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Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

(waxy.org)
363 points jay_kyburz | 23 comments | 26 Aug 25 04:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.429s | source | bottom
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ulrikrasmussen ◴[26 Aug 25 06:15 UTC] No.45022875[source]▶
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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1. brap ◴[26 Aug 25 07:14 UTC] No.45023284[source]▶
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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2. chneu ◴[26 Aug 25 07:49 UTC] No.45023511[source]▶
It also has to do with how basically everything is filmed for Netflix/streaming nowadays.
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3. ulrikrasmussen ◴[26 Aug 25 08:08 UTC] No.45023660[source]▶
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.
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4. jay_kyburz ◴[26 Aug 25 08:24 UTC] No.45023794[source]▶
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.
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5. ulrikrasmussen ◴[26 Aug 25 08:38 UTC] No.45023894{3}[source]▶
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 :).
6. topranks ◴[26 Aug 25 08:47 UTC] No.45023958[source]▶
Not really sure I get why that would be a factor
7. spacechild1 ◴[26 Aug 25 08:48 UTC] No.45023967[source]▶
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.
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8. pja ◴[26 Aug 25 08:49 UTC] No.45023980{3}[source]▶
> 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.

9. Angostura ◴[26 Aug 25 09:06 UTC] No.45024106[source]▶
I hope you waited until they were out of the room and turned it off in settings?
10. agumonkey ◴[26 Aug 25 09:12 UTC] No.45024140[source]▶
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.
11. nathan_compton ◴[26 Aug 25 09:59 UTC] No.45024430{3}[source]▶
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.

12. bbarnett ◴[26 Aug 25 10:12 UTC] No.45024527[source]▶
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.

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13. pratnala ◴[26 Aug 25 10:56 UTC] No.45024852{3}[source]▶
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.
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14. BeFlatXIII ◴[26 Aug 25 11:16 UTC] No.45025001[source]▶
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.
15. incone123 ◴[26 Aug 25 11:48 UTC] No.45025242{4}[source]▶
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_.
16. layer8 ◴[26 Aug 25 11:59 UTC] No.45025319{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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17. bbarnett ◴[26 Aug 25 12:46 UTC] No.45025793{4}[source]▶
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.

18. HelloMcFly ◴[26 Aug 25 12:52 UTC] No.45025863{3}[source]▶
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...
19. SturgeonsLaw ◴[26 Aug 25 12:55 UTC] No.45025897{4}[source]▶
It's already the world we live in
20. whycome ◴[26 Aug 25 12:56 UTC] No.45025901{3}[source]▶
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?!
21. rasz ◴[26 Aug 25 12:57 UTC] No.45025920[source]▶
>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.

22. loudmax ◴[26 Aug 25 12:59 UTC] No.45025938[source]▶
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.

23. mongol ◴[26 Aug 25 14:07 UTC] No.45026782[source]▶
That is a fantastic movie, btw