| ▲ | ulrikrasmussen 6 days ago |
| I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's? I was recently sent a link to this recording of a David Bowie & Nine Inch Nails concert, and I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPg... It turned out that the video was "AI-upscaled" from an original which is really blurry and sometimes has a low frame rate. These are artistic choices, and I think the original, despite being low resolution, captures the intended atmosphere much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1Ikk... We have pretty good cameras and lenses now. We don't need AI to "improve" the quality. |
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| ▲ | prmoustache 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this. Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality. |
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| ▲ | gyomu 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m a photographer, and am on a bunch of beginner photography groups. These groups used to be a mix of people being confused at how their camera worked and wanting help, people wanting tips on how to take better pictures, and sometimes there was requests for editing pictures on their behalf (eg “I found this old black and white faded picture of my great grandparents, can anyone help restore it?”) These days, 99.9% of the posts are requests that involve synthesizing an entirely new picture out of one or more other pictures. Examples: “can someone bring in my grandpa from this picture into this other family picture?”. Or “I love this photo of me with my kids, but I hate how I look. Can someone take the me from this other picture and put it in there? Also please remove the cups from our hands and the trees in the background, and this is my daughter’s ex boyfriend please also remove him”. What’s even crazier is that the replies of those threads are filled with dozens of people who evidently just copy pasted the prompt + picture into ChatGPT. The results look terrible… but the OP is always pleased as punch! People don’t care about “reality”. Pictures have lost their status of “visual record of a past event”* and become “visual interpretation of whatever this person happens to want”. There’s no putting back the genie in the bottle. *: yes, you can argue they were never 100% that, but still, that’s effectively what they were. | | |
| ▲ | flir 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | "I'm delighted by this picture of some weird cartoon people that are in the same pose as my grandparents" puzzles me deeply, also. | | |
| ▲ | quxbar 6 days ago | parent [-] | | You've never seen those stands at the boardwalk where artists draw caricatures? They're extremely formulaic and rarely resemble the subjects aside from a few distorted features, but humans have being paying other humans to pump out that slop for ages. | | |
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| ▲ | slipperydippery 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted. 2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps. I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that. | |
| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Young people often ask "what's the point of fine art photography? It's just capturing what I can already see with my eyes, I prefer art like paintings which are more creative and imaginative" And the answer is often "GOOD photography is about capturing a fleeting moment in time, forever, so that we can enjoy it longer" But what is happening now is going the other way - people are using photography to be more imaginative, as a creative medium more akin to composing a painting. Transforming reality rather than merely recording it | |
| ▲ | petralithic 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop, I don't see the big deal. What I've seen recently is synthesizing whole new pictures with AI, by training a LoRA on their face and body and asking the AI to create themselves with a specific setting or background. | | |
| ▲ | roelschroeven 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I value old photographs of my and my family not because they look good or whatever but because they show where we've been and what we've been doing etc. They're documented history. Once you start heavily editing, making them showing things that weren't there, you loose that history. I think that's a loss. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 6 days ago | parent [-] | | They’re not mutually exclusive though. My wife has our portraits taken about twice a year and sometimes during a vacation or major event. So we have those, we also have tons unedited candid photos we take on a daily basis and never share (or only on a closed platform like a shared Album in iOS Photos), then my wife does a lot of editing and montage stuff for some of the stuff she posts more broadly to SM. I post nothing to SM so can’t speak from personal experiences here, but what I’m saying is there isn’t a single use case anymore. We have the tools at our disposal to just scratch curious itches even when they don’t get posted or shared (which I’d bet is a majority of photos). You’re viewing it as reductive but it’s expansive from what I’ve seen. | | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Ironically one of our framed photo is my partner and me posing next to an historic building in a pueblo magico in Mexico. A stray dog decided to piss on the wall when my sister in law was taking the picture. She actually realised it and took a second picture but it turned out we like the first one better as it is just much more authentic. | |
| ▲ | JohnFen 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They’re not mutually exclusive though. I get what you're saying, but I don't think I entirely agree. If we live in a world where you can't tell if a picture is real or fiction, then it becomes necessary and reasonable to think of all pictures as fiction. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 6 days ago | parent [-] | | This is only an issue with a single photo or low sample sizes. In the case of family photos, you’d like have a whole bunch of them to reference and could spot inconsistencies more easily. If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. You could just as easily think of all pictures as unaltered. It’s a matter of optimism/pessimism or perhaps red pill/blue pill. Granted, if your grandparents are showing you their vacation pictures from their world travels that never happened, this is a different scenario that is weird and can could happen. It’s a balance of trusting nothing you see while making a few exceptions for your family and whatnot | | |
