have ulterior motives.
| Machines just do what you tell them to. People need to
| worry about their jobs, their ethnicities, their status.
| Machines don't even care about replication. There is no
| silicon gene that drives them.
|
| And as for what's happened, it doesn't matter that it's
| less precise. Every piece of information only moves my
| belief tensor in some direction. It only has to move me
| in the direction of what's happened and it's already
| superior to an exact description of what's happened that
| doesn't move me in that direction at all.
|
| You overvalue inaccessible truth. And you overestimate
| historians' propensity to tell the truth. They have every
| incentive to lie. And they do. And it works because I
| suspect you value precision over accuracy. The net result
| is you have lies told to you by people with a vested
| interest in you believing a thing.
|
| And I, I have a machine that I can make that makes
| mistakes. But you know what, you take your approach. I'll
| take mine, we'll see who wins in the marketplace of
| ideas.
| jonshariat wrote:
| This is a Slippery Slope fallacy
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
|
| There is a balance that can found that drives engagement
| from the public that fuels that historical work needed to
| be done.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This kind of purist attitude is so self-defeating in my
| opinion. The choices are "make history interesting/easily
| digestible/accessible" or "not have people care",
| unfortunately "make people care more about history"
| doesn't just happen. I'm sorry but I'm not motivated at
| all to pick through old/inaccessible texts trying to pull
| out some historical significance but I'll gladly watch a
| documentary/YT series/TV docuseries that does a good job
| of explaining events, painting a full picture, and puts
| events in context.
|
| The type of approach you suggest feels like the arguments
| about how people should just learn the CLI or low-level
| computer operations. The "We shouldn't bother with
| GUI's", "it's not important that we expose functionality
| with pretty UI", or "if people cared they would learn the
| CLI and be happy about it".
|
| Making history/art/computers/etc more accessible is not a
| bad thing.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We don't have to forbid AI-upscaling videos, we just have
| to maintain the proper awareness of what those actually
| are (entertainment) and are not (accurate history).
| That's what academic historians are speaking up about.
|
| "Alter things to make them more popular" is fine in some
| contexts, but if everyone starts confusing that with the
| original study of factual knowledge... that's a huge
| problem.
| prionassembly wrote:
| The ethics of this isn't really all that different from
| deepfaking.
| Vrondi wrote:
| No, the Historian's job is to preserve and transmit. Then,
| it becomes the job of the writers and artists to connect us
| to that knowledge in a cultural and emotional way. Two very
| different jobs. Some individuals have the talents to do
| both, but they are discrete disciplines/jobs/roles.
| halfjoking wrote:
| You can either be unemployed, or join our startup whose
| mission is to be Facebook of the past.
|
| Make your choice historians.
| tt433 wrote:
| Every field of study contributes to building a bridge: math
| and science the engineering, language the coordination of
| labor. History alone tells you why to build the bridge.
| mnl wrote:
| I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I
| guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The
| colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film,
| you can't tell from luminance which colors were there.
|
| I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't
| take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all
| settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W.
| In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of
| their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some
| audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical
| appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a
| result the expectations are that everything has to look in a
| very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of
| thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
| jedberg wrote:
| There's a big difference between a colorized movie and
| historical film that's been colorized.
|
| The movie represents a directors vision, and how it looked in
| B&W was part of that vision. I agree, they should not
| colorize old movies.
|
| But historical films are in B&W because that's all they had,
| not because they wanted to depict it that way. I'm sure if
| the creators of those films had the option of 4K HDR, they
| would have used it.
| mcguire wrote:
| I'm sure they would have, too, but they didn't and adding
| pseudo-information to the result isn't going to improve
| much even if it is prettier.
| shard wrote:
| The historical films also represent the directors' vision,
| as they had to choose the lens/film/exposure/processing to
| interpret the image and get their message across. 4K HDR
| would just gives them more knobs to tweak. A documentary
| has less control over what happens in front of the camera,
| but the whole workflow behind the camera is still
| completely under the directors' control.
| ant6n wrote:
| > If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing
| changes the fact that they're fantasy. (...) If you can't
| take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all
| settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W.
|
| So the colorized versions are a Fantasy, but the original b/w
| versions were already a Fantasy.
| toast0 wrote:
| If we're looking at colorized feature films, everything is
| a fantasy of course. The cinematography used various colors
| to get the desired look on black and white film, in some
| cases to evoke various percieved colors with totally
| different colors.
|
| When colorizing, sometimes they have color photos from the
| filming. You can try to match those, but that may not match
| the intent of the film. But you might not know the intent
| either, so you have to guess at that too. It might be
| easier to convince people to watch colorized films, but
| it's important to realize it's not really the same film.
| [deleted]
| outworlder wrote:
| I've never seen a more 'academic' discussion.
|
| So people are 'enhancing' videos and photos. Just like we've been
| doing for decades. Only the process was manual and labor-
| intensive. And usually NOT performed by historians.
|
| As long as we don't destroy the originals, I can't see why
| there's even a debate. Every medium captures an interpretation of
| reality, they are not reality itself.
| rmrk wrote:
| I for one enjoy these adaptations of old footage.
|
| I suppose these historians would also object to me watching star
| trek tng on streaming in HD since it was clearly meant to be only
| ever be seen transmitted over radio waves to a cathode ray tube.
| vmh1928 wrote:
| In studying history I find some of the most useful documents are
| older histories. For instance, reading about World War 1, finding
| the account written in the 20's or 30's can be very informative.
| Of course those histories have bias but so do modern histories.
| Reading both and comparing the two provides even more benefit.
| Newer histories, in spite of their bias, may have more accurate
| facts or facts from records that were not available to the
| historian of 1920. But the mores and culture of the 1920's also
| plays a role and no modern historian can reproduce that.
| growlist wrote:
| '"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.'
|
| Why do these academics always want to complicate things and
| dictate how we feel? Nobody put them in charge!
|
| '"There's something that's gained, but there's also something
| that's lost," says Mark-FitzGerald. "And I think we need to have
| a conversation about what both of those things are."'
|
| I'm guessing that would be a pretty one-way 'conversation'.
|
| Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed
| version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun
| they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty
| hard to spot on the raw footage. It's charming to think of them
| fooling around in the garden with new technology, 132 years ago
| this month.
| antientropic wrote:
| They're not dictating anything. They're giving their opinion.
| Just as you are.
|
| > Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the
| processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly
| how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces,
| which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage.
|
| I mean, isn't that exactly the issue that the critics are
| pointing out? The algorithm is inserting something - the
| behaviour of people - into the source material that may not
| have been there. It may be biased towards falsely making the
| past look like the present because that's what the algorithm
| has been trained on.
| growlist wrote:
| I really don't think it added the smiles etc.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| > we need to have a conversation
|
| I'm not sure how they envisage such a "conversation" (whatever
| that means in this context) taking place.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| It might not be to everyone's taste but it's impressive work.
|
| Why do these particular academic historians not trust people to
| understand the limitations of this? To me this is not dissimilar
| from translating a book from an ancient language - there are
| problems of bias and so on, but why not make good things a little
| more accessible? Nothing wrong with something that sparks the
| imagination.
| smusamashah wrote:
| There are shades of green, brown, red, but not exactly and it
| doesn't stick or stay, just the way I remember colors in
| dreams. They are colorful, but I can not exactly recall
| vividly.
| vffhfhf wrote:
| What a dumb argument.
|
| Humans learn by watching shit.
|
| Colorize the history, HDfy it.
|
| Just coz you got your useless history degree toiling 3 years
| doesnot make you a better historian than 5 year old reciting a
| old story.
|
| Also imagine getting a history degree. What failures.
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| Learning from, teaching about, and documenting history is
| extremely important. The fact that you or I disagree with some
| historians about the proper balance between accuracy and
| relatability does not mean we should denigrate the study of
| history. I tend to agree with you that exposing more people to
| history is a higher priority than painstaking color accuracy,
| but I also believe that there is plenty of room for the kinds
| of historians that care more about accurate documentation than
| about public outreach.
| kbos87 wrote:
| There are romantic arguments to be made on both sides here -
| historians saying that something is lost when this transformation
| happens, and that this is simply progress that people react to
| positively on the side of the doers.
|
| Both of those seem misguided and rooted in one paradigm or the
| other. When I think about the tangible effects of something like
| this, I don't see many downsides.
|
| One thing that sticks in my mind - how easy it is for people to
| look at photos and videos from, for example, the Holocaust, and
| say "wow, the world was so very messed up way, way back then."
|
| The technology of the time isn't telling the story in the full
| fidelity of those who lived it. Instead, it looks nothing like
| the reality that it was, and makes it feel further removed. Fine
| as an art form, but not a service to reality.
| Swayworn wrote:
| "He was talking about how all his life these movies of history
| had been getting better and better looking. How they'd started
| out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around
| like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to
| them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they'd
| slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd been
| colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the
| scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every
| other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it
| might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a
| particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said,
| like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that
| crackle and tin." - William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Old men yelling at clouds. The whole thing is ridiculous, it's
| not like the old films were captured in 1080p or something, it's
| an analog medium.
|
| Yes you can argue that the colorized version is not a historical
| document. Does it matter? Neither is a movie about history.
| vmh1928 wrote:
| Old men yelling? For a second I thought you were commenting on
| the presidential debate.
| bishalb wrote:
| These historians are saying as if these new 4kncolor videos will
| make the original ones disappear from the face of the earth.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Here's some _authentic_ high-resolution video from the past:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY
| strictnein wrote:
| I really enjoy video from that time period for one particular
| reason: no cell phones. Seeing people walk not hunched over
| anything.
|
| One of my favorite music videos (of sorts) is just a song over
| what appears to be a Mountain Dew street team passing out free
| soda on a random night outside bars, while filming their
| efforts.
