I disagree with the criticism. Experiencing the original artifacts of history, like the original unenhanced film, is still possible. And totally understand that it's vital that that is still possible. But experiencing history is not just about experiencing its old, degraded artifacts. It's also useful and enlightening to experience history as it might actually have been back then.
Of course that's partially an illusion, and it's important to be aware of that. But it's still a useful illusion. It's not for nothing that many ancient ruins have been restored so people can get a better impression of what they were actually like. With ruins this is actually a lot more questionable than with film, because you actually change the original historic artifact (which is probably why nobody repaints those ancient statues that probably used to have colour). But we do restore even ancient paintings that have been darkened by the passing of time.
With that in mind, why would we not take this opportunity to create a much clearer window to the past?
It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. People back then didn't experience reality in BW either.
I know it's silly, but I was kinda surprised the first time I saw early color photographies. I was so used to the BW or sepia old images that it had never occurred to me that, you know, people of that time did live in color too just like we do.
As an African-American it was actually useful to watch some of these colorized videos and get a better since for how African-Americans integrated into the society at that time.
Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more real and relatable.
For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded grasp of the era.
Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and allow more time for digestion.
I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old videos because of the off-speed of the recordings.
But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of history.
But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life back in those times.
These people are just doing for photos and video what historians have always done for history in general. They are filling in the blanks with their best guesses according to the information present.
As long as they aren't presenting their results as more real than the original images, I don't see it as a bad thing.
In fact, I think that the field in general needs to be more open about just how much this happens with history in general. Our understanding of the middle ages comes from evidence far less clear than these photos and yet its rare to see professionals admit how much of the field involves countless evolving, educated guesses.
Others may feel differently, but I find the field even more impressive with the understanding that historians are not seeing a clear picture.
> why would we not take this opportunity to create a much clearer window to the past.
My only concern would be that by the very nature of deep learning we are seeding it with simulated information from the current era so we could be injecting temporal biases. Imagine the process of colorizing -- imagine there was a dye color that we couldn't manufacture prior to year X. And we train colorization on a dataset that whether known to the curator or not includes this dye. Are we creating images that are a misrepresentation of the past?
On the other hand, "science" often does some pretty (I think) extreme extrapolation of things like dinosaur fossils, so maybe it shouldn't be such a big deal and it's just something we have to live with.
> experience history as it might actually have been
I think the might in the above is key. If you add new information to take the place of lost information, you're taking a risk that the new information does not accurately mimic the information that was lost. The more bits of new information you add, the more this risk increases.
I think the problem boils down to the difference between a "pattern-matching" AI filling in details by "inventing" them, or a human restorator doing essentially the same.
A human restorator most likely has more background knowledge from other sources, while the AI might fill in completely unrelated details it's seen in completely unrelated training material.
As long as there's a disclaimer about the type of restoration that's been used, both approaches are fine IMHO. The audience needs to understand that both are just "projections". Similar to how we thought for a long time that ancient greece was "marble white", when in reality it was full of colors.
Definitely have to agree with you here, as well as other posters saying it's more relatable seeing enhanced and colorized footage. To me, history becomes much more engaging and thought-provoking when presented that way. Not strictly related, but it brings to mind the 3D mapping of Pharaoh Ramesses VI Tomb [1]. Walking around the tomb in VR was very eye-opening and really made me appreciate the magnitude of people having built that so long ago.
Agreed. Laypersons and experts alike understand that fact intellectually, we believe that the past was not black-and-white and silent.
But our experience in school tells us that a scratchy, low-framerate video is probably from the past. We grow familiar with Hollywood representations of history. Not having any evidence to the contrary, we develop an alief [1] about the past that it was sepia and grainy and distant, when in truth, it was just as vibrant and real as today. No one except Calvin [2] would say that they believe that Gettysburg was black and white, but after looking at a lot of historical photos in a textbook that look like [3], if I go to Gettysburg, see [4], kneel behind the wall, and touch the stones I have a completely different level of comprehension and connection to the people who fought there that I, at least, am incapable of generating for myself from a black and white grainy photo.
I completely understand that upscaling and AI can invent things that aren't there, like Gigapixel inserting the face of Ryan Gosling in this photo [5] or Xerox copiers replacing a 6 with an 8 [6], as well as more subtle changes like assuming greyscale pants that might have used no dye at all or natural, local dyes were always indigo blue jeans.