| ▲ | JohnFen 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. Being 100% convincing doesn't make it true. Not being able to tell what's true from what's fake is a self-evident problem. It means you're at risk of forming an invalid view of the world. The only safe approach would be to never believe anything, at which point we've even lost recent history. Madness lies that way. |
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| ▲ | exitb 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The motivation behind taking pictures has definitely changed over time. People used to keep them mainly for themselves and their close family. Then they started to share with close and not so close friends. Now they use it to boost their "personal online brand". Yes, it was possible to heavily manipulate pictures with Photoshop, or even in analog photography, but it wouldn't make any sense for most people. | |
| ▲ | csomar 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop Very few people who had the skill, time or money. I think we are now discovering that everybody wants to edit the photos, they just couldn't do it before in what they consider a reasonable amount of effort. | | |
| ▲ | petralithic 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I agree, but I am specifically looking to understand the above photographer's point. They said the requests they used to get versus what they get today have changed, but I argue that that doesn't make any sense, people have always wanted to edit their photos in the "now" example even back then. | | |
| ▲ | yorwba 6 days ago | parent [-] | | It totally makes sense that people don't request things they don't expect to be possible. | | |
| ▲ | petralithic 6 days ago | parent [-] | | My point is that their "these days" example was already possible 20 to 30 years ago, so if they're just seeing these requests today then they're missing out on what people have wanted even back then. |
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| ▲ | spwa4 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are. |
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| ▲ | roomey 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People were pirating before napster, but napster made it easy, accessable, and let people do it with little to no barrier. It's the same with this.. yes photo editing could always be done, but it's far easier now to get better results. It's accessibility changes the game | | |
| ▲ | petralithic 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm specifically responding to their point about how "these days" people want different things and I'm saying that they always wanted those things, nothing new about it. | | |
| ▲ | mingus88 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I disagree. My parents generation took photos on point and shoot cameras. They waited a week or longer to get them developed, never really knowing what they took. These photos ended up stuck to pages in an album to be brought out occasionally, or they were really good, in a frame placed on display. They have pictures from the 80s still out on their mantle. Maybe once a decade they would go to a studio like at Sears and get a pro to get the whole family together. These would be edited, but also very rare. Even the thought that they would be taking pictures for anyone else to ever see would rarely cross their minds, let alone the need to make major edits. Regular people simply didn’t have this vanity or need for approval when taking pics like the smartphone era | | |
| ▲ | petralithic 5 days ago | parent [-] | | My parents' generation also took photos but if something was off, they'd ask our photographer relative to edit them. This was over 20 years ago. At least some part of the population did know what photo editing was and did it, either themselves or with the help of someone else. |
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| ▲ | latexr 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the contrary, there is plenty new about it. People’s perception of how much you can change influences how much they ask. Seeing new possibilities gives you new ideas. |
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| ▲ | Atheros 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists. |
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| ▲ | vendiddy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I generally love AI. But I lament these blurred lines of reality. Is this photo real? Was this reply ChatGPT or did they actually write it? It makes me feel uneasy. | | |
| ▲ | johnisgood 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I feel the same way. Thankfully there are still obvious signs in case of using LLMs, but it is not always so obvious. I think we may be better off assuming X is fake, and go from there. Sad but what could we do? There are websites that tell you (with a %) whether or not something has been written by an LLM. Unfortunately, however, some of my writings come out false positive. We may need to do improvements on this front, and I believe we will. | | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 6 days ago | parent [-] | | reality can be faked even without use of LLMs. Take for instance instagram, youtube shorts and tiktok. I see people watching tons of small either supposedly funny or shocking videos. And people seem to believe they are totally real and not organize/produced content until I challenge them on a number of trivial details that make those videos totally unbelievable they would have been recorded by chance or in an opportunistic manner. | | |