|
| Apologies in advance, as they definitely focus on a particular
| gender, but it's still an interesting slice of life in the mid
| 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng
| LockAndLol wrote:
| You can find this phenomenon of self-appointed protectors of
| values everywhere: the clergy, rap purists, rustaceans, Apple
| users... in their echo chambers they are always right and only
| they know how things should be done. If you somehow have the
| misfortune of treading upon their proverbial holy turf and doing
| something they consider against their teachings... boy will they
| get pissed. Especially if you make their world more
| understandable to those not in the know, then you're immediately
| a problem.
|
| This sounds like just another form of gatekeeping.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I though there might be some reasonable arguments in here, like
| restorations might be misleading and badly labeled, it might make
| it harder to find originals because all you find are restored
| versions, etc. But no, it's just "I'm a proper historian and let
| me tell you I don't like the way other people are doing history.
| Making it all accessible and whatnot. History should be _hard_ ,
| or you're cheating."
| hedberg10 wrote:
| "The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New
| York aren't drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was
| never captured there."
|
| I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try
| this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail
| those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos
| from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually
| looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to
| capture them at the time.
|
| So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very
| realistic.
|
| I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these
| videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past
| didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because
| all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were
| limited.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| People didn't look like books either, and didn't look like
| pottery/statue fragments with the paint washed off, but
| historians aren't trying to ban that.
|
| There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists
| who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn
| off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in
| live performance.
| djaque wrote:
| I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film
| unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that.
|
| I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is
| a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going
| in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like
| the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super
| messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made
| watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in
| black and white.
|
| My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up
| with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like
| extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear
| from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in
| post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements
| actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got
| filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures
| to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.
| j4nt4b wrote:
| Remember, this footage was created using silent-era film
| equipment over a hundred years ago. Much of the footage
| used in the film is borderline unwatchable without the
| post-processing used: hand-crank cameras meant wildly
| variable framerate, volatile & unstable early film stock on
| the frontlines of a war exposed to smoke, dust, heat, cold
| and gas attacks, over/under-exposed footage caught in the
| heat of the moment, the list goes on. What I'm saying is,
| you'd probably complain a lot more if you saw the original
| footage, or you'd skip most of it as unwatchable in its
| original form.
|
| Finally, there's an education factor at play. Young people
| deserve the best possible chance they can get to engage
| with their history, especially when it offers such a
| tremendously impactful lesson. And like it or not, I think
| 90% of people are going to be more engaged, not less, by
| well-curated, well-produced and respectful recreations of
| the past. Jackson recorded the SFX using original
| historical weapons, and colored uniforms using historical
| examples.
| mcguire wrote:
| Here's a comparison frame: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/sites/
| bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/p...
|
| https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
| magazine/re...
|
| One criticism:
|
| " _However, it's a bizarre sight that greets us, and not
| just because we lose the top and bottom of each frame.
| The effect is initially impressive, but that soon wanes.
| Almost every man has a creamy, peachy skin tone, and the
| grass in each shot is a warm, yellowy green. The sky is
| blue. If it weren't for the daubs of bright red blood,
| and the bomb craters, this would risk being a unnaturally
| prettified image of war, with remarkably consistent
| scenery. These are really incredible images - so
| homogenising them in this way does them a disservice.
| It's not easy either to dispel the thought that all these
| colours (as well as many of the sounds) are simply
| guesswork: the colour of hair, blankets, signs and
| wildflowers having been plucked out of the air._ "
| (https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-
| shall-...)
| acituan wrote:
| The difference with moving pictures is that it comes with the
| implication of photo-realism, while other art forms are self-
| aware about being representative or expressive rather than
| being high fidelity simulacra.
| yokaze wrote:
| > We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those
|
| Um, do we really?
| hedberg10 wrote:
| Well, technically you're right, but I don't think the
| pigments in our skin made huge evolutionary advancements in
| ~100 years. I'd guess people were working more outdoors, but
| that's it.
|
| So if you were to recolor a film you can take skin colors
| from today. But an advert, car color or fabric is incredibly
| difficult, even if you have the original, since the material
| will have degraded. Even if you repaint it with the original
| paint it will look different, since the paint will have
| changed, or if you use new paint the process to manufacture
| the paint (->led).
|
| It might as well be another universe.
| untog wrote:
| _which_ skin colour is a question here as well. There are a
| lot of variations and I 'm not sure that a black and white
| film is going to contain enough information for you to
| know. There's a danger of white-washing (or the reverse!)
| history by mistake.
| kderbyma wrote:
| true - but we could just recolour it if needed
| untog wrote:
| I think the point is that you simply don't know in a lot
| of these videos. They're random bystanders, not known
| figures with photographic evidence. So you're not going
| to know what to recolour it to, or if it's even wrong in
| the first place.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Not all shades of skins are the same within one specific
| demographic.
|
| Unless there's also a way to accurately extract the
| specific hue, you will never get anything accurate.
|
| Anyone that ever wore foundation can tell you that human
| skin has tones, undertones, different reflective
| qualities, etc.
|
| Just look at https://www.temptalia.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/05/summer-... or https://cdn.shopify
| .com/s/files/1/0009/0000/5932/files/Shade... or this http
| s://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_zp3U1XAAAk4Iz?format=jpg&name=.
| ..
| Uehreka wrote:
| A couple years ago I used deep learning to recolor some old
| family photos. The net I was using would do it's best guess
| first, then present a limited set of options for me to choose
| from when it didn't know what to do. In general, its first
| pass would immediately make human faces look correct, but
| leave everything else really desaturated.
|
| I think some of it comes down to the fact that convnets are
| really good at recognizing human "shapes" (faces,
| silhouettes, etc) and also the valid color space for human
| skin tone is pretty constrained if the photo was well lit and
| you have the luminance value for a grayscale image.
|
| The network was particularly bad at getting the colors of
| balloons in a picture. I don't know what the real colors
| were, but the network was trying to tell me 4 of the balloons
| in a picture were pale yellow and beige while one was a super
| saturated red.
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't mind the colorizations, but to give you some additional
| ammo for your argument, check out the TV show "The Munsters"
| and "The Addams Family". If you're not familiar, they're
| supposed to live in creepy dark houses, and in black and white,
| the houses do indeed look dark and creepy.
|
| But in reality, those sets were bright pastels. Actual dark
| walls and floors didn't show up well on film. Which makes me
| wonder how right we are with some of our other colorizations.
|
| You can google [what did the munsters set actually look like]
| to get some great examples.
| ChrisKingWebDev wrote:
| Similarly, the first Superman wore a grey suit, because it
| was captured better by the black and white cameras.
| TylerE wrote:
| Another example is the "TV Yellow" paint used on many early
| gibson electric guitars.
|
| https://gbmedia.azureedge.net/aza/user/gear/1961-gibson-
| les-...
|
| Actual white guitars would look like blown-out blobs on black
| and white TV. TV Yellow would "look" white on TV.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fascinating! That's such a classic color for an electric
| guitar, I had no idea where it came from.
| TylerE wrote:
| I mean, it kinds makes sense. It's basically caucasian
| skin tone as paint.
| giantrobot wrote:
| For _additional_ additional ammo look at Star Trek (TOS). A
| lot of the campy bright colors weren 't used to make it look
| campy but to show up equally well on black and white and
| color TVs. By using brightly colored uniforms it was obvious
| even on a B&W TV that Kirk, Spock, and ensign C. Fodder were
| different and one wasn't coming back from the away mission.
| shard wrote:
| Another point is that displays can never provide real color
| representation anyway.
|
| The process flow goes from converting the full spectrum lights
| in nature into color filtered photons captured on a camera
| sensor with an artificial color profile, it's own resolution
| and pixel arrangement, and its own lens specifics, then
| converted to another limited color palette with another
| artificial color profile and it's own resolution and pixel
| arrangement that is the display, in order to simulate the
| colors of nature as detected by yet another set of filtered
| detectors with it's own color profile, resolution, neuron
| arrangement, and lens specifics that is the human eye. There is
| already no such thing as objective truth when it comes to
| photography, every step involves heavy interpretation.
| TylerE wrote:
| It absolutely was _possible_ , although certainly not readily
| available.
|
| Most notably the work of Russian chemist Sergei Mikhailovich
| Prokudin-Gorskii, who took absolutely stunning color photos
| around 1910.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%...