The important question is whether or not the AI-invented, upscaled, colorized photos are closer or further from reality than what your brain invents without the aid of that tool. If you subconsciously invent a muted reality, or worse, your brain gets lazy and assumes it's only from a book and wasn't real at all, I think your ability to empathize with and comprehend the past would be better served by a 4k 60fps artist's impression.
As an avid reader of history, I tried hard to understand the points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do.
A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.
"The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there."
I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.
So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic.
I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.
I just tried watching one of the upscaled and interpolated videos, and then comparing it to the source. Please consider doing this before commenting, because in my opinion it really illuminates how silly this all is.
The colorization, of course, is lies. The upscaling and interpolation, however, is harder to argue about. Sure, if you were to freeze a frame and zoom in, you are looking at data that may not directly correspond to what was recorded. But it didn’t come out of thin air either - its upscaled and interpolated. I have read the arguments and some of the comments on this page and I still cannot figure out how this isn’t just rationalizing elitism.
Of course we need to keep the source material, but nobody is suggesting to not do that.
The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned. The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just approximation
This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep making them.
It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
>Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
This was my first thought as well. However, I can think of at least one possible disadvantage --
If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect there will be less desire for the original "source of truth" videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario: the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially manipulated to look better gets 100k.
Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future historians will only have our grossly-artificial reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
(but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent this)
I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there.
I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
Likewise, I've personally been in awe at some of the upscaled Nuclear testing footage that's cropped up on YouTube recently. It's literally awe-inspiring. So what if it's not 100% accurate?
Yeah this article presents a really tiring argument. Learning should be boring! How dare you make it more exciting. These YouTubers don't claim to be some archivists for a national museum..
That video of NYC is breathtaking. I don't care in the slightest that the colors might technically be wrong. The emotional impact of feeling like I could actually be standing on that street is genuinely amazing.
Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
"...a better idea of what things really looked like..."
But that's the problem. Is it what things really looked like?
I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.
Historians fill in gaps from partial information about what happened in the past all the time. I see this as no different then recreating a scene based on an old video.
One of the most eye opening videos for me was that sky train that ran through a city. Germany I think? Such high quality I could really begin to feel what that era was like in some ways.
This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.
I think we're also jaded now, in that all expectation that a photo is a totally truthful artifact produced by a physical process has long since been eroded. Phone camera software tries to create the 'best' image. When the Bay Area had orange skies, everyone noted how their phone cameras were auto-balancing out the orange. Zoom touches up your face. Yesterday's Pixel announcements emphasized changing lighting after a photo is taken. You kind of have to go out of your way to see a recent photo which _isn't_ manipulated in some content-informed way.
So when we see an upscaled, colorized image ... maybe it's not an accurate reflection of the past. But we're no longer used to seeing an accurate reflection of the present, so of course we don't balk at the plausible-but-perhaps-mistaken color choices or interpolations.
Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue -
If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today.
Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it."
Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
From the article...:
"That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
"For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.
This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.
> What information has this person added? What have they taken away?
That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was there originally and what was added through interpretation and extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's available in audio libraries mostly.
But it is not just the present-day processing of the material; as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them) had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.
> Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought.
Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
> Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
This is the fault of the journalist, not the historians. My wife is a history professor. Trust me when I say that historians don't hold opinions just for the sake of it.
This is a manufactured controversy. There's always some people opposed to anything. It's a non-story to moderate something that is just far too awesome: a portal into the past.
> “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,”
> “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
I don't find either of these stances intuitive, but the article doesn't help. A simple follow up question of "why?" would have gone a long way. The technology is clearly explained -- there is interpolation happening -- but clearly the opinions expressed by these historians are philosophical in nature. It's worth having the discussion but the article doesn't go far enough, IMHO.
These academics seem to think they have some ownership of history because they study it. And it seems they’d rather historical content rot in an irrelevant pile than be accessible. All of this with an argument that “something” is lost by upscaling, without any real elaboration as to what is actually lost.
I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project digitizing and archiving their collections.
When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up being important. For something like an album, you don't just have the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes, and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way?
When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way, you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result, it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone.
It's not a matter of "most accurate" representation of a moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in time.
The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.
AI sometimes adds things which were not present in the original scene. For example some upscaling algorithms love to draw tiny glasses. While I don’t see much harm in making some scenes more fun for people, it’s important to keep original sources, because they are ultimate truth, not algorithm outputs. And there’s danger that some people will destroy originals thinking that they are inferior.