| ▲ | xnorswap 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That attitude actually feels a couple of years out of date to me, now the response is often along the lines of, "So what, everything is staged, it's just for fun, get over it and stop being a killjoy". There's a general belief that nothing is real, but we should still just act, and be influenced by it, as if it were real. |
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| ▲ | rurp 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is wild to me. I take plenty of smartphone photos and have literally never in my life wanted to distort a picture in this way. None of my pictures are ever getting published or being used to promote a product; being a visual record of a past event is exactly what I want out of them. I'm honestly pretty surprised to hear this is turning into such a minority view. | |
| ▲ | joaquincabezas 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | No wonder why Google says: “Generate, transform and edit images with simple text prompts, or combine multiple images to create something new. All in Gemini.“ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026719 |
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| ▲ | ulrikrasmussen 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content. It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good. | | |
| ▲ | xnorswap 6 days ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses. It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology. It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies. | | |
| ▲ | matt-attack 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Your premise to lower (temporal) detail his automatically worse is a naïve view. I’m certain you’re aware that impressionism is a valid, quite successful form of art. Do you think there are any critics who say a Monet painting would be far better if it, just had more detail? Oh if only Van Gough used a smaller brush his paintings would have been so much better! It needs “more k!”. Film making at 24fps (while originally selected for pragmatic reasons having to do with film cost and sound fidelity) turned out to be a happy accident. It produces an Impressionistic Effect entirely similar to a money painting. 24fps is absolutely not reality. Our brains know it too. The same way they know that those giant brush strokes in a Van Gough painting are also NOT REALITY. Turns out our brains like to be toyed with. Art is just always “trying to document precisely what our senses would have experienced if we were there”. That is just a false premise and one they misunderstands art in general. | | |
| ▲ | xnorswap 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I reject that, it's a product of familiarity being more comfortable. 24fps was not a deliberate choice that was made a century after we previously had high frame-rate. It was a limitation at the time. Impressionism was a deliberate choice, it came centuries after more detailed paintings were being done. And there were indeed many critics of the movement at the time. 24fps in movies is just banking on the comfortable, the familiar. It isn't art, it's giving people what they expect and not challenging people. It has about as much artistic merit as the N'th Mission impossible movie or MCU movie. | | |
| ▲ | matt-attack 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I totally disagree. If you read my statement I specifically stated that 24 was not designed to be impressionism. It was just a happy accident that it worked out that way. We've since tried all sorts of other frame-rates. Slower is to studdery, faster removes the impressionism and starts biasing towards realism. Once you get to 72fps or higher, it's essentially pure reality, and your brain knows it. Look, detailed photos can be art. Not saying that HFR cannot be art, but we'd all agree that realism and impressionism are simply different forms of art. And often times those who like one, doesn't like the other. So you have to accept that those are find the appeal of 24fps due to its "different than reality" look, they might easily find HFR material to be "boring and hyper real" in the same way I might look at a crystal clear photo of Paris and think the same, whereas a Monet impression of it, is way more appealing. |
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| ▲ | Sammi 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences. | | |
| ▲ | ptsneves 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah! I thought I was the only one who felt movies or series change scenes too fast. I often find myself needing a small pause, when it is in Netflix, to recapitulate with my wife what just happened. This happens even in lawyer dramas like Suites. | | |
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| ▲ | queenkjuul 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lower framerate isn't worse, it's just different. But the artifacts introduced by TV frame interpolation absolutely can ruin the content completely. | |
| ▲ | SirMaster 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I disagree with this. Even if the film is shot in HFR I don't like how it looks. It's just SOE, soap opera effect, and it has nothing to do with any artifacts from motion smoothing, because the look is the same even if it's filmed in HFR. The only things I like in HFR are sports or maybe home videos. Any sort of movie or TV show where I want the suspension of disbelief, I am still much preferring 24fps. Of course this is just my opinion, but home theater is a big hobby of mine and so I spend a fairly great deal of time looking at different content and analyzing it and thinking about it and how I feel about it or enjoy it. Not attempting to take anything away from those who do like HFR, but just saying that it's not for everyone. |
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| ▲ | windward 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At some point it became unacceptably rude to gatekeep, king-make, or be otherwise judgemental of taste. It was at around the same time that subcultures and counterculture melted into an homogenous mass. I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones. | |
| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | gt0 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is weird. One funny thing I've noticed is that software developers (including myself) seem to rebel against it the most. A surprising number of software developers I know shoot film. No digital cameras, they just take photos, get the prints, and they're done. It seems to be the non-technical people who are most OK with the inauthenticity that comes with AI "enhanced" photos. | |
| ▲ | BobaFloutist 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Couldn't you pretty reasonably create Bokeh algorithmically, since it's destroying information rather than creating it? | |
| ▲ | Atheros 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is? The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious. |
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| ▲ | conradfr 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png |
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| ▲ | moefh 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That's insane. Here's the same-ish frame from the original: https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video). The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces". | | |
| ▲ | ygra 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Seems like they ignored the non-square pixel aspect ratio as well for the upscaling, which may have changed face shapes as well. | |
| ▲ | janfoeh 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Between 2:07 and 2:08, the guy on the right loses his glasses. Over the course of a couple frames, they just fade into nothingness. |
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| ▲ | brap 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad. Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV. It was the auto-smoothing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect |
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| ▲ | ulrikrasmussen 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It is especially bad for animated shows that have made an explicit artistic choice to let (parts of) the animation progress at a lower frame rate. My kids watched "spider-man: across the spider-verse" at a friends place where smoothing was not turned off, and it completely ruined the artistic feel and made the movie feel like a stuttering video game. | | |
| ▲ | BeFlatXIII 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Studio Ghibli movies are among the hardest-hit by smoothing. It's jarring how it'll transition between motion-smoothed pans and motion scenes and natural Ghibli animation. | |
| ▲ | jay_kyburz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap. | | |
| ▲ | pja 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap. It was absolutely an artistic choice - Sony spent more per frame on those movies than any previous animated film & the directors knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to animate some parts on every second (or even third) frame. | |
| ▲ | nathan_compton 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is an artistic choice with a variety of film precedents. Its not exactly the same thing, but if you watch this GDC talk about the way that Arc System Works uses 3d to simulate 2d animation, it gets some of the ideas across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E Artists might want to produce a lower framerate just to make something look filmic (eg, 25 frames per second) or hand animated, but it can also be a deliberate stylistic choice for other reasons. Eg, the recentish Mad Max films used subtle undercranking to make action scenes feel more intense, and part of that effect is a more noticeable frames and I think there is a bit of that in the Spiderverse films too. | |
| ▲ | HelloMcFly 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean, it was an artistic choice, and it wasn't cheap at $90m budget. That doesn't mean you're obligated to enjoy the end product by any means, but they were really doing some interesting things! https://medium.com/everythingcg/spider-man-into-the-spider-v... | |
| ▲ | ulrikrasmussen 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think that's a matter of taste, but it definitely doesn't make it easier to watch them when the frame rate randomly switches between low and high all the time :). |
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| ▲ | mongol 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is a fantastic movie, btw |
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| ▲ | spacechild1 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I had the exact same experience watching Goodfellas on my parents' TV. It felt like a cheap soap opera and I was thoroughly confused about what's happening. Afterwards I did some research and learned about motion interpolation in modern TVs. | | |
| ▲ | bbarnett 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Back when there was a lot of 4x3 on TV, 20 years ago, my parents had their TV set to auto stretch. Why? Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen! Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen! Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now. And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice. When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person. I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win. | | |
| ▲ | pratnala 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel this so much. Despite telling her umpteen times till date, my mom will stretch photos only along one dimension to "fill the space" when writing docs or making slides. It drives me absolutely insane. She doesn't even realize till I tell her that the faces (and people) are stretched or squished too much. | | |
| ▲ | incone123 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Not to defend her preference, but faces (and everything else) can also look different depending on the focal length of the lens used and the distance from lens to subject, _and most people won't realise_. |
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| ▲ | layer8 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win. Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance. | | |
| ▲ | bbarnett 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you really want this to be the world we live in? No. But I also don't want to go bankrupt. If I want to make a niche market product, for the discerning consumer, well that's different. But from what I see, that's not even one in a thousand... so best be careful. | |
