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Comment by emsign | Hacker News Reader

Imagine history documentaries where they take an old photo and free objects from the background and move them round giving the illusion of parallax movement. This software does that in less than a second, creating a 3D model that can be accurately moved (or the camera for that matter) in your video editor. It's not new, but this one is fast and "sharp".

Gaussian splashing is pretty awesome.

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Oh man. I never thought about how Ken Burns might use that.

Already you sometimes see where manually cut out a foreground person from the background and enlarge them a little bit and create a multi-layer 3D effect, but it's super-primitive and I find it gimmicky.

Bringing actual 3D to old photographs as the camera slowly pans or rotates slightly feels like it could be done really tastefully and well.

What are free objects?

The "free" in this case is a verb. The objects are freed from the background.

Until your comment I didn't realise I'd also read it wrong (despite getting the gist of it). Attempted rephrase of the original sentence:

Imagine history documentaries where they take an old photo, free objects from the background, and then move them round to give the illusion of parallax.

I'd suggest a different verb like "detach" or "unlink".

isolate from the background?

Even better, agreed!

> Imagine history documentaries where they take an old photo, free objects from the background

Even using commas, if you leave the ambiguous “free” I suggest you prefix “objects” with “the” or “any”.

Free objects in the background.

No, free objects in the foreground, from the background.

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