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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.