Said Michael Lindsay-Hogg, quoted in "Long Dismissed, the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Returns After 54 Years Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s 'Get Back,' will stream on Disney+" (NYT).
I saw "Let It Be" in the theater when it came out in 1970, when I was a "child" of 19. I guess I'll have to subscribe to Disney again to see this digitally restored version. If we can now see the individual strands of the famous hair....
When I get older, losing my hair... it will be digitally possible to restore your hair, to individualize the strands so that they pulsate and coruscate as never before. I was once 19, in a movie theater, gazing upon the film "Let It Be," trying to see the reason why Beatles were breaking up — couldn't Paul please lead more subtly? couldn't George tone down the sarcasm? — and now, at 73, I can strap Vision Pro goggles to my face, lie in bed, and marvel at the individuality of the hairs in the once seemingly clumpy moptops. It's getting so much better all the time.
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I saw this in the NYT the other day: "A.I. Made These Movies Sharper. Critics Say It Ruined Them. Machine-learning technologies are being used in film restoration for new home video releases. But some viewers strongly dislike the results."
Although “Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which involved footage from World War I, made extensive use of the same A.I. processes, they did not receive as much criticism. That’s partly because of the condition of the source material: Both films took damaged archival images and appeared to reverse the deterioration, and in one case, to also colorize it. By contrast, the recent Cameron restorations ["The Abyss," "True Lies," "Aliens"] were based on new 4K scans of the original negative, none of which needed extensive repair of that kind.
“It’s not a question of the negative being damaged,” [said Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment]. “But back on the set, maybe you picked the shot that had the most spectacular performance, but the focus puller was a bit off, so it’s a bit soft. There could be a million reasons why it’s not perfect. So now there’s an opportunity to just go in and improve it.” The A.I. can artificially refocus an out-of-focus image, as well as make other creative tweaks. “You don’t want to crank the knob all the way because then it’ll look like garbage,” Burdick said. “But if we can make it look a little better, we might as well.”
For viewers like [the journalist Chris] Person, the problem is what those minor enhancements entail: That uncanny smoothness, though perhaps more in focus, can look oddly fake... “It’s the same thing as TV motion smoothing — they say it’s better, so you feel like you’re the one person cursed with vision who can see that it looks bad.”
You don't have to admit it's getting better. It can get worse.
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23 comments:
It’s the digital. The zeros and ones and pixels. Our brains aren’t digital…
This isn’t new. Audio and video special effects like the ILM stuff suffer the same 1101e…
I've been working with Topaz AI software capturing images from movies and making them look sharper, and there is a learning curve involved. It's so easy to click a button and the image will look better, but it can also look like an Instagram filter cranked to 11. The facial features and skin tone can be smoothed out to deliver an uncanny valley effect.
In the hands of a competent person (which I'm far from in his field), you can do some startling things with it. There's a YT channel posting songs apparently done with AI, in the style of songs from the '50s and '60s, and if it weren't for the extremely scatological lyrics (sample title: "I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again") I swear you would think it was real.
Is this a reverse Mandela effect?
Just a side bar FYI
If your household has a sports enthusiast, Hulu, upgrade with ESPN+, to get a whole host of college and MLB sports games, includes Disney+. So, if you wanting to see this new remake, you 'might' already have Disney+.
Billionaire filmmakers just won't stop polishing their toys.
Roger Ebert said it best: "computer graphics look real but feel fake."
The human capacity for self-delusion is infinite.
I saw the movie when it came out. It was glum and tedious. I saw the multi-hour TV thing which was designed to make chumps subscribe to some cable channel and for suckers to buy the DVDs. It was even more glum and more tedious.
Four guys in a warehouse who are tired of being around each other try to rush out new product. Fun times!
As for the album, one great song—Get Back; two sappy schmaltzfests—Let It Be, Winding Road; and three decent songs—Two of Us, For You Blue, and One After 909—swimming in a sea of dreck—Dig It, Maggie Mae, Dig a Pony, I Me Mine (barf), I've Got a Feeling.
Rick Beato recently raved about the genius of the lyrics of "Across the Universe." Sure. Try Cole Porter instead.
Anyway, for decades a publicity machine has told us to worship, worship, worship anything these guys did. All it does it put more money in their pockets.
Coruscate. C-O-R-U-S-C-A-T-E. Coruscate. to flash or sparkle
Thank you professor for our new word of the day!
The AI flap about retrospective image sharpening is reminiscent of the colorization kerfuffle .
I had to look up coruscate. Not part of my vocabulary either. Hard-sounding word. I'll stick with flash and sparkle. It's softer and more descriptive.