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Thanks for linking - that was really cool!
| ISL wrote:
| These are incredible. Thank you for sharing.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, and we have artifacts (I believe they're called antiques
| :-)) from that time too that tells us what color clothes were,
| signs, etc. So we should be able to do alright.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| And being such artifacts the means used by historians to
| reconstruct the past, while they deny others the same rights
| to interpret it, is quite ironic.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > And being such artifacts the means used by historians to
| reconstruct the past, while they deny others the same
| rights to interpret it, is quite ironic.
|
| Maybe that's because those others are more likely to do a
| bad job, because they lack the training to do a good one.
| Sort of like how sci-fi filmmakers have taught millions of
| people that you can hear explosions in space and that
| lasers make a "zap" sound.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Still, a pretty harsh take on what should be considered
| hobbyist work.
| leetcrew wrote:
| or that highly advanced space-faring civilizations are
| doomed to forever fight WWII naval battles over and
| over...
|
| BTW, if you want to support some folks that actually try
| to get it right, check out the expanse.
| DanBC wrote:
| We also know what chemical and natural dyes were in use so we
| have a good idea what colours looked like. We have old colour
| charts too.
|
| https://www.c82.net/werner/
|
| eg, this blue: 24. Scotch Blue
| Throat of Blue Titmouse. Stamina of Single Purple
| Anemone. Blue Copper Ore.
|
| https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/natures-colours-page-
| paint.ht...
| Vrondi wrote:
| But those artifacts have usually faded with time and exposure
| to the light, so even those don't show you what the colors
| actually looked like, unless they have been sealed away from
| light exposure all this time.
| jandrese wrote:
| Often you can find a bit of the paint in an overspray area
| that was covered by some other piece that is well
| preserved, even if the original paint is totally lost.
| Start taking off bolts and look at the flecks of paint
| stuck to the underside of the bolt.
|
| Also, we still have the techniques and materials used to
| make old paints. New batches can be whipped up (assuming
| they aren't too toxic) for comparison. Lead based paints
| obviously are more problematic, but modern technology is
| really good at replicating paint colors.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You've seen though where a fabric covered couch, color
| faded over time, will reveal its original color when you
| roll back the cording covering the zipper or whatever. But
| I get your point.
| alliao wrote:
| I don't see an issue, as long as we have links to the original;
| we can do that right? /s
| Waterluvian wrote:
| One of the most eye opening videos for me was that sky train that
| ran through a city. Germany I think? Such high quality I could
| really begin to feel what that era was like in some ways.
|
| This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries
| to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize
| the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way
| to do things.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. Also, 'runs' not 'ran'. It's
| still there in daily use.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Modern-quality full-colour fairly-high-def (1080p) video
| reconstruction:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg
|
| Erm, _not_ reconstruction ;-)
| rkachowski wrote:
| The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned.
| The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the
| environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in
| holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it
| was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just
| approximation
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The source material doesn't lie to you, though. The black and
| white you see is the true brightness of the scene, without any
| fake colours dreamed up by a neural network. Your mind is free
| to fill in the details itself without having someone else's
| guess at them imposed on it.
|
| It is like the difference between a film adaptation of a text
| and the original text. If you see the film first, it will
| permanently colour your reading of the text, taking away from
| you the opportunity to draw your own meanings from a blank
| slate.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Hold on -- every capture of reality, whether it's a 100-year-
| old black and white video camera or a modern day 3d video --
| "lies" to you. There is no such thing as an objective capture
| of reality. Media is inherently representative, from the
| limitations of the medium itself to the biases of the
| recorder in what they choose to focus on and what they choose
| to not film. Hell, even our own eyes lie to us frequently.
| gridlockd wrote:
| The sky did not literally look like that either, when Van Gogh
| painted it. You are missing the point.
| rkachowski wrote:
| I don't understand, van gogh made art in his own style whilst
| these films and photos attempted to document and capture the
| state of the world
| shard wrote:
| Photographers and filmmakers also make art in their own
| style. There is no such thing as a perfect representation
| of the world on film: they are compressing the dynamic
| range and adjusting the color/brightness profiles through
| the film they use, the exposure settings and any added
| filters on the camera, the development process for the film
| (chemicals, timing, pushing/pulling), the paper for the
| print (photography) or the film for the positive print
| (movies), the dodging/burning of the print, and others.
|
| It's not about correcting the image to match what their
| eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a
| photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and
| photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get
| their message across.
| rkachowski wrote:
| I totally in no way meant to imply that camerawork has
| somehow less artistic value than any other medium, but
| just as pencil and paper can be used to produce technical
| drawings of architecture and field sketches to outline
| geography, documentary footage can be recorded with the
| primary intent of capturing a scene and setting before
| rendering a creative work.
| mcguire wrote:
| I believe gridlockd's point was that the colorization and
| interpolation applied to these films and photos is a
| modification to and a stylistic choice about a
| representation of the state of the world, in the same way
| Van Gogh's skies are modifications and stylistic choices
| about the skies he saw.
| jedberg wrote:
| An artist is executing a vision with the tools available. The
| final product is what they intended. And sometimes not (see
| how George Lucas kept updating Star Wars as new tech came out
| to match his vision).
|
| But for historical documents, the creators are usually
| hamstrung by technology, not embracing it. If they could have
| had 4K HDR, I'm sure they would have.
|
| Van Gogh would still use oil on canvas to execute his vision.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's not that the source material is accurate, it's that our
| knowledge is based on the source material, so the limits of the
| source material make clear the limits of our knowledge.
|
| It's kind of like the concept of "significant digits" in
| science. If your experimental apparatus can only measure a
| value with precision plus or minus one tenth, it's
| inappropriate to report your results with digits out the
| thousandths. Doing so would make it seem more precise to the
| reader, but the additional precision is an illusion.
|
| In much the same way, using software in 2020 to guess what
| things "really looked like" can give viewers a false impression
| of how much we actually know about what things really looked
| like.
| kube-system wrote:
| I am now imagining up-scaling my ruler to be accurate to
| 0.000001"
| jawns wrote:
| Are you saying that we should only display dinosaur bones and
| never draw illustrations of what the dinosaurs actually
| looked like, because it might fool someone into thinking we
| know more than we actually do?
| edaemon wrote:
| Wouldn't the same logic apply to someone drawing or painting
| a historical event based on written source material?
|
| I find it hard to believe these academics would criticize
| Paul Philippoteaux for the _Gettysburg Cyclorama_ despite it
| going far beyond the limits of the source material.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Colorized historical videos:
|
| pros: more emotional connection, easier to visualize the scene in
| front of the camera
|
| cons: misrepresents the epistemic status of the captured scene
|
| What more is there to say... things often have two (or more)
| sides to them.
| aaron695 wrote:
| What people are really pissed about is how fucking lazy it is to
| watch colorized and upscaled media.
|
| Seen it before with wide screening and dubbed media.
|
| Everything about the past you have not lived is made up anyway.
| That's both philosophical and literal.
|
| Being annoyed is gatekeeping. But I'll justify it myself as a
| dumbing down of the populace by them not looking at source
| materials.
| pjc50 wrote:
| So what is the state of the art in auto upscaling and detail re-
| imagining? There's a lot of 240p VHS transfer music videos on
| youtube I'd like to see less bad versions of without regards to
| accuracy.
| floatboth wrote:
| Here's an.. example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkDUObv5iIU
|
| Original:
| http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%252...
| rokweom wrote:
| I can't believe people actually find those results to be amazing.
| None of these algorithms, or as they call them - "AIs", are yet
| capable of adding detail (be it spatial or temporal) in a way
| that actually makes it look believable. It's all approximation, a
| very, very poor approxiation. I'm sure we'll reach that level one
| day, but for now, we are far away from it.
|
| Add to that the fact that those film scans are rarely shared in
| their original framerate and you're getting an absolutely
| terrible result.
| ezoe wrote:
| It can be comparable to old manuscript, hand-copied many times
| and each copy modified the original. We certainly wish the
| original text be survived. But it won't happen anyway. It was
| copied, modified thus increasing the value along the way.
|
| It's either valuable enough to be copied or not to be copied and
| lost. We have certain old text because it has been copied and
| modified.
|
| If they have time and resource to complain it, they should rather
| start copying the original photo and films in order to preserve
| the historically important materials. The more copied, more
| change to survive.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation
| Project digitizing and archiving their collections.
|
| When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up
| being important. For something like an album, you don't just have
| the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes,
| and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing
| each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the
| Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way?
|
| When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way,
| you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a
| Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result,
| it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their
| analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone.
|
| It's _not_ a matter of "most accurate" representation of a
| moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in
| time.
|
| The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc
| applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| AI sometimes adds things which were not present in the original
| scene. For example some upscaling algorithms love to draw tiny
| glasses. While I don't see much harm in making some scenes more
| fun for people, it's important to keep original sources, because
| they are ultimate truth, not algorithm outputs. And there's
| danger that some people will destroy originals thinking that they
| are inferior.
| ludamad wrote:
| I don't think so. I think eventually we would have an ensemble
| of restorations with different flairs, like how people see
| movies based on history almost
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| The originals are not ultimate truth. They are messy evidence.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| How true!
|
| Take the original Star Trek. Its color scheme is 'iconic' now
| but at the time most people watched it in black and white.
| They specifically picked those colors to look decent on the
| semi new color TV's but just as importantly to not smear out
| into the background on black and white TV's. Gilligans island
| was similar.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| It's the artifice of presentation that gets me. The color's not
| real, the filled in scratches aren't real, and once upon a time a
| photographer sat and composed the shot in the first place. It's
| an artist illustration of history. Which is fine, those are
| important to have. But it's too easy to forget that it's not
| reality.
|
| As the production value of video gets better (in general, not
| just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan
| they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking
| at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the
| screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you
| really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about
| all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning.
| Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you
| read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative
| nobody, are willing to tweet.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| These academics seem to think they have some ownership of history
| because they study it. And it seems they'd rather historical
| content rot in an irrelevant pile than be accessible. All of this
| with an argument that "something" is lost by upscaling, without
| any real elaboration as to what is actually lost.
| ppod wrote:
| The rarely seen positivist-luddite niche.
| mcv wrote:
| I disagree with the criticism. Experiencing the original
| artifacts of history, like the original unenhanced film, is still
| possible. And totally understand that it's vital that that is
| still possible. But experiencing history is not just about
| experiencing its old, degraded artifacts. It's also useful and
| enlightening to experience history as it might actually have been
| back then.
|
| Of course that's partially an illusion, and it's important to be
| aware of that. But it's still a useful illusion. It's not for
| nothing that many ancient ruins have been restored so people can
| get a better impression of what they were actually like. With
| ruins this is actually a lot more questionable than with film,
| because you actually change the original historic artifact (which
| is probably why nobody repaints those ancient statues that
| probably used to have colour). But we do restore even ancient
| paintings that have been darkened by the passing of time.
|
| With that in mind, why would we not take this opportunity to
| create a much clearer window to the past?
