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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Considering it is entirely automated, this is extremely good.

I'm not a bit against ML restoration. We've been paying artist to color BW in the early days, this is just replacing the artist by machines.

Judging from the video, it looks like no inter-frame relation is considered, so color varies wildly from on frame to another. The video still lacks some form of stabilization. Frames still have defects inherited from the film.

Also, it clearly was recorded in different speeds, so people have an uncanny walk in the last scenes.

I hope, in the not too distant future, these flaws will be taken care of and we'll see restorations that are very hard to differentiate from original footage.

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I couldn't possibly disagree more. This is nothing more than the digital equivalent of the monkey Jesus restoration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_G... It's extremely disrespectful. The colours are shifting all over the place. At times it's no better than overlaying a random gradient over the original.

> We've been paying artist to color BW in the early days, this is just replacing the artist by machines.

And some people are very upset over those. (Have you ever actually seen classic movies like "It’s a Wonderful Life" in colour?) But this ML nonsense doesn't even hold a candle to those. In the manual process, for every object, they pick a colour and stick with it.

How is this disrespectful if it's just a demo of the tech progress?

Are painting artists not allowed to train by repainting Picassos until they get good?

Presumably, because they're training on a video of the Hindenburg disaster.

It's not like the original video is full of 'tact'.

> Suddenly - The fatal moment!

Sure, you can train all you want, but showing off something that is inferior to other things that can already be done is just embarassing. At least it should be. There's a difference of showing off progress to your parents or investors or whatever, but making a public post of something clearly inferior in a way that screams "look what I did" is sad really.

Interesting. This is a common consumer view. Since pure consumers aren't acquainted with anything but the best in the field, they demand very high quality of anything they witness. That makes sense.

At least part time content creators know that creation is harder - because that first step to actually doing something is mentally hard (pure consumers find it impossible). People will make crappy things before they make good things and they'll share them with each other.

Perhaps the problem is when pure consumers, seeking further stimulus, enter creator spaces. Or where part-creators accidentally expand the audience for their fellow creators into pure consumer spaces or more-consumer-than-creator spaces like HN.

If you are attempting make something from scratch that has a competitor on the markent now, why would you evern think someone would use your product when it is so clearly inferior to other offerings? Hope to attract business by being the cheaper option? That just means you're going to get the clients nobody wants.

There's a difference between showing your friends and family something, but opening up the entire public with posting to YouTube and asking "tell me what you think" means you must be pretty proud of it. If you were proud of the results from this, then just wow.

In full disclosure, I've spent many an hour in the chair of restoring film/video. I've written many a tool to help with this endeavor for internal use as well as used professional tools. I have beta tested software that later went to production release. I have sent content out to outsource the work and critically evaluated the results. If this was the result someone sent me after suggesting they could do the work, I would never send them the work as well as vocally tell others not to waster their time.

This isn't even good enough to send someone's 8mm footage to for viewing on modern devices let alone professional.

It’s put up to share, man.

You’re writing this comment of yours and posting it publicly. Are you so incredibly proud of it? It’s riddled with typos and wouldn’t get you a passing grade in middle school.

That’s what I would say if I were being overly critical of someone sharing their opinion. It really doesn’t need this degree of hyperbolic value judgment. If it’s such rubbish it will easily be outcompeted for attention.

The original medium contains information collected at the time, with the technology available at the time. As such, it represents a time capsule that includes much more context than we can possibly realize; especially analog filmstock and audio. "Upscaling" and "autocolorizing" is injecting inferred (and often wrong) context from today using today's technology and context, tainting, corrupting (IMHO), and again, IMHO, ruining what the original artifact represents.

In our current technological, digital zeitgeist, everything that seems like higher and better resolution is universally better and must absolutely replace what was there before. But this is just a shifting fad, unrecognizable to the people who were alive then, and probably unrecognizable to people in the future.

Preserve, conserve, protect and pass on. Don't corrupt and "better" these things.

Lack of temporal consistency for colors is absolutely horrible.

I think it indicates that the problem posed to ML was defined wrongly.

Exactly, the upscaling is good but any human intern would have fixed the color for free, even by choosing a random one, and it would have produced a result closer to expectations...

Maybe then we'll finally get an HD release of Deep Space 9.

Evidently all efforts of the following HN member to improve consumer-grade DS9 video has reached an end:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24417255

The studio itself won't commission the necessary professional work for an HD (or at least upscaled) re-release.

The article you linked in that thread had an update from the same person.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/324466-tutorial-how-to-u...

He came back to it :).

> Update (7/17/2021): The article below has been superseded by the results discussed in “Far Beyond the Stars” and the accompanying tutorial, “How to Upscale Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” These articles are the latest that I’ve published and the best showcase for my latest work.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/323905-far-beyond-the-st...

[2] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/324466-tutorial-how-to-u...

It really isn’t very good. It’s worse than you’d get from low cost hand retouching outsourced to a low cost of labor geo as was done in the 80s.

>as was done in the 80s.

as is done to this day. FTFY

>> The video still lacks some form of stabilization.

Yeah, I wonder why. Once you are able to create colors, I'd think stabilizing the picture must be really easy. And since we're doing fancy interpretation (yeah, I say "interpretation" 'cos ML can't know the exact colors, just see the craft turning red and blue all of the time), then it'd be nice to go to the end of it : color, stabilization, speed fixing, the whole thing.

Besides, how do we know how such "interpretation" is close or far from reality ? What sort of validity testing is done ?

The channel Rick88888888 has a ton of restored movies: https://youtube.com/user/Rick88888888

I'd sooner call it vandalism. Restoration is what's shown in "They Shall Not Grow Old" where they paid attention to detail and approached it with respect.

Sharp edges and shifting red-blue colours is not what I would call restoration.

It’s not vandalism unless the originals have been damaged. If someone makes a digital copy and goofs around with it I really don’t see any harm being done.

Hahaha, that's their creative touch so they can claim copyright on this for the next 70 years

It's getting sadder and sadder to see people enjoying these fake restorations. Eventually we'll have so much of a mess that the original source will be forgotten or lost.

In this particular case I think there is the extra complication that the ship skin was made of a special material that likely does not burn with the usual wood fire colors. Combined with the hydrogen on the inside I actually have no idea what color the fire would have been - the most accurate way to restore this would probably have been with an actual eyewitness in the loop, or by restoring a section of the ship including the flammable paint.

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