This AI stuff has its uses. I recently saw the remake of Roadhouse. A lot of the fight sequences were AI enhanced but were much better than the ones in the original movie. In real life, you can't body slam your component onto a concrete floor, but with AI you can do this. I read that in the original movie a lot of the actors and stunt people suffered injuries, but the fights still looked choreographed and fake. Lots of breakaway furniture, and Hollywood had not yet mastered the martial art of jump cuts. The fights were much better in the new version.....I liked some parts of the old movie better though. Back in those days, women were more apt to go topless and dance lasciviously. The downside was that a lot of the women had silicone boobs. Perhaps they could use AI to go back and give these women more natural appearing boobs and remove uncanny valley aspect of the cleavage back then.
The very first time I saw "It's a Wonderful Life" was the colorized version. It seemed perfectly fine to me, not having seen it in black and white, and I never understood the controversy over the subject. I would love to see the black and white version brightened up just a bit.
I went down the rabbit hole on You Tube the other day, watching videos with a musician doing analysis of various singers/performers, using pitch technology to visually show what he was hearing. The most interesting were live or older performances with just the natural human voice. It became evident that for many of those we know of as brilliant, such as Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, technology would remove the nuance and emotion. Isn’t that becoming true of everything, especially sports and music? We’ve become so enamored of perfection that we remove the humanness and drama. Human senses distrust perfection.
Quit corusucating. Its hurting my eyes.
"Coruscate" is — in my mind — a Nathaniel Hawthorne word:
"And there was born to him a child, a beautiful daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of God with no just sense of her immortal value, but as a man already rich in gems would receive another jewel. If he loved her, it was because she shone. After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating continually an unnatural light, the source of it—which was merely his gold—began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon, he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking from annihilation."
— The Blithedale Romance
Imagine being able to write like that!
These days, though, you could just use A.I.
You could blog in the style of Hawthorne just by writing in your own ordinary way and having A.I. translate it.
No one would want to read it though. It's only because you know Hawthorne was a human being that you are interested in the writing. A person had to write that or it's just completely annoying and stupid.
And yet people, most/many of us, are annoying and stupid.
A.I. probably systematically cuts down the annoyingness and stupidity.
But that's just dull.
"Coruscate. C-O-R-U-S-C-A-T-E. Coruscate. to flash or sparkle
Thank you professor for our new word of the day!"
Yep, it's also the source of the ecumenopolis planet "Coruscant" in the Star Wars books and films, since it's said to glitter like a "Corusca gem" when viewed from space.
“No one would want to read it though. It's only because you know Hawthorne was a human being that you are interested in the writing. A person had to write that or it's just completely annoying and stupid.”
I disagree, because I can separate the artist from the art. I don’t think AI has reached the level of Hawthorne yet, and probably won’t for some time, but when it does I’ll be very interested in the result.
Just kind of scanning your text, the capitalized "Let It Be" caught my eye. Except, I read it as "Let It Die".
It was a long time ago. I don't care what their hair looked like.
I have Let it Be on VHS! I don't think it's ever been released on DVD. It was, mercifully, shorter than the interminable Get Back. I thought it was interesting that the original was not in widescreen, but Jackson's was. In the original, the crowded screen created the impression that Yoko was hugely intrusive. The cropping on Get Back made her seem less so, but so did the other material in the film, which made it clear that there were many people, from Harrison's Hari Krishna friends to various music industry types, milling around the studio. How the Beatles got anything done is a miracle.
tommyesq said...
"The very first time I saw "It's a Wonderful Life" was the colorized version. It seemed perfectly fine to me, not having seen it in black and white, and I never understood the controversy over the subject. I would love to see the black and white version brightened up just a bit."
In the early 1980s, I saw It's a Wonderful Live in a movie theater in Hollywood. I noticed something in the background that I hadn't noticed on TV. When George is in the alternate universe and running away from Bert the cop, there is a sigh in the background that says "POTTERSVILLE." When Bert shoots at George, he hits the sign and it changes to saying, "POTTERS ILLE."
Tom Waits made a fantastic concert/performance art film in the 1980s called "Big Time". It was only released on VHS and maybe a Japanese laser disc. When it came to streaming a couple of years ago it looked terrible. Basically unwatchable. Some dedicated fan fed the image through an AI post processor. The output looks quite good; not quite like it did in the theater, but it's nice to be able to see it again in acceptable quality.
Just to throw in another bit of anecdata, the original Star Trek series had most of the special effects re-done in the early 2000s or thereabouts, and I think they did a wonderful job and greatly improved it. Cheesy effects -- phaser blasts that are obviously cartoon drawings on the film, 2-dimensional alien ships or whatever -- were distracting to me then and even more so now. Roddenberry had said he always wanted to re-do the effects at some point. They didn't fancy these up, basically just the same shot, but better. I didn't even notice it for a few minutes the first time I saw one and was thinking "Say, these effects are better than I remember them...."
I would actually love to see old stop-motion animation re-done. None of it feels even remotely realistic. "Oh, look, Theseus is battling a puppet Medusa. . . .how. . . not-scary...."
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