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| It's totally an illusion. Up-scaling is a lie. Colorization is
| a lie. It's literally missing information that can never be
| verified.
|
| It's like if I used machine learning to double the length of
| the federalist papers. It would just be absurd to treat that
| like it was a real piece of history.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| There's a bit of a difference between interpolating to fill
| in spaces between pixels with hints from what's next to them
| and adding whole new words and sentences.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > It's like if I used machine learning to double the length
| of the federalist papers.
|
| I don't think that's an appropriate analogy at all. When
| colorizing or up-scaling, you're making informed guesses to
| fill in gaps, and even if it's wrong occasionally, it doesn't
| matter.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| The process for forming those guesses is the same whether
| you're generating text or generating pixels. Data is data.
| Another risk this poses is that video is not as simple as
| many assume. A naive approach of simply desaturating or
| downscaling an EiB of video data is not enough to achieve
| even a 50% level of historical accuracy because that
| doesn't address the problem of normalizing those processes
| across different camera models, lenses, film processes,
| digital scanning processes, codecs etc.
| mthoms wrote:
| Translation of historic texts and glyphs is also "a lie"
| since information (meaning) is lost or distorted during the
| translation process.
|
| Sometimes that distortion is intentional, sometimes not.
|
| The point being, as long as we're aware of the _source_ of
| the (image or text) translation we can decide for ourselves
| whether that source is reputable enough to trust.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| We're not that evolved yet. This technology is outpacing
| our own evolution as is evidenced by all the people in the
| comments who claim they actually learned more about history
| by watching doctored videos.
| burnte wrote:
| So what?
| DennisP wrote:
| Since most of the videos show before and after, I've seen more
| of the original artifacts than I ever did before.
| asperous wrote:
| I believe the average person will get most of their
| understanding of the past from time period movies and shows,
| purely constructed art forms.
|
| At least this upscaling "medium" is tied directly to what was
| captured at the time.
| devmunchies wrote:
| > the average person will get most of their understanding of
| the past from time period movies and shows
|
| actually, that's how lots people get their understanding of
| the present, too.
|
| For example, I'd wager most people on HN have seen more
| horses in movies than in real life. I've never actually seen
| what the ocean looks like underwater with my own eyes.
|
| It's actually mind boggling how much of our worldview is
| shaped by content we consume. Think about how different your
| worldview would be if it were based solely on things you've
| experienced first-hand.
| Someone wrote:
| And to the training set. It wouldn't surprise me if machine
| learning resolution enhancement methods would add a
| smartphone or some out-of time branding such as Adidas
| stripes or a Nike swash to some movie scenes.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It already does blue jeans (as described in the article).
| xenocyon wrote:
| > experience history as it might actually have been
|
| I think the _might_ in the above is key. If you add new
| information to take the place of lost information, you 're
| taking a risk that the new information does not accurately
| mimic the information that was lost. The more bits of new
| information you add, the more this risk increases.
| willis936 wrote:
| I would like to see AI upscaled and colorized versions of the
| past when there are at least 15 9s assuring me that I won't
| see Ryan Gosling on the front lines.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Agreed. Laypersons and experts alike understand that fact
| intellectually, we _believe_ that the past was not black-and-
| white and silent.
|
| But our experience in school tells us that a scratchy, low-
| framerate video is probably from the past. We grow familiar
| with Hollywood representations of history. Not having any
| evidence to the contrary, we develop an _alief_ [1] about the
| past that it was sepia and grainy and distant, when in truth,
| it was just as vibrant and real as today. No one except Calvin
| [2] would say that they believe that Gettysburg was black and
| white, but after looking at a lot of historical photos in a
| textbook that look like [3], if I go to Gettysburg, see [4],
| kneel behind the wall, and touch the stones I have a completely
| different level of comprehension and connection to the people
| who fought there that I, at least, am incapable of generating
| for myself from a black and white grainy photo.
|
| I completely understand that upscaling and AI can invent things
| that aren't there, like Gigapixel inserting the face of Ryan
| Gosling in this photo [5] or Xerox copiers replacing a 6 with
| an 8 [6], as well as more subtle changes like assuming
| greyscale pants that might have used no dye at all or natural,
| local dyes were always indigo blue jeans.
|
| The important question is whether or not the AI-invented,
| upscaled, colorized photos are closer or further from reality
| than what your brain invents without the aid of that tool. If
| you subconsciously invent a muted reality, or worse, your brain
| gets lazy and assumes it's only from a book and wasn't real at
| all, I think your ability to empathize with and comprehend the
| past would be better served by a 4k 60fps artist's impression.
|
| [1]:
| http://www.pgrim.org/philosophersannual/pa28articles/gendler...
|
| [2]: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/10/29
|
| [3]:
| https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/styles/gall...
|
| [4]:
| https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/styles/gall...
|
| [5]: https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-
| accidentally-a...
|
| [6]: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
| workcentres_...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > No one except Calvin [2] would say that they believe that
| Gettysburg was black and white
|
| That's Calvin's dad, not Calvin.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Surely Calvin's worldview is influenced by what his father
| told him?
| m463 wrote:
| It might be as simple as saying "what historians are saying
| this? are they speaking for all historians? I just asked 3
| historians and they love 4k."
| inquist wrote:
| Breaking news! Some number of people have an opinion about
| something.
| pier25 wrote:
| It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. People back
| then didn't experience reality in BW either.
|
| I know it's silly, but I was kinda surprised the first time I
| saw early color photographies. I was so used to the BW or sepia
| old images that it had never occurred to me that, you know,
| people of that time did live in color too just like we do.
|
| See these images from the early 20th century:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rgb-compose-Alim_Khan.jpg
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography#/media/File:...
| tommica wrote:
| That is so true, I've also gotten similar kind of realization
| with being happy - so serious in most pictures, as was the
| style then, but then a picture of a farm couple laughing
| reminds me that they infact were living their lives just like
| we are
| fossuser wrote:
| The seriousness in pictures was a cultural artifact of the
| time, I think partly because people treated photos like
| getting portraits?
|
| There's this photo from 1901 which seems really modern:
| https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/0...
|
| The speculation is that he didn't know about the culture of
| looking serious.
| btilly wrote:
| It was also an artifact of the technology.
|
| Cameras tended to have long exposure times. If you have
| to hold a position for 30 seconds, it is easier to do so
| with a serious face than a laughing one.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The other aspect is the early photos required long
| exposures. It is hard to maintain a smile or stand still
| long enough, so a neutral face was requested by the
| photographer. Daguerreotype's required upwards of 20
| minutes!
| beebmam wrote:
| Every time we apply an interpretation technique, we're losing
| information. It is strictly an increase in entropy. That's
| not good from a historical perspective
| mcv wrote:
| We're not actually losing anything here, though. The
| original still exists.
| dwighttk wrote:
| obligatory Calvin and Hobbes:
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09
| adventured wrote:
| The colorized Peter Jackson WW1 documentary is the most
| dramatic example of how useful this is, of any that I've
| seen.
|
| I think making the past seem more real and relevant is useful
| in helping people to learn from and understand our history by
| making it more relatable. Those were real, warm blooded
| people with hopes and dreams, dying by the tens of thousands
| in 1916. The more you humanize history (rather than being a
| rote, soulless text or object in a book), the better. Which
| takes nothing away from how beautiful B&W can be, there's no
| reason we can't preserve that history simultaneously.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This snowball fight is so much better colorized (and maybe
| upscaled):
| https://twitter.com/JoaquimCampa/status/1311391615425093634
|
| The more illusions the better, I say. Can't wait for the VR
| recreation of famous battles WW2 battles extrapolated from
| grainy footage.
| wffurr wrote:
| It's not VR, but...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
| ijidak wrote:
| As an African-American it was actually useful to watch some of
| these colorized videos and get a better since for how African-
| Americans integrated into the society at that time.
|
| Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more
| real and relatable.
|
| For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded
| grasp of the era.
|
| Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and
| allow more time for digestion.
|
| I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old
| videos because of the off-speed of the recordings.
|
| But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these
| artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of
| history.
|
| But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these
| videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life
| back in those times.
|
| Btw, this is the video I watched: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
| roywiggins wrote:
| The dance scene from Hellzapoppin' is my favorite use of the
| colorization algorithms so far- it's so much easier to follow
| the dancers when the color pops them out of the background.
| Color contrast helps a _lot_. In that case the whole setup-
| the costumes, the lighting, etc, are all artificial _in the
| first place_ , adding some fake color on top doesn't seem
| like a historical sin.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzc7vY9VTnk
|
| Personally, I don't find frame interpolation to be as
| effective as colorization; the artifacts it causes are often
| more distracting than just leaving the framerate alone. It
| can create a sort of artificial floating feeling to the
| motion- a problem that people often complain about with
| _native_ 60fps, and is _much_ worse with interpolated 60fps.
| Algorithms keep improving though, eventually I might find
| them more satisfying.
| awhitby wrote:
| I wonder if it is possible - if not practical - to extract color
| information from processed black and white film negatives.
|
| It seems plausible that there are trace chemical imperfections in
| the film medium, and these might react differently to different
| wavelengths, so that if you could inspect the image at a
| molecular level you could make pretty good guesses about colors.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| My cynical take is that these historians' objections stem from
| jealousy: they lack the ability or means to create these
| restorations, and are thus envious that the upscaled versions are
| receiving more attention than the originals ever did.
| Traster wrote:
| My cynical take is that there are no historians saying that we
| shouldn't upscale images. There are historians who are warning
| that lots of the information in the upscaled images are
| ahistorical (blue jeans in the 1910s) so people should view
| this images as interesting but not accurate views of history.
| The journalist is the only one saying anyone should stop
| anything. None of the historians in the article ever say the
| youtubers should stop. They're just saying pretty much: "Hey,
| history cares about the context and accuracy of sources and
| these images are worse sources than the originals, they're good
| entertainment but bad historical sources". Pump it through a
| journalist and this is what you get. It's at this point I make
| some ironic point about how the journalist is using his neural
| net to upscale the story, inserting innaccurate information to
| the picture to create a more entertaining piece than the
| underlying facts.
