So I think in this case the motion interpolation can legitimately increase the verisimilitude of the footage. The pace and fluidity of the movement being more natural is not a bad thing for the showing off the times, though it is important that the it be noted it’s a particularly poor reflection on the history of cinema its cultural impact. The two thirds that are missing have the 1/18 of a second on either side there, so I think there’s a particularly low risk in introducing misleading information.
My bigger concerns are actually the upscaling (a bit) and the colorization (more). The former, I guess if you’re just sort of presenting this to create the impression of these people’s faces and to enhance the immersion in the era for a modern audience, it’s not that bad, but you’d want to be very clear what you were doing, and you certainly wouldn’t want to say soemthing like, “See what your great-grandfather’s face really looked like?” For the colorization, I’d want to know what were the sources, techniques, and tools used. Those would befit from genuine historical research and could be actively misleading about what we’re seeing, providing a false certainty in a way that motion interpolation mostly doesn’t, and upscaling sort of doesn’t.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I think you’re right to be wary of it. It’s like AI colorization of photos. They tend to be much more desaturated than ones done by professionals. Great colorists take the time to research materials and fashions and make informed guesses about how things should look. When something automated by AI it can be much more inaccurate since no research was done.
I would imagine the same pitfalls could happen with a video like this. It’s cool to see the results, but I agree it shouldn’t be presented as anything more than an artistic re-interpretation.
Lupus108@feddit.de 6 months ago
Yeah I once saw a “colorization” done by AI from a photo from the early 1900s or something, it was a photo from a house and some people in front of it, Russia or Ukraine somewhere.
The thing is that the photo that was used was in fact a color photo that they turned black and white and then gave it to the AI. The AI used very muted colors, a little beige a little dark green - colors you would expect from a photo of that time and region. In the original you could see, that the colors where actually very bright and plentiful, the house was a bright yellow not beige, the green fence was not dark green but bright green, the accents on the house were not brown but red. The people in the AI colorized picture had black, white, dark blue clothes, a man had a brown hat, in the original they wore blue dresses, yellow blouses, the hat was red and so on.
Of course you can extrapolate some things but the original photo was so colorful, these people clearly painted the house bright on purpose and they wore very bright clothes but the re-colorization was so much less colorful and it gave a wrong impression of the reality what was photographed. Of course the old film wasn’t perfect and the colors maybe were also a little off - but it showed how many different colors were present in the original.