Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

How long until we can run this over shows like Star Trek Voyager/DS9 and Seinfeld to achieve believable 16:9 scenes?

Temporal coherence will still take a while to solve but it's not undoable. Making things that look correct upon closer inspection rather than just looking "nice" will probably take some degree of human curation for quite a while.

Anyone working on closed caption models at the moment?

Tesla could use some of that temporal coherence as well.

Someone has been upscaling DS9 already[1]. Obviously not release anywhere.

Not sure I'd want them in 16:9, hd 4:3 like the other HD releases of TNG and TOS would do me. I understand they shot on video so an official true HD remaster is likely to never happen.

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

DS9 shot on film: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454370

But it did use a lot of early CGI that would need to be redone.

I don't have a deep understanding of how training models work, but I wonder if training a model with every frame of TNG and then outpaint it into 16:9 would work.

Why would you do that? What an awful idea. People made those shows in the 4:3 format, you’d just be adding fluff. This is like adding more description to a book so it becomes an epic novel instead of a novella. I’d say keep to the creators intent…

I'm not the person who suggested it, but I wouldn't mind having it fill my (wide)screen when watching. That said, I understand that some film/tv uses the frame very precisely, however I'm not sure that these two particular examples do that throughout their entire episodes. (Though I bet that in Seinfeld in particular it might weaken/ruin a few visual gags.)

Still seems to me like adding fluff - it seems a bit impossible to me that the AÍ would add anything pertinent to the plot. It would add “stuff” like corridors and background sets and maybe someone out of focus.

Do the black bars actually bother you that much? You know there are cropped 16:9 widescreen versions of some of these shows (which I personally detest, but I work in the business of moving images).

Genuinely interested in why this bothers people.

It doesn't bother me much (if the show is good, I don't realize it after maybe 5 minutes), hence why I said "I wouldn't mind..." instead of something harder. But it'd be interesting to see what would happen if shows were expanded frame-wise like this... The 16:9 cropped widescreens you mentioned take something away, whereas expanding the frame with AI adds something, and theoretically if you don't want it you can just matte it out and still have the original. It seems like a more advanced version of Ambilights.

I think we still have a ways to go before the results would work well without looking like those nightmarish deepdream videos where things are constantly shifting, so society will have plenty of time to discuss the merits.

I'm inclined to agree, but if it were coherent I'd take it over what platforms like netflix do and chop off the tops and bottom of the content so it'll fit 16:9.

What if there is critical visual content in the half of the view that you're removing. Television is a visual medium, one could assume that a good filmmaker would be using the full viewport afforded them.

I’m saying adding is better than removing, and removing is terrible.

Not as terrible sometimes, since often television shows and films “protect” for different aspect ratios (yes this is a thing). So people might shoot 16:9 and protect (basically make sure you have a readable frame) for 4:3 or you can shoot Scope and protect for 16:9.

It’s not perfect but if the filmmakers thought of it it can be ok.

Next week?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com