It's the artifice of presentation that gets me. The color's not real, the filled in scratches aren't real, and once upon a time a photographer sat and composed the shot in the first place. It's an artist illustration of history. Which is fine, those are important to have. But it's too easy to forget that it's not reality.
As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.
"He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they'd started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they'd slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin." - William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)
My cynical take is that these historians’ objections stem from jealousy: they lack the ability or means to create these restorations, and are thus envious that the upscaled versions are receiving more attention than the originals ever did.
I really enjoy video from that time period for one particular reason: no cell phones. Seeing people walk not hunched over anything.
One of my favorite music videos (of sorts) is just a song over what appears to be a Mountain Dew street team passing out free soda on a random night outside bars, while filming their efforts.
Apologies in advance, as they definitely focus on a particular gender, but it's still an interesting slice of life in the mid 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng
[+] [-] mcv|5 years ago|reply
Of course that's partially an illusion, and it's important to be aware of that. But it's still a useful illusion. It's not for nothing that many ancient ruins have been restored so people can get a better impression of what they were actually like. With ruins this is actually a lot more questionable than with film, because you actually change the original historic artifact (which is probably why nobody repaints those ancient statues that probably used to have colour). But we do restore even ancient paintings that have been darkened by the passing of time.
With that in mind, why would we not take this opportunity to create a much clearer window to the past?
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
I know it's silly, but I was kinda surprised the first time I saw early color photographies. I was so used to the BW or sepia old images that it had never occurred to me that, you know, people of that time did live in color too just like we do.
See these images from the early 20th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rgb-compose-Alim_Khan.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography#/media/File:...
[+] [-] ijidak|5 years ago|reply
Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more real and relatable.
For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded grasp of the era.
Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and allow more time for digestion.
I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old videos because of the off-speed of the recordings.
But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of history.
But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life back in those times.
Btw, this is the video I watched: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
[+] [-] asperous|5 years ago|reply
At least this upscaling "medium" is tied directly to what was captured at the time.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|5 years ago|reply
The more illusions the better, I say. Can't wait for the VR recreation of famous battles WW2 battles extrapolated from grainy footage.
[+] [-] jeffalyanak|5 years ago|reply
As long as they aren't presenting their results as more real than the original images, I don't see it as a bad thing.
In fact, I think that the field in general needs to be more open about just how much this happens with history in general. Our understanding of the middle ages comes from evidence far less clear than these photos and yet its rare to see professionals admit how much of the field involves countless evolving, educated guesses.
Others may feel differently, but I find the field even more impressive with the understanding that historians are not seeing a clear picture.
[+] [-] dnautics|5 years ago|reply
My only concern would be that by the very nature of deep learning we are seeding it with simulated information from the current era so we could be injecting temporal biases. Imagine the process of colorizing -- imagine there was a dye color that we couldn't manufacture prior to year X. And we train colorization on a dataset that whether known to the curator or not includes this dye. Are we creating images that are a misrepresentation of the past?
On the other hand, "science" often does some pretty (I think) extreme extrapolation of things like dinosaur fossils, so maybe it shouldn't be such a big deal and it's just something we have to live with.
[+] [-] xenocyon|5 years ago|reply
I think the might in the above is key. If you add new information to take the place of lost information, you're taking a risk that the new information does not accurately mimic the information that was lost. The more bits of new information you add, the more this risk increases.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flohofwoe|5 years ago|reply
A human restorator most likely has more background knowledge from other sources, while the AI might fill in completely unrelated details it's seen in completely unrelated training material.
As long as there's a disclaimer about the type of restoration that's been used, both approaches are fine IMHO. The audience needs to understand that both are just "projections". Similar to how we thought for a long time that ancient greece was "marble white", when in reality it was full of colors.
[+] [-] asxd|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467292
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|5 years ago|reply
But our experience in school tells us that a scratchy, low-framerate video is probably from the past. We grow familiar with Hollywood representations of history. Not having any evidence to the contrary, we develop an alief [1] about the past that it was sepia and grainy and distant, when in truth, it was just as vibrant and real as today. No one except Calvin [2] would say that they believe that Gettysburg was black and white, but after looking at a lot of historical photos in a textbook that look like [3], if I go to Gettysburg, see [4], kneel behind the wall, and touch the stones I have a completely different level of comprehension and connection to the people who fought there that I, at least, am incapable of generating for myself from a black and white grainy photo.