| varrock wrote:
| This is the first time I am seeing these remarkable videos. I
| cannot tell you why, but I am feeling awfully emotional while
| watching them. It cannot be nostalgia, as I wasn't there during
| the recordings of these videos, so I'm not sure what it could be.
| Animats wrote:
| Fixing film speed problems is fine. Increasing resolution is OK
| if not overdone. 2x, maybe; 4x, no, as Photoshop users know.
| Remove dust, scratches, camera sprocket drive jitter, no problem
| - those are all mechanical problems with the original camera.
|
| Colorization is bad, though, because it's often a total guess.
| The article linked to the Wuppertall monorail shows this. Look at
| the monorail supports. They keep changing color. The system doing
| the colorizing has no baseline data for "color of late 19th
| century monorail supports". It might match them to elevated
| railway supports, but there's no official color for those. The
| Wuppertall monorail was a different color in the 1960s than it is
| now, a much darker green. Parts were brown.
|
| Colorization can probably be stopped by claiming it's racist,
| when it guesses wrong and makes a Black face white.
| tt433 wrote:
| As someone with a historian's training, I don't mind it at all.
| Every narrative and theory of history is based on some element of
| fiction. Some in the field don't like being reminded of that.
| realradicalwash wrote:
| The academic 'controversy' aside -which I think is BS, at least
| as it is presented in the article-, two things truly amaze me:
|
| 1) How beautiful of a city Wuppertal was in 1902. I have been to
| Wuppertal about 5 years ago, and it's ... well, not beautiful.
| Great people, though! 2) The appetite for engineering, for
| creating things, and the audacity of the late 19th century, early
| 20th century. A freaking flying train for a city of less than
| half a million of people. Contrast this to the changes over the
| past two decades in my hometown, which is about the same size as
| Wuppertal. The changes were marginal; a cancelled train route is
| what pops to mind.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think we're also jaded now, in that all expectation that a
| photo is a totally truthful artifact produced by a physical
| process has long since been eroded. Phone camera software tries
| to create the 'best' image. When the Bay Area had orange skies,
| everyone noted how their phone cameras were auto-balancing out
| the orange. Zoom touches up your face. Yesterday's Pixel
| announcements emphasized changing lighting after a photo is
| taken. You kind of have to go out of your way to see a recent
| photo which _isn't_ manipulated in some content-informed way.
|
| So when we see an upscaled, colorized image ... maybe it's not an
| accurate reflection of the past. But we're no longer used to
| seeing an accurate reflection of the present, so of course we
| don't balk at the plausible-but-perhaps-mistaken color choices or
| interpolations.
| janee wrote:
| I dunno, I saw the title and scanned through...it just feels like
| click bait to me.
|
| I would love my peers to be more interested in history even if
| it's as trivial as being amazed by some fleeting vids of altered
| old footage, even if colors are incorrectly assigned.
|
| Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it sortta seems to me like an
| interesting view point that's more akin to something you'll see
| in the comment section of these vids than a whole drawn out
| article on the matter.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| This along with the 'wandering' videos are seemingly getting
| popular on youtube. Eg nippon wandering tv, rambalac. These
| colorized + hd historical videos are super fascinating. Love how
| AI has been the driving force for towards creating these
| dorkwood 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."
|
| I don't buy this argument. I feel like the reason these upscaled
| videos are going viral is because it makes the events in the
| footage feel like something that actually happened, rather than
| an old-timey silent movie.
|
| Having said that, I'm not always a fan of upscaled historical
| footage. I think the best argument against it is that it's a
| distortion of reality. Regular people don't have the
| technological sophistication to understand that what they're
| seeing is the result of a machine filling in the gaps and making
| a "best guess". They assume all the new information they're
| seeing was already hidden somewhere in the original image and
| just had to be pulled out. I think if everyone was on the same
| page as to what these videos were, there wouldn't be a problem.
| jchw wrote:
| I just tried watching one of the upscaled and interpolated
| videos, and then comparing it to the source. Please consider
| doing this before commenting, because in my opinion it really
| illuminates how silly this all is.
|
| 4K: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
|
| Original: https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0
|
| The colorization, of course, is lies. The upscaling and
| interpolation, however, is harder to argue about. Sure, if you
| were to freeze a frame and zoom in, you are looking at data that
| may not directly correspond to what was recorded. But it didn't
| come out of thin air either - its upscaled and interpolated. I
| have read the arguments and some of the comments on this page and
| I still cannot figure out how this isn't just rationalizing
| elitism.
|
| Of course we need to keep the source material, but nobody is
| suggesting to not do that.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Wow, I played those in sync and for me the 4K version is
| significantly more relatable. Even though the colours are
| obviously fake, the smoothness of the movements of the people
| in the video is what makes it great because I can actually
| relate and feel the emotions through the body language. It also
| feels more immersive because the nature's physical behaviour
| looks more accurate.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a manufactured controversy. There's always some people
| opposed to anything. It's a non-story to moderate something that
| is just far too awesome: a portal into the past.
| ludamad wrote:
| I don't get this sentiment personally - I found that I struggled
| less to imagine myself there with the "enhancements"
| nsonha wrote:
| what are they even on about? As if people will watch these videos
| and spread some conspiracy theory about how the tree was greener
| in the past?
| fizixer wrote:
| Ridiculous luddites are ridiculous.
|
| 4K the hell out of everything, and ignore the crybabies.
| jackric wrote:
| This feels like clickbaity story generation - cool new tech doing
| something many enjoy.... not enough tension... go and find a
| handful of grumpy people who don't concur
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Not even. The historians aren't even grumpy. Wired is just
| trying to create drama.
| kbuchanan wrote:
| As an avid reader of history, I tried hard to understand the
| points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult
| for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is
| rooted in elitism--that "true history" can only be discovered by
| straining and toiling, as they do.
|
| A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences.
| Colorization and other techniques--done sincerely and as
| accurately as possible--are additional tools that can accomplish
| this in other ways.
| cyrrus wrote:
| Academic historians are just annoyed because they didn't do it
| first.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Perhaps it's because of loss of control? Previously one may
| have relied on an academic's interpretation via interview and
| now the upscaled video becomes the more compelling medium.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| You can't really know history without paying tens of
| thousands of dollars to a university -- and it has to be a
| university that pays big salaries to professors too. Not one
| of those cheap ones. Then the professors will say that you've
| really learned something.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Colorization and other techniques--done sincerely and as
| accurately as possible--are additional tools that can
| accomplish this in other ways.
|
| The article unfortunately doesn't point out why this is a naive
| take.
|
| If you upscale an image for display on a 4k display, you can:
|
| 1. Leave an aliasing artifact intact.
|
| 2. Remove an aliasing artifact.
|
| Now, suppose you have two clients-- one making a documentary
| about the moon landing, and another making a documentary about
| moon landing conspiracies.
|
| Pick your favorite "sincere and accurate" ML algorithm-- it
| cannot generate a single image that will be suitable for use by
| both clients.
|
| Perhaps "straining and toiling" is hyperbole. But I don't see
| an alternative to careful, deliberate study of the primary
| sources of history.
|
| Also-- keep in mind that was a didactic example. When you talk
| about colorizing films or cartoons, things get quite muddy.
| onion2k wrote:
| _it 's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that
| their position is rooted in elitism--that "true history" can
| only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do_
|
| I think there's a very similar pattern in tech with developers
| who hack on apps in 'proper languages' like Rust and C++
| dunking on developers who write JavaScript or PHP because those
| aren't seen as 'true development' because they make things 'too
| easy'.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Yeah, feels like "Horseshoe salesmen want combustion engine
| makers to stop"
| runarberg wrote:
| In fact I think we might even need more of these. How many
| people imagine ancient Roman architecture with white columns
| and white statues, when in fact there is evidence those were
| painted in varied colors. Without tools to aid our imagination
| we have effectively bleached ancient Rome.
| anticristi wrote:
| I can't agree more. I was shocked to find out statues were
| coloured and I still have trouble re-wiring my head around
| it.
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| Think of it as translation. Should you read Dante in his
| original medieval Italian or in a modern English translation?
| Yes. But if you want to understand and make strong arguments
| about Dante, you'll probably have to dig out the Italian.
|
| Or, alternatively, back in the day there were these shows
| called "situation comedies" or sitcoms. One of them was
| "Three's Company." Many of the stories of the episodes of
| Three's Company were taken more or less directly from
| Shakespeare's comedies. Is it elitism to suggest that seeing a
| production of Shakespeare's plays is a better way of connecting
| with what he was trying to say than watching a '70s sitcom?
| contravariant wrote:
| Fair enough, but then the argument of these historians is
| basically equivalent to "There shouldn't be an english
| translation of Dante". Which I think is still a bit silly.
| 8note wrote:
| I'd guess the historians would pick the sitcom.
|
| The play is pretending to be a Shakespeare production when it
| isn't, and will give people unrealistic views on the history,
| whereas the sitcom won't do that
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened
| in history, but how we know what happened in history.
|
| Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to
| modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and
| attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions
| of what history actually was like and how we know what it was
| like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's
| not accurate history in an academic sense.
|
| (Well, I should say it's not history of Hamilton's time. It
| will be studied as an important part of the history of _our_
| time.)
|
| The folks running these upscaling operations understand the
| concerns:
|
| > Antic and Kelley aren't under any illusions that images
| treated by DeOldify will come out historically accurate, though
| their reservations are with the practicalities of training a
| neural network. Making sure colourised films are accurate is "a
| literally impossible problem," Antic says. DeOldify uses modern
| images to train its AI on, he explains, "and we know that's a
| big weakness, because, amongst other things, it biases people
| to wearing blue jeans."