| ▲ | SturgeonsLaw 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's already the world we live in |
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| ▲ | whycome 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | One of my pet peeves of the opening scene in Star Trek (2009?) was when the ‘bad guy’ shows up on the monitor, his video is stretched wide to fill the view screen. wtf kind of future is that?! |
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| ▲ | loudmax 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A few years ago I was playing around with upscaling options in ffmpeg. For my starting point, I used my DVD of The Road Warrior that I bought in 1999, and wasn't particularly well mastered. I applied some filters to remove film grain, and raised the frame rate to 120 fps by inserting artificial interstitial frames. Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean. But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame. An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film. |
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| ▲ | rasz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >everything looks cheaper Specifically to You because you grew up with soap operas. Young people today grew up with 60 fps games and video, to them 24-30 fps looks broken. | |
| ▲ | chneu 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It also has to do with how basically everything is filmed for Netflix/streaming nowadays. | | | |
| ▲ | agumonkey 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thing is, to some population this is seen as better. While to me it feels as journalists camera, too real to pass as a story. | |
| ▲ | Angostura 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hope you waited until they were out of the room and turned it off in settings? |
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| ▲ | hliyan 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc. |
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| ▲ | ddq 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | After decades of consumerism, most consumers already have most of what they need/want, so in order to keep selling widgets, corporations must manufacture demand. Enough big screen TVs have already been built and sold to give every American a fully functional 60"+ screen in every room in their residence, enough lightly used ones to go around to completely negate the need to manufacture more. But profit must not go down for any reason, so they must invent gimmicks to push the latest and greatest model onto a public that can't even tell the difference without marketing propaganda. The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit. I say enough is enough. | |
| ▲ | wickedsight 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > pushing technology that end consumers don't want Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was. | | |
| ▲ | lifestyleguru 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Failure of 3D TVs was one unprecedented glorious victory of a customer, where customers not buying it indeed led to its disappearance. Otherwise I'm furiously not buying other ridiculous stuff but my consumer decision does nothing. | | |
| ▲ | vrighter 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I still have one! But there is, of course, pretty much no 3d content to view on it. Maybe Gran Turismo on ps3 |
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| ▲ | hdgvhicv 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | When stock price has to grow 8% more than gdp this is inevitable. |
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| ▲ | latexr 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Who seriously thinks this looks better I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference. Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online). > I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s Looking at the original, it’s obvious why: that section was really blurry. The AI version doesn’t understand camera effects. https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126 Thank you for providing both links, it made the comparison really simple. |
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| ▲ | justsid 6 days ago | parent [-] | | If you watch the average person watch TV, they don’t actually pay attention to it. Everyone is just on their phone. It drives me crazy watching just about anything with people because I look around and no one even has their eyes on the TV. It’s just background noise. |
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| ▲ | ageitgey 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious. |
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| ▲ | justinator 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That is terrible. I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation. |
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| ▲ | raffael_de 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, 2:07 is just ridiculous. That's more Matt Damon than David Bowie. To be fair, though, this upscale was not committed by Youtube. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127 |
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| ▲ | energy123 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!" |
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| ▲ | rightbyte 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The closeups of the bass player are like 6 slowmotion frames in the original and look like an interpolated mess with unhuman body joints upscaled. |
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| ▲ | omnimus 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What makes it uneasy is not only upscaling but they are generating new frames to make it 60fps. 60fps by itself feels fake (check some footage of The Hobbit that tried 48fps). It feels like video games. It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural. The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps. |
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| ▲ | i80and 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media. | |
