Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here.
If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off.
Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war.
He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc.
I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again.
I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing.
That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence.
Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way.
Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it.
I'm with you. Black and white footage feels fake. The colored stuff was mind boggling. The worst part was that the footage was taken during mostly peaceful moments and re-enactments for obvious reasons.
The stuff in Ukraine on head mounted cameras is something that has surpassed all.
Yeah, I'm waiting for film makers, like Werner Hertzog, to take all the Ukraine footage to the cinema. 'Cleaning' it up to get past the artifacts and jitter and confusion to a real message. Editing all those hours of gopro will be massively helped by AI, I think.
My biggest complaint was actually that the portion with the original footage went on too long.
One thing that surprised me was that they did the transition from original to enhanced footage so abruptly; I'd expected a smooth transition over a couple of minutes where you don't even realize it happened until after the fact. The abrupt transition didn't get a crowd reaction when I saw it, but maybe that collective gasp was the goal and it just didn't work out in this showing.
I totally agree that _They Shall Not Grow Old_ was an excellent use of AI, but I don't think it is a great counterpoint to this article. The article is predominantly arguing wholly AI generated imagery rather than restoration and that has very different ramifications to restoration of historical footage.
If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off.
Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war.
He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc.
I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again.
I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing.
That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence.
Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way.
Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old
[1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH