Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowtree | Hacker News Reader

The Irishman is the perfect example of where the Deepfake is MILES BETTER than then classic CGI de-aging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHSTWepkp_M

Just look at it, the CGI DeNiro looks like from the Polar Express.

This is deceptive, though. The "deep fake" is essentially building on the CGI de-aged product. If they'd started with deepfake it likely wouldn't have yielded this level of result.

I disagree, deepfaking completely replaces the face. It doesn't ahve to be close to start with. Check this one out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=861gfPVmgdc

It doesn't have to be close but it helps a lot both the quality of the results and the convergence speed if both faces are similar.

In movies you don't usually have the luxury of choosing the original face you want to replace, but for people who make memes (or porn), you commonly choose a source video featuring someone that resembles the person you want to put in.

> In movies you don't usually have the luxury of choosing the original face you want to replace

Hiring an actor that roughly resembles the person you're trying to deep fake seems doable.

Uuuh, why? I can't imagine a reason why the deaged video would've improved the deep fake version. If anything, it should've reduced it's quality by adding incorrect data which could confuse the model.

The default model for deepfakes is an autoencoder. The encoder and decoder will converge faster and to simpler solutions if the distributions of original faces and fake faces are closer.

It's an intuitive result even ignoring the specific model. It takes less information to go to and from similar faces than it does two completely dissimilar ones.

I'm inclined to agree and I'd be interested to see this process applied to some of the raw footage featured in the the award season campaign. It's also worth noting that in addition to de-aging they also changed De Niro's eye color.

Well, Robert DeNero's face still has the same proportions and bone structure, so taking the original video as a starting point would probably yield the same results.

That would still be an effective technique for big-budget films if the net result is an improvement on the state of the art. (Which I think it does seem to be).

Wait what, Deepfake is better? To me, not at all, deepfake seems blurry. It looks like, well, a deepfake, there is something distinct about deepfakes which just stands out, I think it's the soft blur around individual parts. It's taking the easy route by blurring and darkening a lot of things, look at the eyelids for example in modeled example, there is incredible detail there.

Deepfake definitely has a place in this space, in that it can do things with 1/100th the effort in a scalable way, but it has a lot more to catch up on with traditional modeling than what some folks appear to be thinking. rendering with goodies likes SSS, AO, etc. gives magical results which are hard to achieve any other way. And as soon as you get a little bit complicated in what you're trying to create, at least the currently existing neural network models fall apart are are just not applicable. Take this video for example, which was very manually modeled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2dRkm8ATU Deepfake is a long, long way to taking a stab at things like this.

>Wait what, Deepfake is better? To me, not at all, deepfake seems blurry. It looks like, well, a deepfake, there is something distinct about deepfakes which just stands out, I think it's the soft blur around individual parts. It's taking the easy route by blurring and darkening a lot of things, look at the eyelids for example in modeled example, there is incredible detail there.

I agree with your complaints about DeepFake but imo it did a far better job de-aging DeNiro. To me, the release version had a lot of "old man" cues that the DeepFake one didn't, such as the jowls and heavy wrinkles.

On mobile, I don't see the blur on the deep fake. It looks really good. I suspect it would be more obvious on a large screen.

It is? The deepfake just looks out of focus to me, just something blurry that as a side-effect removes some wrinkles but also takes away lightning and everything else.

Not to say the deepfake isn't seriously impressive. But I very much prefer the netflix version.

Wow the deep fake version is WAY better.

That does look amazing. But I'm not sure I should be seeing myriad facsimile of younger deniro...

If Deniro appears as Scorsese wanted him to appear then the deep fake (that I do find subjectively better) is actually aiming at the wrong target. It seems like a flawed comparison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com