Should the use of AI be allowed for film restoration?

It probably makes a bit of a difference to people who splurge on the latest home theater stuff. (I'm not being judgy or anything, just stating a fact).

That is in fact what is driving most of these "restorations" - when people pay top dollar for a top-of-the-line 4k television, and the respective 4k UHD disc player, they also want to be able to see something that is dramatically sharper.

Mind you, for me personally, just plain old HD is already good enough. If I can get an even better image at a reasonable price, then that's even better.

Franky, I feel like the race towards having the greatest fidelity of image on your home entertainment system is more about the brag of having cutting edge tech, and considerably less to do with it making the films really any better.


I imagine some films could be enhanced by absolutely perfect resolution (Avatar, 2001, maybe some other spectacle type films), but mostly....who cares. To me it just sounds like a lot of nonsense created in order to make old tech irrelevant, and force people to continue upgrading things that were already pretty great to begin with.

I agree with you completely, but I also ask you to consider the counterpoint: that there's plenty of people who truly don't care about great PQ or AQ in their home viewing experience, and if it was up to them, then maybe nothing would ever get a restoration of any sort.

I'm talking about people who are still happy with Standard Definition and think the DVD is the ultimate in video technology.

All of that is possible. And I'm not against the restorations (as long as things don't get altered from their original intent). I'm just rolling my eyes a little at all of these bells and whistles that supposedly enhance a viewing that, outside of some superficial improvements, usually don't. Its just starting to feel, to paraphrase the great Nigel Tufnel, that these machines go up to 11. So, they are one better.

As I mentioned before, like much of life, whether AI is good or evil will depend on the lawyers. Those of us here can debate all week about whether it's good, or whether the result matches the intention of its creators or whether it just fixes film flaws. If it's just fixing film flaws, then you can argue about the original "sanctity" of the movie as a single, complete work of art in which at least some of the flaws are intentional or part of the art, or whatever, but it will be lawyers and courts that determine who has a right to do what with a movie and it won't be based on art.

I recall a similar debate about colorization. On the one hand there were some awful outcomes from that, but on the other, it was used to help badly deteriorated color movies.

The one that conditionally won me over was Peter Jackson's movie, They Shall Not Grow Old, consisting of historical, jerky, silent black and white footage of soldiers in World War I. Jackson added sound AND color. The outcome was truly amazing and made things I'd heard about European ancestors in that awful conflict come to life in a way that silent, jerky monochrome never did. We might as well forget about saying that it's awful and should be banned (how would you DO that?) and start contemplating how to use it. We're also not going to go back to Social Security employees hand writing checks and licking the envelopes.

So, trying to think through this analogy, which movies were shot on digital, originally at the PQ of a DVD?


My mind keeps going to back to films actually shot on celluloid. It seemed like a lot of the examples given in the article fell into that category. The problems that people are complaining about seems to arise from dealing with transferring those films. Though, Inland Empire was its own interesting challenge because it was purposely shot on low quality digital.

That wasn't an analogy.

The other half of the argument is how to transfer them. A lot of old film is faded, deteriorated, color-changed and missing frames. Do you fix that if you can? Just how much do you fix? Restore colors to something YOU prefer or try to emulate the original, even though the original is what is deteriorated?

I don't know the answers to all of this, but as long as the process doesn't destroy whatever remains of the original, at least it can be walked back.

AI is just a tool in the hands of humans...If the movies are modified in a way that dramatically changes what the movie looked like back in the day when the film prints were brand spanking new...then it's still a human problem. With humans you get greed and with studios you get greed eternal. I agree with others, if a film is restored to like new when it was first released, and kept available to the public to watch, then I'm not so irate about modifying films, though still not a fan.

The reason I bought the Blade Runner deluxe Blu Ray set wasn't for the modified Final Cut but so that I could have the original restored but not modified Theatrical Cut.

I recall seeing one of those versions of Blade Runner and seeing an interview with Ridley Scott in which he said that the altered version was what he originally wanted, but didn't have the tech or studio approval to do when it was all new. This is parallel to arguments about old paintings being "restored" or fixed or whatever. I don't think we will ever have a resolution or answer, but at least the discussion can continue if we do have whatever remains of the original.

Humans are still programming AI and making the settings and defaults in the software but this discussion is going to go on for a long time, at least until the next wave of software starts it over again and we render Gone With the Wind in a 3D version where you can walk through Tara and shake hands with Scarlett. That's why we need to keep the originals.

That lends itself to another discussion about if a director who's hired to make a film but didn't write the script, didn't conceive of the original idea, gets to alter the original movie after they've become famous and rich enough to be able to do so.

That also lends itself to the idea that eventually 'socially controversial films by today's standards' will be altered by the copyright owners and changed to be socially correct.

I don't think they're either-or. In fact I'd say it's kind of important to do both. We all know pragmatists whose principles dissolve over time and we all know idealists who never affect real change.