|
| The challenge is, once they create one of these films and post
| it for the public, the implications and effects are out of
| their hands.
|
| You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film
| and think that what they are seeing is _more_ accurate than the
| original, since it transmits more information (detail, color,
| etc). But if that additional information is made up, it 's
| actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate
| (e.g. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to
| be hard for a lot of people to understand.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > Academic historians are concerned with not just what
| happened in history, but how we know what happened in
| history.
|
| So they want to ban textbooks and force kids to learn dozens
| of languages to read primary sources and to travel to places
| of their origins?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The current history taught is fairly blatant propaganda, I
| wouldn't be surprised if academic historians would prefer
| it taught in that manner.
| ev1 wrote:
| > You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed
| film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate
| than the original, since it transmits more information
| (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is
| made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually
| less accurate (i.e. wrong color instead of no color). That
| nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
|
| I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-
| invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling,
| textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical
| content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look
| at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and
| compare it to any actual museum or historical society's
| website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference.
|
| On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful
| and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is.
| Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content
| (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image:
| https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/
|
| They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of
| any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and
| likes to spam with later.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during
| upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine
| historical content
|
| I think you are missing OPs point.
|
| Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.)
| is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original
| because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It
| suddenly becomes a fake.
| jerf wrote:
| Then the original is a "fake" too. The past was not black
| and white, jittery, and silent.
|
| It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's
| taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
| ddingus wrote:
| True, but the impressions made upon people, at that time
| in history, were monochrome, jittery and silent.
|
| Linking derivatives makes sense. Replacing original works
| does not.
|
| And the little things matter.
|
| We will learn how much over time, and ideally we keep
| originals to benefit from the lesson.
|
| Really, what we do by augmenting originals is lock in one
| best guess interpretation.
|
| The point of history is for people to go back and see
| what can be learned, not settle on what everyone should
| have learned.
| kibwen wrote:
| This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that
| laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-
| white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into
| thinking that those records are faithful recreations of
| color and sound. But without those obvious markers,
| people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in
| these modified records _pretends_ to be real in a way
| that the originals do not.
|
| I would expect tech people to understand the risks here
| by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you
| are _inventing_ detail based on what the AI _expects_ to
| see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say,
| a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV
| footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the
| potential to become outright dangerous.
|
| It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the
| proper context, even as records of history. But pop
| culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I
| would expect any responsible historian to be extremely
| clear about the processes use here, even to the point of
| protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard
| time expressing to people that false-color photography
| and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not
| represent reality).
| jerf wrote:
| The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to
| ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in
| reaction to one of the videos earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369
|
| I would assert that even with the errors, people get a
| more realistic view of the past through these
| reconstructions than by watching the original footage.
| The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which
| greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a
| historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions
| make it seem like a real place that had real people in
| it.
|
| Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried
| about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have
| slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the
| past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how
| slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you
| feed in footage about a train ride or people riding
| horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell
| phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and
| changing political posters to features modern
| politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's
| connections to the past because we're afraid they...
| what, exactly?
|
| By all means keep the original and label the
| reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining
| about them or running around telling people "STOP!
| Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about
| COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?"
| This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases
| of the vapors than a real concern.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which
| greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a
| historical lesson for the masses._
|
| I think you make a very important point. I watched lots
| of silent movies as well as historical footage growing
| up, and the jerky motion and slow frame rates gave them a
| cartoonish quality that I still find artistically
| endearing but which makes history less real to the
| viewer. For historical figures one admires, it confers a
| sort of mythic aura, and for ones you don't it makes them
| seem clownish or misshapen. This impacts written history
| too, where it's already hard to separate our posterior
| knowledge of how things turned out from the historical
| figures of whom we have a visually distorted mental
| image.
|
| I watched a historical series on WW2 where the imagery
| was colorized and somewhat stabilized/cleaned up a year
| or so ago and was struck by the different perspective it
| offered without all the 'emotional blurring' that occurs
| due to the technical limitations of the time. It was much
| easier to relate to events, both good and bad, through a
| 'happening now' frame of reference that would have been
| closer to what people experienced at the time, when
| newsreel footage offered immediacy and accuracy that was
| new and modern.
|
| No doubt in the future there will be debates over whether
| HD and 4k footage of today and the recent past should be
| given the full VR treatment, allowing people to
| experience current events from the point of view of the
| participants and so forth.
| vmh1928 wrote:
| Perhaps the Academic Historians are critical because
| enhanced and colorized documents make the past more
| understandable to lay people and reduce the need for the
| Academic Historian to define the historical context
| compared to looking at the world through a dirty,
| scratched up, black and white windshield.
| ev1 wrote:
| When I say outperforms, I mean in terms of raw #
| views/likes/outreach. I don't mean in terms of accuracy
| or anything.
| runarberg wrote:
| I keep thinking about dinosaurs in this context. How do we
| know how dinosaurs looked like? All we have are some
| scattered fossilized bones (and footprints) found in a layer
| of sediment, which experts have carefully (and perhaps
| wrongly) puzzled together.
|
| Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a
| complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good
| academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had
| feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and
| sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or
| a 3D rendering of these guesses?
|
| I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand
| how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone
| fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more
| interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in
| reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces
| of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do
| justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth.
|
| I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it
| wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the
| popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably
| be even worse if experts wouldn't paint their best guess at
| the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to
| recreate it for the population.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| But they're not altering primary documents, any more than
| someone who writes a new history of some well-covered topic
| is trying to destroy all other commentary on the period, or
| artist's renditions of what ancient societies looked like are
| an attack on archaeologists, or new translations of works in
| other languages are meant to prevent people from learning
| those languages.
| dheera wrote:
| > You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed
| film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate
| than the original
|
| On the other hand, unless there was a 4K full color film
| those millions of people wouldn't even watch the original.
|
| The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than
| minorly-distorted knowledge?
| shard wrote:
| I've always had the thought that religious texts should be
| updated with modern prose and sensibilities. Not for the
| believers of the religion, but for the non-believers.
| People are not incentivized to slog through some text that
| was written centuries ago, using phrasings that they've
| hardly ever encountered. But if a modern twist was put on
| it, perhaps it would be better accepted as a good yarn by
| the general population, and widen the readership.
| notriddle wrote:
| > The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than
| minorly-distorted knowledge?
|
| Yes. No knowledge is much better than distorted knowledge.
| dheera wrote:
| But almost all knowledge we receive is at least slightly
| distorted, if not severely distorted.
| [deleted]
| disown wrote:
| > Academic historians are concerned with not just what
| happened in history, but how we know what happened in
| history.
|
| No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the
| dominant historical narrative that they themselves have
| created.
|
| > "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not
| accurate history in an academic sense.
|
| Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate"
| than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is
| fiction created by historians affected by their own biases.
| History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science.
|
| > That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to
| understand.
|
| That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no
| historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the
| "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There
| are facts and then there is history ( which is what is
| colored in between the facts by historians ).
|
| There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the
| historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie
| adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all
| fiction.
| mcguire wrote:
| As a note, if you are going to go all post-modern, you
| should go all the way. Inconsistency is bad.
|
| " _History is interpretation. It isn 't fact. It isn't
| science._"
|
| Science is interpretation. _Scientists_ are concerned about
| maintaining their dominant narrative. "Facts" are very
| scarce on the ground. (I'm willing to act as if Mumbai
| exists, but I have no personal experience of it and
| therefore no positive reason to believe it does.)
|
| In more serious terms, a good academic historian will point
| to evidence as a way to explain why they want you to
| believe some statement, and---because they recognize the
| perils of what they're doing---many of them will complain
| about potentially misleading modifications to that
| evidence.
| Bayart wrote:
| >Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to
| modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and
| attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions
| of what history actually was like and how we know what it was
| like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's
| not accurate history in an academic sense.
|
| That's such an _arriere-garde_ cause. It doesn 't take too
| much time nor too much effort for any self-examining
| historian to understand that you can't create a "right
| impression" of history at the level of the general public. It
| will always be partial, truncated, falsified. Your cherry-
| picked period is misunderstood by the general public ? Too
| bad, that's part of the job. The best you can hope is making
| somebody interested enough that someday they'll have to
| reflex on historiography, philology and epistemology.
| anticristi wrote:
| Another way to put it, is that it creates a more precise
| history, which is, however, not necessarily accurate.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
| 188201 wrote:
| I think the purpose of colarization of a video is same as
| mimicking a drawing in ruin that lost its paint. It is an
| interpretation of history from current time. If historian
| find the color is not represent the event accurately, it can
| be changed anyway, just like a painting.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Technical points aside:
|
| I doubt those youtube historians could possibly do more
| damage to false history lessons, than all those cheaply made
| hollywood "historical" movies.
|
| And the youtube historians I have seen, were very good. So
| mostly on the right side in battle to truth (dramatically
| speaking) and mostly not on the side of cheap effects for
| drama, or even intentional misleading for political reasons.
|
| (seriously, there is nothing wrong with historic fiction -
| but it disturbs me deeply that a) most movies/books are not
| labeld that way, even if they should and b) even if it is
| labeled, most people probably do not notice)
| sthomas1618 wrote:
| Most expensive "historical" movies are wrong too. Otherwise
| I totally agree with you. I just don't think how much a
| movie cost to make matters much with regards to historical
| accuracy.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| With cheap I meant the dramatic effects, not the cost to
| produce ..
| razakel wrote:
| >all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies
|
| There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust,
| where a recurring feature is completely historically
| inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the
| Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").
| Vvector wrote:
| "Altering primary documents..."
|
| No one is altering the original documents. They still exist,
| right?
|
| "actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no
| color)."
|
| That's debatable. Why is "no color" more accurate? The world
| wasn't monochrome.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Why is "no color" more accurate?_
|
| If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you
| colourise it to look more like an army uniform, or a
| different country's uniform, you've made it less accurate
| as it looks like they're in a different branch of the
| military.
