[HN Gopher] AI made these movies sharper - critics say it ruined...
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AI made these movies sharper - critics say it ruined them
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-04-14 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| yoyopa wrote:
| looks like it made everything darker
| GaggiX wrote:
| I wonder if there was a conversion between HDR and standard
| image format to make the images look so dark, I'm not too
| familiar with this technology.
| extr wrote:
| Yeah i'm guessing whoever pulled the images for the article
| didn't correct for the newer versions being HDR.
| jsnell wrote:
| It's quite strange, because the article text talks about how
| the "colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and
| inky" and the problem is that the surface details look off. But
| then on the screenshots all you can see is a difference in the
| color grading, and no details of any kind.
|
| Like, the problem with the closeup of Jamie Lee Curtis isn't
| the skin texture like suggested in the subtitle. It's that she
| is blue.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It completely ruined the grading and killed the skin tones.
| There's many other things wrong, but making the actors look
| like gray clay isn't helping at all.
| dinkblam wrote:
| didn't you notice that most movies and series in the last 5
| years have been dark to the point of not even being able to to
| notice which eye color people have?
|
| not enough to ruin all the newly produced stuff, they also need
| to ruin all the old stuff now...
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's big OLED conspiring to force us to buy more expensive
| TVs with better blacks. /s
| mikkom wrote:
| Paywalled for me
| dedosk wrote:
| This works a bit
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240414193245/nytimes.com/2024/...
| cayal wrote:
| https://archive.is/ug4an
| andrewstuart wrote:
| AI will be applied to every possible thing it can be.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| And re-packaged and re-sold, and people will re-buy and re-
| watch/re-consume.
|
| Imagine "Lord of the Rings - the full trilogy in three 8-hour
| movies, now with new AI-generated content that fills the gaps
| left from the 'extended' releases. I know people that will
| definitely renew their HBO subscriptions in order to watch them
| (if/when they re-release one movie per year)
| cout wrote:
| I would pay to see the missing Scouring of the Shire even as
| a poorly done AI render.
| dvh wrote:
| Time to update "software Peter principle" to "ai Peter
| principle"
| furyofantares wrote:
| Didn't the Peter Principle have to do with organizations of
| the late 60s, and not anything to do with software?
| dwighttk wrote:
| ai will be promoted to it's level of incompetence just like
| people in "organizations of the late 60s" (or today)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Maybe it can do something about the muffled, mumbled dialog in
| modern productions.
| niccl wrote:
| Park Road Post used it to clean up the sound in the Beatles
| Get Back videos. I don't know the details, and I haven't seen
| the original or Get Back, but apparently the sound in the
| original was terrible. They used 'AI' to do things like pick
| out George's (or whoever it was) voice from the rest so they
| could EQ it separately
| AlienRobot wrote:
| It's blockchain all over again xD
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Critics will always be critical.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Agree. Though today it's sharper, tomorrow you ask for the plot
| to be changed or for everyone to be wearing spinny hats. At
| least there's a shared experience now. If people find this
| outrageous, just wait until tomorrow. Better to accept the
| infinite progress unfolding before us than to spend another
| moment angry or enraged. All I ask for is choice.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Or perhaps removing all the cigarettes?
|
| On second thought, that could be hilarious. It would make all
| the smokers just look like very thoughtful people constantly
| bringing their fingers to their lips.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Tuckerpete/status/1569478529892646913
| seadan83 wrote:
| Check Arnold's hair:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg
|
| Almost looks like rotoscoping.
|
| > Better to accept the infinite progress unfolding before us
| than to spend another moment angry or enraged.
|
| Some would say this is infinitely regressive. From the
| twitter picture, it looks like a justified criticism, from
| the examples in the article, it's hard to tell whether
| there's a merited criticism or if it reflexive anti-AI'ism
| chilmers wrote:
| I think this kind of AI "enhancement" is where CGI was in the
| 90s. It might be state of the art tech, but it's still very
| unrefined, and in ten or twenty years these remasters will look
| painfully dated and bad.