| ▲ | petralithic 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is just habitual and I feel it's making movies look terrible, especially panning shots look like a stuttery mess that is almost unwatchable for me at 24 FPS. |
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| ▲ | lm28469 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's? Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations. Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers. |
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| ▲ | hliyan 6 days ago | parent [-] | | This sounds like two completely different things. I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off. This is neurological, not generational. | | |
| ▲ | lm28469 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird | | |
| ▲ | hliyan 6 days ago | parent [-] | | In that case the answer is even simpler: what few young people I know (yes, N = small) have been the loudest in complaining about the feature. They seem to prefer "cinema quality" the same way some people of my generation like vinyl records. |
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| ▲ | SanjayMehta 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The first video induced actual physical nausea. I had to stop playback or I’m sure I would have thrown up. And I don’t suffer from motion sickness etc. There’s definitely something “uncanny valley” about it. |
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| ▲ | black_puppydog 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Holy... wtf... At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible. |
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| ▲ | MrGilbert 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Also, David Bowie looks like a 20-something-year old man in this shot. |
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| ▲ | Retr0id 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I also think it looks like garbage, but I wonder if maybe it looks better on small mobile screens - where you can't actually see the mangled details, but can perceive that it "looks sharper" |
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| ▲ | andrepd 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception When I took LSD for the first time, I realised it was hitting when everything started looking like stable diffusion |
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| ▲ | kg 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wow, you're not kidding. In some shots David Bowie barely looks like David Bowie because the algorithm's taken such liberties with the original image to try and make it look sharp. |
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| ▲ | chrsw 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I pulled up a podcast on YouTube the other week of just two people facing the camera and their faces side-by-side the screen. I had to just use audio only. I couldn't actually look at the video. The guest on the show was using some kind of AI filter for his video stream. I guess because he was on a low-quality phone camera, and he thought the filter would be better?? But the result was very disturbing. I almost barfed on my desk when his image came up. |
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| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | maplethorpe 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your post just made me realise that as soon as the technology is ready, built-in AI upscaling will be just as ubiquitous as motion smoothing. |
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| ▲ | incone123 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Not sure if you're serious, but wouldn't it be more efficient to upscale at source and stream the result? Extra bandwidth versus a million TVs all doing the same computation. | | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but that wouldn't let them slap AI on the TV box as a selling point |
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| ▲ | internet_points 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wow, that is horrible! The 2:07 mark where AI put in some generic Rick Astley-alike for Bowie, just made me feel sick |
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| ▲ | alienbaby 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think its preferred to get this kind of smooth unreal effect for services like youtube, but not because it looks better; but rather because it compresses better for storage. Less fine detail overall helps video compression. |
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| ▲ | cercatrova 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I like upscaling and frame interpolation but as always, the TV does not have the hardware to do a good job. If you use neural network models, it works and looks a lot better without looking plastic-like. |
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| ▲ | actionfromafar 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the only way to future-proof 24 fps content is to render it as 120fps, but repeat every frame 5 times. 5 * 24 = 120fps. I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended. |
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| ▲ | jazzyjackson 6 days ago | parent [-] | | It was probably a Technology Connections video or something but I learned that film projectors actually flash each frame 3 times before progressing to the next so the light is flickering 72 times a second, while the image is only changing 24 fps. |
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| ▲ | robotbikes 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past. |
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| ▲ | jdhzzz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You will see the same thing on any online real estate listing. I spend more time wondering why it looks so weird than I do looking at what the picture is attempting to show. |
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| ▲ | yahoozoo 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s surprising how many people don’t notice when frame smoothing is on, when it looks so bad. |