|
| If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from
| age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look
| younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had.
|
| If you've got a photo of a famous scientist or war hero who
| had a Mediterranean complexion and you colourise them with
| more of a pale complexion, you've made it less accurate as
| it looks like they're a different race.
|
| (Of course, these sorts of accessibility-accuracy trade-
| offs aren't unique to colourising photos - they also apply
| to everything from translations of historical documents,
| through illustrations and selecting what content makes it
| into books, to questionably accurate history facts shared
| on social media)
| Vvector wrote:
| > If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white
| from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made
| them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they
| never had.
|
| But what about the opposite? What if a B&W photo shows
| someone with white hair, but his hair was blonde. Now the
| colorized photo is more accurate than the B&W photo. I
| just don't think you can claim B&W is more accurate
| absolutely.
|
| > If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you
| colourise it to look more like an army uniform
|
| Do you understand that the typical consumer of this media
| cannot tell the difference between air force, and army
| uniforms from 100 years ago? Get people interested in
| history, then worry about the little details like the
| color of someone's hair or uniform.
|
| Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world. Most
| people's knowledge of history is abysmal. History is
| boring, as it is taught in schools today.
| shard wrote:
| > Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world.
|
| Your ad hominem attack devalued your whole argument.
| Argue the merits of his points, not your preconceptions
| of his mental state.
| animatedb wrote:
| You may have missed one more part. When you see a black
| and white picture, you assume that the black, gray and
| white are not real. When you see color, it biases your
| brain to think the color may be close to correct.
| ev1 wrote:
| Note: My opinion is that I am neutral/do not like or dislike
| historical media, I am not a historian, but I do dislike those
| awful Twitter spammers that steal random "historical image of
| the day", often with a completely wrong caption, stolen
| content, no sourcing, and then post affiliate links all over
| them. I have previously done professional work with ML/AI.
|
| --
|
| I can kind of understand this if it was made very obvious that
| it was "AI generated"; that is, the colours are totally
| invented and made out of thin air, that spaces might be filled
| in with random computer generated content to support upscaling
| and make it look better.
|
| I don't want a machine-generated random filler content to be
| repurposed for "oh, here is a source video for the skin colour
| of specific people back in the day" or "you see those marks in
| the corner (that didn't exist in the original source), those
| are hieroglyphs"
|
| AI does not mean you magically get colour restored to an image
| that did not have any in the first place, it is invented,
| machine created content that potentially has absolutely zero
| bearing on the real world.
|
| Additionally, stuff like this ends up ranking higher than the
| original source content; preference is given to HD+ videos in
| search, "viral cool colourised version of the past" on
| instagram will rank higher than "actual history"; it is
| potentially a large problem when you have people that don't
| actually know how to separate genuine primary source vs
| computer generated content.
| croes wrote:
| The problem is the user doesn't know which information is
| accurate and which just an estimation of the software. It's a
| fake accuracy.
| kzrdude wrote:
| And a historically based movie or theatre play is fake
| accuracy too, it seems it is not really a new problem.
| mcguire wrote:
| A very old rule of thumb that I learned at one of my first
| jobs: "Never give anyone more than two significant digits.
| Never give a manager more than one."
| prutschman wrote:
| How does one "accurately" colorize something from over a
| hundred years ago?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _<... > I tried hard to understand the points the points these
| academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any
| other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism--that
| "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling,
| as they do.'_
|
| With respect, historians who are involved with archiving aren't
| grinding these historical points fine because they're 'rooted
| in elitism'. Even if some are elitist (some people are), that's
| not what the profession of archiving is all about. Snowwrestler
| before me aptly sums the matter up. I'd also offer the
| following comments but I tackle some of the reasons why
| archivists do what they do from a more technical perspective.
|
| Archiving is a very complex business, especially so if
| historical context is to be preserved with fidelity. Moreover,
| as we've seen from both the article and these posts, that
| historical 'fidelity' is defined or set by the different
| contexts in which the archive material is used. Simply, people
| will use archived material in many different ways according to
| their individual requirements; furthermore, one's requirement
| will also likely vary depending on one's circumstances or
| surroundings. (For instance, a curator will likely require the
| highest quality of reproduction for a museum exhibit and a
| lower one on his/her smartphone.)
|
| Here, I'll mainly confine myself to archived images as per the
| article, however these issues could also involve paintings and
| other works of art, and even objects (have you noticed how the
| value of a rare coin dramatically decreases in value if you are
| silly enough to remove its patina?)
|
| Back to images: Ideally, for preservation, we'd like to
| replicate an image perfectly and end up with an identical clone
| --and the only way to do that is copy the whole physical object
| molecule-for-molecule. Clearly, this is impossible, so what's
| next?
|
| The limits of current technology means that essentially we are
| limited to capturing a planar reproduction of the image by
| photographing or scanning it from directly above or by
| projecting light through it onto some recording medium. So what
| are the criteria for doing this, that is if we wish to copy
| every trace or single bit of information from said image?
|
| 1. First we have to acknowledge that even if we were able to
| record every bit of information that's available from this
| planar view/projection (which is very unlikely), that it is
| _not_ all the information that comes with the image. Being a
| physical object, it has thickness; it has a photographic
| emulsion; its emulsion is chemical and we may wish to know how
| it was made. Is the emulsion only blue sensitive, say a
| collodion emulsion, or is it new enough to be either
| orthochromatic or even panchromatic? What is its physical
| condition, has it been damaged, or scratched, or has it been
| repaired, and how was it stored, .etc (as that extra (metadata)
| information tells us a great deal more about the image and its
| history than just the image itself)? Clearly, those who require
| this ancillary physical information are likely to be different
| people to say casual YouTube viewers--this is an important
| difference.
|
| 2. Incidentally, archivists are also concerned not just the
| intrinsic nature of the image itself but also aspects about the
| way it was viewed, its environment, etc. For example, did the
| original film stock have a tint or was it completely neutral?
| Has the film changed in color since the print was made, does it
| now have sepia tint? When film was first viewed, what was the
| brightness and color temperature of typical projector lamps of
| the period? This information is important as it will influence
| how we end up viewing the film today,
|
| 3. To capture every detail of the image requires some very
| stringent requirements and often it's not possible to meet
| them. If we attempt to capture every detail to the point that
| the law of diminishing returns has determined it's not
| worthwhile going further, we'll almost certainly never get to
| that point. Even today, it's almost impossible to scan even
| 'ancient' 35mm film to the limit of its resolution and density
| because scanners just don't exist that are capable of doing it
| in any practical way. Sure, for still images, you could use a
| $100k+ drum scanner that uses photomultipliers but it's a very
| expensive and extremely tedious and messy process. For moving
| images, you could use a telecine that also uses
| photomultipliers but I've never come across one that's capable
| of exceeding the limiting spatial resolution of 35mm film made
| circa 1900 (some of this film was remarkably sharp)! (And these
| days, every Telecine I've seen uses lossy compression to store
| images.) Sure, one with suitable specifications could be made
| to order I suppose but I hate to think of the cost (the fact is
| most people just don't need to reproduce every bit of info
| that's on film)! That said, the film may not even be the
| limiting factor, the image itself could be out of focus or
| otherwise deteriorated (but you have to allow for best case).
|
| 4. With still images, when scanning, you need to consider the
| limiting spatial resolution of the film as well as consider the
| Nyquist limit of the film/scanning combination. For images,
| this can be a complex matter (especially movies) but
| theoretically an ideal scanner should have around double the
| resolution of the image (it's essentially the same reason why
| 44.1kHz is used in CDs to record audio that only goes to
| 20kHz). Again, no scanner that I know of outside drum scanners
| comes even close to these figures).
|
| 5. Therefore, from the outset we have to compromise. Whether
| current-day best performance is satisfactory for most
| archivists is moot. I'd suggest, given the chance, that almost
| every archivist would keep the original film after scanning so
| that at a latter time a better facsimile can be made. Of
| course, with disintegrating nitrate film this is not likely.
|
| 6. OK, we have the best photographic reproduction we can
| muster, so what comes next? First this, true-as-is-possible
| image is the master copy and it _must_ be distinguished as such
| from any later reproduction that 'enhances' the image in any
| way--irrespective of reason. _There should be no argument
| whatsoever about this (I doubt you 'd ever find a respectable
| archivist who would disagree with this logic.)_
|
| 6. I see no objection to image enhancement so long as it is
| made clear that the image is enhanced and that it not the
| original or master copy. It's a big subject so I'll try to keep
| matters short here. Essentially, the future of image
| enhancement has hardly begun. In future expect to see images
| such as those horrible 16mm grainy WWI battlefield scenes come
| to life with enormously enhanced resolution as well as having
| accurate 'true' color--color that's calibrated to real-world
| object.
|
| 7. AI will make this possible by 'learning' the properties of
| the objects in these old movies then applying new data to the
| existing images. Moreover, it's already beginning to do so now.
| What about the accuracy of the color you ask when we had none
| to start with. In short, AI will scan millions upon millions of
| objects including thousands of items from WWI and it will do so
| in color and in high resolution and even in 3D. To reduce noise
| and film grain, it will also scan multiple instances of the
| same footage and compare side-by-side frames both within and
| across films (and also from other source material such as
| related hi-res B&W photos--for example, Frank Hurley's famous,
| wonderfully-sharp plate camera photos of WWI). It will then
| match and analyze all this information to provide both stunning
| and realistic images. But as I said, these are _not_ the
| originals, and they serve a completely different purpose
| altogether!
|
| There's much more to this story (such as making almost flawless
| copies of famous paintings including using identical paint
| pigments, paint textures and brushstrokes as well as keeping
| existing damage and crazing marks for reproduction
| authenticity). This technology will act as a means of insurance
| against damage, loss etc. but I've not time to cover more about
| it here.