| josefx wrote:
| People who knew what they where doing could pull of some
| timeless art with 90s CGI and a decade of improvements did not
| stop people from ruining otherwise good movies with bad GCI
| either. AI is just another tool that needs to be used
| correctly.
| mrob wrote:
| I think it's worse than bad CGI. With bad CGI, you can use your
| imagination and interpret as what it would have looked like if
| they had unlimited time and budget. You can't do that with bad
| AI "enhancement", because it's an automation of that same
| imaginative process. You'd have to somehow mentally reverse the
| AI processing before imagining a better version, which is much
| more difficult.
| gdubs wrote:
| I dunno - I look at the original Jurassic Park and it still
| looks pretty amazing to me. Same with Terminator II. In many
| ways I feel like as directors got more and more capabilities
| with the tools they became comically overused. I don't think
| it's the sophistication of the tools, but the way that they're
| wielded that will make them look dated, or timeless.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| My biggest gripe with these AI film enhancements is that they are
| _adding information_ that was never there. You 're no longer
| watching the original film. You no longer have a sense of how
| contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations were,
| how the director dealt with those limitations, etc.
| cout wrote:
| I don't think that's universally true of all AI enhancement
| though. Information that is "missing" in one frame might be
| pulled in from a nearby frame. As others have pointed out, we
| are in the infancy of video enhancement and the future is not
| fundamentally limited.
|
| If that takes away from the artistic nature of the film I
| understand the complaint, but I look forward to seeing this
| technology applied where the original reel has been damaged. In
| those cases we are already missing out on what the director
| intended.
| pimlottc wrote:
| In part, we need more vocabulary to distinguish different
| techniques. Everyone is just "AI" right now, which could mean
| many different things.
|
| Standard terminology would help us discuss what methods are
| acceptable for what purposes and what goes too far. And it
| has to be terminology that the public can understand, so they
| can make informed decisions.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| > Information that is "missing" in one frame might be pulled
| in from a nearby frame
|
| Yeah - does anyone know if anyone is actually doing this?
| Like some sort of DLSS for video? I'd love to read about it.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| How do you feel about extended cuts?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Where would you draw the line though? What is acceptable non-AI
| remastering?
|
| I'm 99% confident that similar issues were raised with e.g.
| recolored films, HD upscales, etc.
| mrob wrote:
| I draw the line at edits that consider semiotic meaning.
| Edits are acceptable if they apply globally (e.g. color
| correction to compensate for faded negatives), or if they
| apply locally based on purely geometric considerations (e.g.
| sharpening based on edge detection), but not if they try to
| decide what some aspect of the image signifies (e.g. red eye
| removal, which requires guessing which pixels are supposed to
| represent an eye). AI makes no distinction between geometric
| and semiotic meaning, so AI edits are never acceptable.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yes, back in the mid-late 80s Turner Entertainment colorized
| a huge number of old films in their vaults to show on cable
| movie channels. It was almost universally panned. It was seen
| at first as a way to give mediocre old films with known stars
| a brief revival, but then Turner started to colorize classic,
| multi-award-winning films like _The Asphalt Jungle_ and the
| whole idea was dismissed as a meretricious money-grab.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations
| were, how the director dealt with those limitations, etc._
|
| Non-film buffs, _i.e._ most viewers, don 't care about this.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Repaint the product, sell it as new again.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong with selling an upscaled film as a
| new product, if it's done well. Doing a decent upscale isn't
| trivial, and quality is often improved significantly.
|
| Like anything, not all upscaled re-releases are of worthwhile
| quality.
| procflora wrote:
| Wow, that tweet they link to with a super punched in shot looks
| really really bad! Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked
| better than just a normal 4k transfer, yikes. Was really looking
| forward to a UHD release of The Abyss but now I'm not so sure...
|
| https://twitter.com/RazorwireRyan/status/1735753526167347232
| pimlottc wrote:
| Direct image link:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg
| xenospn wrote:
| This is very bad.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better_
|
| I doubt he even looked, he's too busy with his blue monkeys
| these days. Most likely someone duped him on taking on the AI
| upscaling and he signed off on it without looking and the movie
| studio just shipped the output without QA to save time and
| money, because they're going to streaming not in cinemas.