It's going to happen. We can't stop it. So I hope it's transparent. I think that's a winnable fight. But we can still complain about it the whole way. I mean, that's more or less what happened with Full Screen. Cinephiles moaned incessantly but the packaging was clear so people could avoid it, and over time the argument was more or less won. I think the transparency is ultimately what plants the seed for any eventual win, at least in areas where something is clearly better.

It all lends itself to the argument that a movie is a business property and that "Art" is the pretension that we add after the fact. Unless the US had some sort of "artistic treasure" law that declared movies to be untouchable, it's always going to happen. Restoration, modification, elimination of content that becomes obsolete, offensive or whatever will happen. It's just how all this goes. Society moves on.

You can still stream some of this stuff, but movies like the old silent Birth of a Nation have gotten cringe-worthy. One I recall seeing on broadcast TV was an old John Ford classic, Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers, Hattie MacDaniel and Stepin Fetchit....good ole' homespun nostalgia, but damn....also cringe-worthy. Judge Priest is a nearly educational movie, no Klan in this one, but an illustration of how things are NOT anymore, hopefully. You can actually stream that one on Amazon Prime.

That's an on-going challenge. Unless the director or someone is involved who is consciously trying to alter the movie (see Lucas, Scott, Coppola), it's usually done to emulate what they think the movie originally looked like on film before it deteriorated. There's sometimes special features on blu-rays/etc about the restoration process. My copy of Peeping Tom has one. Film fades, scratches get introduced. There can be large debates/comparisons between different transfers if two different blu-ray restorers end up with very different results. I remember that happened with Possession between the Second Sight restoration in the UK and the Mondovision one in the US. People posted screen-caps comparing them (because the color tones were different). This is also ignoring that by switching mediums, from celluloid to digital, visually things don't necessarily transfer identically, which is part of the transfer challenge.

Re-reading the flow of conversation with crumbsroom, I will say, I'll stake out a different position. As TVs support higher resolutions, it isn't surprising that there'll be releases of movies at those higher resolutions. I feel there's a lot of daylight between wanting to show something off and being content with standard definition. People will want something that matches their max resolution by default.

It feels like if you want to show off sharper images in the manner you described earlier and it being important to them, that seems akin to stores cranking the brightness of the colors on their higher end models on display, so they appear to have stronger colors to people browsing them. Those color settings are actually terrible for watching movies (though a lot of people will still keep those settings for watching movies). So in that sense, it feels like it's weird to use that group to represent people who care about picture quality (though, in their mind, they do. Or, they do, but it's for poorer picture quality) - and by weird, I mean, I want to recoil at someone doing that.

Even without A.I., we'd be arguing about the presence of grain in transfers from film, because that's often a major sticking point. The complaints here feel very similar to reading reviews of different releases of Predator.

For reference:
https://www.dvdexotica.com/2018/10/c...-with-and.html

I'm not saying I can't grasp the idea that we should make the best of what maybe be inevitable. I'm saying when the question at hand is "should they do this", and if we don't think they should, the only answer is "no, they shouldn't". Regardless of what may or may not be inevitable.


What I don't like about this is this attitude that if we are going to answer the question that was actually asked in this thread, we first should just resign ourselves to the fact that those with the power will do what they want. Then we can figure out everything else out after our supposed fate has buggered us.



No.

**** that.

I guess it depends on what you think constitutes resignation. Is having a backup plan resignation? How about just answering a slightly different question than the one literally in the title (something we do all the time)? Et cetera.

One thing that might factor in here is that when I hear "should they do this," I don't automatically replace the "they" with Hollywood executives, because as bad as stuff like full screen or motion smoothing (or maybe this) can be, there's usually plenty of demand for it from people in general, who only care that the thing they see have more definition. Still a problem, but I find my posture towards this stuff is different when I think it's coming from a larger group of non-specific people than a small number of powerful ones, if only because the former requires a more diplomatic approach to get anywhere by its very size and nature.

Fortunately, with any contemporary approach, it's very possible to preserve the original, although, in whatever state it is, deteriorated or pristine. It it's an old "film" (as on celluloid), you're going to scan and digitize it, so everything after that will be virtual/digital, easy to back up and walk back if needed.

I don't know who "they" are, but it's hard to think that, looking at an old, faded, color-shifted, missing frame original, if they have bought off on spending money to do this process, they won't have some wish to make it look and sound better.

Whatever you think of the outcome, at least the "original" still exists, in whatever broken or color shifted version it was at the outset.

The one that converted me was the one I mentioned, They Shall Not Grow Old, WW I footage digitized, colorized and sound-added. I was riveted when I saw this. Like any powerful tool, digitizing, editing, colorization, balancing, needs to be used carefully.

The other thing I recall about this one was the Jackson hired lip readers so they could get the words of the soldiers right. That made it actually kind of spooky.