| vmh1928 wrote:
| Some Youtube accounts post recordings of video games, some of
| which are set in a historical context. Nobody takes those for a
| view of reality.
|
| By the same argument art restoration should not be attempted
| because cleaning paintings discolored by centuries of candle soot
| may alter the historical context of the painting and confuse the
| lay person about what the art really looked like. Or not.
|
| Mostly the argument by the Academic Historians seems to be an
| attempt to retain control of the historical narrative and
| colorizing and sharpening old movies means the historian has less
| room to maneuver.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Colorizing and upscaling is marvelous technology, and greatly
| improves my enjoyment of old photos and films. (I saved many
| colorized photos as wallpaper.)
|
| I know it isn't historically accurate, but the originals are not
| destroyed, and the historian has those available.
| paulcole wrote:
| Reminds me of the vinyl people. "It sounds warmer!"
| vaccinator wrote:
| Cable does that with HD TV by compressing it to the max
| jedberg wrote:
| Every comment in the article from a historian says "this is bad"
| but not a single one gives any reason why, other than they just
| don't like it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is the fault of the journalist, not the historians. My
| wife is a history professor. Trust me when I say that
| historians don't hold opinions just for the sake of it.
| jedberg wrote:
| Now I'm curious, what is your wife's opinion on this matter?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| She thinks that this is an unusual opinion among most
| historians but perhaps more common among art historians.
| She doesn't see much problem with this sort of work, but it
| _is_ possible for this sort of thing to be done badly. She
| doesn 't doubt that the cited historians have formed a
| detailed opinion here (rather than just being emotionally
| upset at somebody touching their things) but doesn't agree
| with them.
|
| She rolled her eyes hard at the name "deOldify" and
| mentioned that there are a lot of dumb attempts at doing
| this that don't have any empathy for people (ex. redoing
| Shakespeare as rap to connect with young people without
| actually trying to understand young people, ironically this
| sort of thing was actually mentioned by Shiryaev).
|
| There is a cost to careless distribution of primary sources
| (a good example I never considered was the loss of
| marginalia when digitizing books badly) but it is the job
| of historians to do this well and it can be done well.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Plenty of professionals hold unjustified opinions just for
| the sake of it. I don't see why you would think historians
| are exempt.
| rayiner wrote:
| I strongly disagree with these historians, for historical
| reasons. Our limited recordings of the recent past make it hard
| for us to understand that it wasn't that long ago and things
| weren't that and people weren't that different. By 1911, the
| railroad I used to get to from Westchester NY to Manhattan was
| already electrified, thanks to an investment from JP Morgan,
| where my brother works today. By 1910 the subway line running
| down Lexington Ave I'd take all the time had already been built.
| So had the Grand Central Post Office, on top of which the office
| building I used to work at was later built. By 1910, all of
| Manhattan had been electrified for decades, and you had electric
| refrigerators and curling irons and stoves. By 1910, vaccines had
| been developed and the first antibiotics were coming out.
|
| It's important not to forget how close in time we are to history.
| Imagine if, instead of always seeing black and white pictures of
| Martin Luther King Jr., people saw him in 4K color. Maybe they'd
| remember he was shot for his civil rights activism when Bill
| Gates was already a teenager, just a couple of heads before Unix
| and C.
| [deleted]
| rootsudo wrote:
| Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue -
|
| If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate
| to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we
| have today.
|
| Especially since most people can not relate to black and white
| videos/photos because they don't have the context required to
| expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo,
| enlarged and think "that's it."
|
| Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger
| generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing
| this when _I_ was a kid in school, during the 90 's and 00's.
|
| From the article...:
|
| "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 on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it
| _may_ be bad, but still - I don 't think it's good enough to be
| up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
|
| "For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools
| like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing,
| but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it.
| "Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow,
| that's quite an arresting image," she says. "But always then my
| next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And
| what is the person who's made this intervention on the
| restoration actually doing? What information has this person
| added? What have they taken away?"
| claudeganon wrote:
| > Especially since most people can not relate to black and
| white videos/photos because they don't have the context
| required to expand on that thought.
|
| Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I've heard it expressed,
| especially around movies, but it's always been incomprehensible
| to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it
| unrelatable?
| gadders wrote:
| I thought it was silly as well. But then I bought a copy of
| The Colour of Time [1]. I don't know why it makes a
| difference, but it definitely does (at least for me).
| Obviously, your mileage may vary.
|
| [1] https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-
| histo...
| arp242 wrote:
| When all the images you see from a certain time period are
| captured in a certain way (black and white, in this case)
| then it's easy to imagine that this is also how the people at
| the time perceived it, which of course isn't the case at all.
|
| I wouldn't call it "unrelatable" as such, but adding colour -
| even if not completely accurate - certainly gives me a better
| impression of how people at the time saw things, and it
| becomes more relatable.
|
| Black and white can certainly be used for fantastic artistic
| intent in e.g. movies, by the way. But for these kind of
| historical records that's not what was going on; it was just
| a technological limitation at the time.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I struggle to believe that the Afghan girl picture would have
| been anywhere near as popular as it was/is if it was B&W
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Girl
| prionassembly wrote:
| But this is because of strange racial issues. Americans
| expect "Muslims" to all be uniformly brown (I remember
| circa 9/11 the slur "sand n#$%r" was common) , but Afghans
| and Iranians have whiter skin and often eyes that are not
| black. And then we decode that as "this is beauty and it's
| surprising that there is beauty among these people".
| rootsudo wrote:
| Look at old photos, and then take a current photo, something
| you understand and make it black and white, and resize it.
|
| You'll immediately will understand how your senses help "add"
| thought, context, feelings, emotion behind it.
|
| It can be anything, a road w/ houses, a car, a portrait of a
| person at a famous sight.
|
| That. That's the sentiment.
| fao_ wrote:
| > Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that
| kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I
| remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the
| 90's and 00's.
|
| http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-8900-ex :)
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > _I never would 've thought this would be an issue_
|
| It isn't.
|
| 1) historians have no power over random people colorizing,
| upscaling and frame interpolating some old videos for fun
|
| 2) it's not "historians", it's actually a tiny minority of
| vocal historians who want this to be a problem
| tgv 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.
|
| This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in
| comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there
| already? And why is that bad?
|
| So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no
| argumentation. None.
|
| And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that
| something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you
| personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize
| that the people in that old footage are just like you and me,
| and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap
| that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it
| look recent.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Because a photograph is already a lossy simulation of some
| real situation. But then, even though we don't _know_ what
| WW1 or Marilyn Monroe really looked like, we know what the
| artifacts look like. Upscaling is yet another level of
| simulation. What it says beyond the immediate impact is more
| about the early era of deep learning than it says about WW1.
| But it also entices us to mistake this Disneyland WW1 for
| something that 's supposedly behind the original artifact
| (which did have some reference to the real battle). This is
| what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal.
| brownbat wrote:
| > So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no
| argumentation. None.
|
| Yeah, these quotes all seem like ad lapidem, just unsupported
| vague claims. I'm not even sure I agree people can be
| "closer" or "farther" from the past when looking at an image,
| it's a poetic way to look at the difference but not precise,
| and seems like it would evaporate if we tried to find any
| quantifiable measurable effects.
| redisman wrote:
| I can't believe they're shitting on "They shall not Grow
| Old". The whole point of it was to give an emotional and
| immersive experience of one of the worst wars humanity has
| seen to modern audiences. There can be other goals than
| absolute historial accuracy. All Quiet on the Western Front
| is one of my favorite books and not because it's the most
| exhaustive and accurate history of WW I.
| ardy42 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.
|
| > This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap,
| in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not
| there already? And why is that bad?
|
| Probably because the colorization can be misleading. With a
| B&W images, it's clear the color data is missing. With a
| colorized photo, a red building could be shown as blue or
| gray, and someone could leave with the false understanding
| the the building was really a different color than it
| actually was.
| monkpit wrote:
| How does that increase the gap exactly?
| Izkata wrote:
| > This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap,
| in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not
| there already? And why is that bad?
|
| It increases factual distance and reduces emotional distance.
| When just "distance" is used, some people assume one, some
| people assume the other, and everyone values each
| differently.
| tgv wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by factual distance. Those
| buildings and people were definitely not black, white or
| gray. Now they've got a color which is (in most cases) much
| closer to the original. The original recording was probably
| also distorted in other ways as well.
|
| You might say you're not looking at the (probably) only
| reliable source of information for that particular scene,
| but that's an entirely different proposition.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > What information has this person added? What have they taken
| away?
|
| That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are
| interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was
| there originally and what was added through interpretation and
| extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not
| likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds
| added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's
| available in audio libraries mostly.
|
| But it is not just the present-day processing of the material;
| as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age
| were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as
| neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up
| propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them)
| had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you
| need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are
| not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is unclear to me how viewing the originals, as opposed to
| these derived works, gives you any greater insight into the
| motives of those who made them.
|
| The only corner-case I can think of is the erasure of obvious
| signs of faking, but that does not seem to be the issue that
| people are getting worked up over. Is anyone even wasting
| their effort on upscaling faked film?
| monkpit wrote:
| I think it's so strange to see all of the arguments saying
| "if this building is colored as gray instead of blue, then
| it is making it harder to understand the past".
|
| A layperson does not care about the exact color of a
| building or a jacket or a hat, and if it is really that
| important then it's probably documented somewhere.
|
| It might be important to historians and that is ok. But
| they are not the intended audience of these type of
| upscaled/colorized clips.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is as if Luke McKernan has been so immersed in the original
| film for so long that he now mistakes it for reality.
|
| And viewing old film at the wrong speed is the opposite of an
| authentic experience.
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