In reply to jwz.

I hadn't seen that "Angels With Attitude" post before and I gasped out loud in horror when I saw those images.

In reply to CSL3.

Ugh... I was in the Mission yesterday and walked past Big Mouth Burger on 24th. The TV inside (and yes, I know how much jwz hates TVs in restaurants) was running YouTube videos on AutoPlay. I happened to look in as they were playing Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"... with the TV's motion-smoothing turned on. 😡

Resisted the urge to run inside and scream:

In reply to Kyzer.

I was going to say, back in the day when we* did crappy upscaling it at least didn't require a small freshwater lake to do it...

*At one point I worked for a company that was trying very hard to sell an, uh, upscale upscaler to make DVDs look better on HDTVs for those with a few k to drop. It didn't work out as a product, but at least its power budget was sane.

Have you seen this Jaime?

Restoration from a 1987 VHS recording (of The Cure):

https://youtu.be/ks1wE_NXWv8

It's not "modern iPhone video" quality - but I'm astounded at how much detail is "hiding" in 1980s VHS recordings, check out the detail of his face and hair in some of the full headshot closeups.

Using this: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki

It seems to be a super neat trick - you tap into the signal coming out of the heads of a VCR, then digitally process that signal.

From the GitHub Readme:

Summary

Thanks to a flexible range of low-cost analogue to digital converter options direct digitisation and archival of many magnetic analogue media formats can be done not only properly, but affordably with original FM RF (Frequency Modulated Radio Frequency) signals being captured and preserved in the digital file realm in generic PCM samples.

This is dubbed as the "FM RF Archival" method.

Unlike limited baked-in standard S-Video/Composite, or "baseband" video & audio capture, FM RF capture allows the original tape signals to be stored making a true digital master copy of your analogue media, thus removing the need for expensive time base corrector or even working physical players in the future.

The decode family of tools brings you a state of the art archival toolchain to make use of these FM RF archives today!

In reply to pedro.

Well goddamn it, I hadn't even noticed it before. On Angel it's not so bad since the whole thing is gritty and washed out to begin with, but it really fucks with Protection in a way I can't un-see.

In reply to CSL3.

We call that "soap opera mode."

Actually, this could be really cool in this video specifically if each version of Kylie and the various background actors showed generational copying loss and you had them all side by side dodging traffic and ladders and such, some fuzzier or more be-fingered than others.

Then again, I liked the intro to Marvel's Secret Invasion (which was otherwise trash) because use of generative AI crap did a good job of evoking dread and kept changing appearance.

In reply to Kyzer.

The "food museum" line is from Jason Scott, and I love it so.

In reply to hokid.

I did get rid of all of my old SD DVDs, after ripping the rare ones, but now I wish I had done so in slightly higher quality.

In photography, especially competitions, upscaling chicanery like this gets called out and ridiculed.  This follows a long history of poo-pooing any sort of excessive digital processing like too much sharpening, turning saturation up to eleven, or cartoonish HDR.

I recently wanted to show Björks "All is full of love" from Chris Cunningham. All HD versions are AI upscaled shit. The original in Björks channel, for some unfathomable reason, is age restricted and requires sign-in. You can't make this shit up. Had to rip my old DVD... never get rid of your old physical media.

In reply to MattyJ.

... it's all about the training data...

In reply to Baggypants.

Makes sense.

Especially since they definitely add AI-audio re-dubs to every vidro, unless the channel-owner actively turns it off (meaning that the majority of channel-owners have re-dubbed videos, bit don't even realise it).

Using the word correctly would requre equipment, phone calls, physically searching, you know: work. Easier to redefine the word...

In reply to Kyzer.

labels get to "replace" the canonical video

Which is rather absurd. YouTube could add the higher pixel count variants without removing the former. It's not like anyone could see the analytics and notice that people prefer the originals.

In reply to MattyJ.

That's just the rider...

In reply to bazzargh.

You can't opt out of it. I've watched enough shorts I guess to see some creators complain (some bitterly) about it.

You have my condolences.

Tom Scott cried a tear for Smash Mouth's All Star when he covered the "4k remaster" trend of 2019. His conclusion: "if you're going to change the historical record... it does seem a terrible option to make it worse"

And at least back then they fucked up the videos traditionally with a quick decomb/rescale/sharpen pass, rather than hallucinate the extra detail.

The main issue is that the labels get to "replace" the canonical video with another one, so they keep their view counts but you lose the better-quality original. But as you said some time ago, YouTube isn't an archive in the same way a supermarket isn't a food museum.

Doesn't Youtube just splat their own AI filters on peoples videos without asking anyway? There was a thing about it.

In reply to pedro.

Infuriating.

Especially since the upscaling results in such worse images. If you just did a double-and-average upscale it would have looked better than the unsharp-mask push-sharpness mess that this "AI" crap comes up with. It's incompetent. It's a "too much Photoshop for you" level of amateurism.

It all comes out looking like Angels With Attitude.

This reminds me of the disappointment I had when I realized the sad state of the videos on the Massive Attack official channel (see, there's even a Michel Gondry connection). I was all excited when I realized that they were all in HD now, so I thought I would update all my dowloaded collection of badly encoded 480p videos with shiny new HD ones, which surely the label lovingly remastered from the original tapes.

Ha ha ha, no. The "remaster" consisted of running the same badly encoded 480p originals through an AI upscaler and they look like absolute shit. AI upscalers are useful but they're not magic, you can't ask them to turn 480p into 4K (well you can, but the result will be ... that)

next target, the music 😭

In reply to CSL3.

But in the ai enhanced one you can see the horse's asshole.

At least when I saw the 4K "remaster" of インターステラ5555「intāsutera fō faibu; "Four Five"」aka Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem at the New Parkway, they had the decency to give everyone in the audience a token for a free movie, after the abomination that was the A"I" upscaling mauling of that. Moreover, I own it on BluRay, before that BS had been applied too (though I think I read somewhere the source material was just 720p and the original prints are all MIA and since Leiji Matsumoto passed away, chances of finding that needle in a haystack of needles is going to be more or less impossible if it ever existed).

There's so much garbage in the realms of "remastering" money grabs; but it's been that way since the 20th century and "colorization" BS too. ;(

In reply to Captain Kirk.

I really do mean dorks using AI. Not stuff like 4k77.

In reply to mhoye.

For the curious: around 0:10, gold-on-blue sign coming in from the left, second from the top

Related: “We’re being lied to about 4K.”

Found this recently and enjoyed the revealing details.

https://youtu.be/yN0H_WfWOp4?si=NyA8f0m2afIOEGdo

In reply to owlboy.

Please, don't insult the fan editions like that. Fans usually have respect for the source material, and their audience.

This has real shades of that spanish fresco that was "fixed." This person is barely recognizable /as a person/ in the "Full HD remastered" version.

Watching the e in “Jupe” chomping like a Pac-Man.