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.
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.
Yeah - does anyone know if anyone is actually doing this? Like some sort of DLSS for video? I'd love to read about it.
Sorry if it sounds crass, but I feel the process of shooting the movie is less important than the story it is trying to tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_gallery_of_image_sc...
It's a widespread issue with the emulation of old games that have been made for really low resolution/different ratio screens and slow hardware, especially early 3D/2D combinations like Final Fantasy, and those that relied on janky analog video outputs to draw their effects.
Another thing that's plainly obvious in TNG's remastered version is all the black cardboard placed over the display screens in the back of the bridge, to block glare from lights. In SDTV, this wasn't noticeable because the quality was so bad.
'Film buff' responses are common to every major change in technology and society. People highly invested in the old way have an understandably conservative reaction - wait! slow down! what happens to all these old values?! They look for and find flaws, confirming their fears (a confirmation bias) and supporting their argument to slow down.
They are right that some values will be lost; hopefully much more will be gained. The existance of flaws in beta / first generation applications doesn't correlate with future success.
Also, they unknowingly mislead by reasoning with what is also an old sales disinformation technique: List the positive values of Option A, compare them to Option B; B, being a different product, inevitably will differ from A's design and strengths and lose the comparison. The comparision misleads us because it omits B's concept and its strengths that are superior to A's; with a new technology, those strengths aren't even all known - in this case, we can see B's far superior resolution and cleaner image. We also don't know what creative, artistic uses people will come up with - for example, maybe it can be used to blend two very different kinds of films together.
These things happen with political and social issues too. It's just another way of saying the second step in what every innovator experiences: 'first they laugh at you, then they tell you it violates the orthodoxy, then they say they knew it all along'.
Maybe ... just maybe ... Step 2 is where it stops sometimes because it was a bad idea and did make the films worse.
The article is about AI upscaling "True Lies", which was shot on 35mm film. 35mm provides a very high level of detail -- about equivalent in resolution to a 4k digital picture. We're not talking about getting an old VHS tape to look decent on your TV here.
The differences in quality between 35mm film and 4k digital are really more qualitative than quantitative, such as dynamic range and film grain. But things like lighting and dynamic range are just as much directorial choices as script, story, any other aspect of a film. It's a visual medium, after all.
Is the goal to have all old movies have the same, flatly lit streaming "content" look that's so ubiquitous today?
I think the argument against "isn’t there space for people who just want to see the story but experience it with modern levels of image quality" is that such a space is a-historical -- It's a space for someone that doesn't want to engage with the fact that things were different in the (not even very distant) past, and (at the risk of sounding a bit pretentious) it breeds an intellectually lazy and small-minded culture.
I'm 99% confident that similar issues were raised with e.g. recolored films, HD upscales, etc.
The separation you're talking about is imaginary, the line doesn't exist. Any tool will affect the original meaning if it doesn't match the execution. Remastering is an art regardless of the tool, and it's always an interpretation of the original work. It's fine to like or dislike this interpretation.
But there is a line here. An editor that's using simple tools knows exactly what they're changing, and if they're using simple frame-global tools then they're not introducing anything that wasn't already there.
If you throw an AI at things, it will try to guess what things in the image are, and make detail adjustments based on that.
So that's three categories of edit, easily distinguished: human making frame-global changes, human deliberately changing/adding details, AI changing/adding details in a way that's basically impossible to fully supervise.
It sounds like they accept category 1 in remastering, even though it's not foolproof, and reject 2 and 3.
The problem is that remasters don't make a lot of money, so instead of a properly controlled faithful representation (or a good rethinking) it's typically a half-assed job with a couple filters run over the entire piece. Another issue is that you now have two possibly conflicting intents - one from the original and another from the remaster. ML haven't changed anything in here, it's always been like that.
Non-film buffs, i.e. most viewers, don't care about this.
See new Netflix show Ripley.
All shot in B&W, beautifully shot.
For example Tenet. Cool story, poor audio mix. (I don’t buy the explanation that Nolan had any reason other than expediency for this.) If we use “AI” to fix the audio after the fact, that’s a win in my book.
I’m not a film buff or a purist though. I watch movies with subtitles which is certainly not what the director had in mind, but that’s ok.
... consciously ...
Assuming competent cinematography, it will have an effect on the viewer whether they can analyze it or not.
Good storytelling (and probably blunt spectacle) is the only thing common to all viewers that can win them over. For mainstream media everything else is gloss that may have no effect.
Most people don't even have their sound/brightness/contrast well-adjusted. Some free-to-view services regularly air content with the wrong ratio (and I've seen people happily sit watching the wrong ratio seemingly oblivious to it).
Yes, media nuances can have an effect on the unwitting, but I suspect much doesn't even have opportunity to.
You're going too low level, I'm thinking of lighting and colour and intentional blur via adjusting focus.
> Good storytelling (and probably blunt spectacle) is the only thing common to all viewers that can win them over. For mainstream media everything else is gloss that may have no effect.
You really need to reverse spectacle and storytelling in this statement. How else can the box office be dominated by superhero movies that personally I ... just ... can't ... tell ... apart?
This just provides a new way to watch older movies should you choose to do so. Or not.
This is far from certain, unless "you" are willing to engage in piracy. It's often difficult or impossible to legitimately buy (or even rent) the original, unadulterated versions of older films.
Nonetheless, i do believe that most film makers are actually want to make a film not work around contemprary limitations.