Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/05/beautiful-footage-of-parisian.html
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Charming. Must go seek more of it.
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Restore it, fine.
But colorize? Why?
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Everyone seems to be wearing white shirts. The rich had new shirts, but people who wore second-hand shirts dyed the pink, cream, or light blue. Most of these come out as looking white, but I remember a paper where a scan of old plates managed to establish the colours in uniform-looking group photos from the fringing at the edges from chromatic aberration (can’t find it now, sorry).
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I would love to see this footage get the same treatment of the frame rate that Peter Jackson gave the WWI footage in They Shall Not Grow Old. It gave those shots a real immediacy that old-timey hand-cranked footage, for all its wonderful dreamlike character, lacks.
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If I could time travel, that would be my first stop.
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This is New York, but look to the upper-left quadrant to see R2D2 crossing the street at 48 seconds (I cued the time for you)…
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Totally agree. I have no room for colorized anything.
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Normally I’d agree, where a corruption of artistic intent is involved. But I make exceptions for documentary footage, where the goal is usually to accurately convey the event. Educated-guess-driven colorization gets us that much closer to real experience. (ETA: Also see e.g. GulliverFoyle’s post)
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I’m time traveling right now.
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I just want to throw this out there — color film/video/digital is just as unnatural as black and white.
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I prefer sepia myself.
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That is an amazing film, and the excellent work in getting the frame rates right has a lot to do with it. This video is fairly well done, though. It’s a lot better than anything you could see even a few years ago, when the transfers were pretty much universally done at frame rates that were obviously far too fast.
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So this means that you don’t ever get to time travel; otherwise we’d see you photobombing this footage sorry, dude. Meanwhile, I’m off lurking on the grass knoll in the Zapruder film.
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I think I saw someone mouthing “I’m photobombing RIGHT NOW” during the market scene.
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Roger that!
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Colorizing can make an old movie easier to watch, because objects stand out more. So it has it’s place. If a movie is colorized well, the luminosity channel should not change from the b&w version, so turning off the color would be trivial if you don’t want to see them.
Also, good research into the correct colors can give people more of an idea what that time actually looked like.
This movie was colorized quite badly though.
if not more so
The audio. I’m never sure about superimposed sounds effects on old film.
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