| xenospn wrote:
| He's insanely detail oriented. I'm almost certain he either
| approved everything, or, he no longer has right of refusal.
| Solvency wrote:
| you're completely wrong.
|
| cameron lost all of his creative sensibilities in the early
| 2000s.
|
| his hands are all over this just like his blue monkeys.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The one on the left looks normal.
|
| The one on the right looks like you ran an edge-directed
| upscaler on it. Those things have distinct artifacts, and
| sometimes it looks like all curves turn into snakes. Or it can
| make new diagonal curves out of random noise.
|
| Not knocking edge-directed upscalers though, they can work in
| real time and are very good for line-art graphics. You can even
| inject them into games that have never had that feature before.
| gedy wrote:
| If I was to do this, I'd upscale for larger screens, but recreate
| the film grain and scratches as if it were just from larger
| negatives -\\_(tsu)_/-
| great_psy wrote:
| The issue I see with the screenshots from the article is that it
| changed the contrast and overall feel of the scene.
|
| I think there's plenty of opportunity to exchange old videos, but
| I think it requires some human touch or deeper understanding of
| the movie to maintain its message.
|
| The light and contrast and color is made a certain way on
| purpose, usually to convert whatever the scene is meant to
| convey. You can't just mess with those things just so you add
| details.
| JoyousAbandon wrote:
| The main issue is the totally invalid and ignorant comparison
| of compressed-to-hell streaming versions and Blu-Ray.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Why is everything darker and grayer? Is that an editorial choice?
| Or an AI artifact?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I think it's insane that the main argument for AI boils down to
| "everyone has 4K now so we need to upscale the videos."
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| The main argument for AI is for the rich to find a way to
| employ far fewer of the poor. Everything else is misdirection.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The "AI" versions of the movie stills are darker and "greener" or
| "bluer" in all cases in this article, which is NOT the case when
| you watch the movie. It's a mistake on the part of whoever put
| together the image comparisons.
|
| The culprit here is that the non-AI screenshots are taken from
| presumably 1080p non-HDR sources, while all the AI screenshots
| are taken from presumably 4K HDR sources. The "AI" images are all
| displayed in the completely wrong color space -- the
| dark+green/blue is exactly what HDR content looks like when
| played on software that doesn't correctly support decoding and
| displaying HDR content.
|
| It's a shame that the creator of the comparison images doesn't
| know enough image processing to understand that you can't grab
| stills from HDR content from a player that doesn't properly
| support HDR.
|
| On the other hand, the state of HDR support is a _mess_ right now
| in software players. Playing HDR content in common players like
| VLC, QuickTime, IINA, and Infuse will give you significantly
| different results between all of them. So I can 't actually blame
| the creator of the images 100%, because there isn't even a
| documented, standardized way to compare HDR to non-HDR content
| side-by-side, as far as I know (hence why each player maps the
| colors differently).
| jacobolus wrote:
| The upscaled versions also screwed up the camera focus blur by
| artificially removing it. Taking out the film grain is also
| totally unnecessary. Even leaving the grain and blur aside, the
| texture of the objects depicted is also getting seriously
| screwed up, with unrealistic looking smoothing and weird places
| of heightened contrast unrelated to the original scene.
|
| More generally, automatically second guessing the artistic
| choices of whoever originally color graded the film, for the
| sake of adding narratively gratuitous features like HDR or
| extremely high resolution, is a nasty thing to do. There might
| be moderately more dynamic range in the original physical film
| than there was in a digital copy; if so, by all means try to
| capture it in a new digitization while trying to match the
| visual impression of a theater projection to the extent
| practical. The "AI" features demonstrated here are incredibly
| tacky though.
|
| Art from different times and places looks different due to
| changes in both the medium and the culture, and we should enjoy
| those differences rather than trying to erase them all.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| At some point this tech will become actually good and useable.
| But at this stage, nope, almost there, but not they should wait
| at least a few more years.
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