I completely understand that upscaling and AI can invent things that aren't there, like Gigapixel inserting the face of Ryan Gosling in this photo [5] or Xerox copiers replacing a 6 with an 8 [6], as well as more subtle changes like assuming greyscale pants that might have used no dye at all or natural, local dyes were always indigo blue jeans.
The important question is whether or not the AI-invented, upscaled, colorized photos are closer or further from reality than what your brain invents without the aid of that tool. If you subconsciously invent a muted reality, or worse, your brain gets lazy and assumes it's only from a book and wasn't real at all, I think your ability to empathize with and comprehend the past would be better served by a 4k 60fps artist's impression.
[1]: http://www.pgrim.org/philosophersannual/pa28articles/gendler...
[2]: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/10/29
[3]: https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/styles/gall...
[4]: https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/styles/gall...
[5]: https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...
[6]: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...
[+] [-] kbuchanan|5 years ago|reply
A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.
[+] [-] hedberg10|5 years ago|reply
I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.
So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic.
I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.
[+] [-] jchw|5 years ago|reply
4K: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
Original: https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0
The colorization, of course, is lies. The upscaling and interpolation, however, is harder to argue about. Sure, if you were to freeze a frame and zoom in, you are looking at data that may not directly correspond to what was recorded. But it didn’t come out of thin air either - its upscaled and interpolated. I have read the arguments and some of the comments on this page and I still cannot figure out how this isn’t just rationalizing elitism.
Of course we need to keep the source material, but nobody is suggesting to not do that.
[+] [-] rkachowski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code4tee|5 years ago|reply
It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|5 years ago|reply
If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect there will be less desire for the original "source of truth" videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario: the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially manipulated to look better gets 100k.
Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future historians will only have our grossly-artificial reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
(but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent this)
[+] [-] snowwrestler|5 years ago|reply
It's not, though. It's a great way to get an idea of what a few people today think things looked like.
Enjoying the videos is fine, but it's not great to think they are more accurate just because they look better.
[+] [-] mnl|5 years ago|reply
I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
[+] [-] detritus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|5 years ago|reply
Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
10/10 best possible ad for these services.
[+] [-] mcguire|5 years ago|reply
But that's the problem. Is it what things really looked like?
I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.
[+] [-] cooljacob204|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 years ago|reply
https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg
Erm, not reconstruction ;-)
[+] [-] abeppu|5 years ago|reply
So when we see an upscaled, colorized image ... maybe it's not an accurate reflection of the past. But we're no longer used to seeing an accurate reflection of the present, so of course we don't balk at the plausible-but-perhaps-mistaken color choices or interpolations.
[+] [-] rootsudo|5 years ago|reply
If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today.
Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it."
Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's.
From the article...:
"That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage.
"For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
[+] [-] tgv|5 years ago|reply
This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?
So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.
And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|5 years ago|reply
That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was there originally and what was added through interpretation and extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's available in audio libraries mostly.
But it is not just the present-day processing of the material; as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them) had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.
[+] [-] mannykannot|5 years ago|reply
And viewing old film at the wrong speed is the opposite of an authentic experience.
[+] [-] claudeganon|5 years ago|reply
Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|5 years ago|reply
It isn't.
1) historians have no power over random people colorizing, upscaling and frame interpolating some old videos for fun
2) it's not "historians", it's actually a tiny minority of vocal historians who want this to be a problem
[+] [-] fao_|5 years ago|reply
http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-8900-ex :)
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleMeat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turdnagel|5 years ago|reply
> “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.”
I don't find either of these stances intuitive, but the article doesn't help. A simple follow up question of "why?" would have gone a long way. The technology is clearly explained -- there is interpolation happening -- but clearly the opinions expressed by these historians are philosophical in nature. It's worth having the discussion but the article doesn't go far enough, IMHO.
[+] [-] slx26|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SirensOfTitan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|5 years ago|reply
When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up being important. For something like an album, you don't just have the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes, and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way?
When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way, you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result, it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone.
It's not a matter of "most accurate" representation of a moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in time.
The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finnthehuman|5 years ago|reply
As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.
[+] [-] Swayworn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MontyCarloHall|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|5 years ago|reply
One of my favorite music videos (of sorts) is just a song over what appears to be a Mountain Dew street team passing out free soda on a random night outside bars, while filming their efforts.
Apologies in advance, as they definitely focus on a particular gender, but it's still an interesting slice of life in the mid 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng