Originally published at: Captivating first-person video from a San Francisco cable car in the 1960s | Boing Boing
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I suppose that simply restoring the film (not video, film) wasn’t good enough.
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Jack and Neal zipping by in the black car at the 2:37 mark…
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All those changes make it look really unreal or dreamlike, it’s weird. Nothing really stays in focus or and details keep shifting. Reminds me of the movie Waking Life.
(Warning: Alex Jones is briefly featured in the movie, from before everyone realized just how unhinged and toxic he was…)
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This is NOT a “restoration”. Restoration would imply removing dust and scratches, adjusting contrast to a faded image, etc. Adding fake color through an AI algorithm that guesses what colors things might have been, and interpreting extra frames, is just making up new information. It looks terrible and from a historical point of view it’s a lie.
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Just to pile on, the original source for this work is low res, compressed, and appears to come from an interlaced video. This really stacks the odds against it, and I think a simple re-scan of the actual original film would probably be far better.
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I came here to say all the same things as @hungrylens, @apalatn, and @GagHalfrunt.
This is a truly awful “restoration”. The presumably AI-powered interpolation takes the original’s sense of being a slice of reality and turns it into something more like a fever dream.
We watch movies in 24fps all the time and don’t perceive the relatively low frame rate as problematic. Why do we need to boost old films to 60fps?
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I’m on Nob Hill almost every day and it’s amazing how little it has changed. The cars and the way people dressed and the store names are different but that’s about it.
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I wanted to jump off the trolley and just wander around the city on a beautiful sunny day. Spied a few vintage cars I want too.
Another reason why this “restoration” is pointless is that San Francisco’s cable cars still exist and haven’t changed. If you want an HD video of them in 60fps you can go and make one yourself. If you want to see what San Francisco looked like in the 1960s, there are real colour photographs and colour films.
I’m going to stand up for the NASS people. At the outset let me agree that these films aren’t “restorations.” That’s a poor choice of words. “Re-creations” perhaps, or simply “colorizations.” I’ll also agree that some processes like upping the frame rate seem unnecessary.
However the overall project is great. Especially their reworking of black-and-white footage from the 30s through the 50s. We have always lived in a color world (despite what Calvin’s dad said) and by cleaning, colorizing, and adding audio to this footage NASS are just trying to give us a sense of what it may have felt like wandering these streets or riding these cars. They say upfront that the colors and sounds are guesswork. That would make a difference if these videos were presented as historically-accurate records, but less so in an attempt to create an ambience. On that level it works for me.
AI colorization is definitely hit and miss. It’s amazing, though, how much the process has improved in the last half-decade. Many of the new videos do have a dreamlike quality, overly sharp or overly soft, but what the heck. Reworking these videos is much like sampling dead musicians’ music or re-mixing Beatles songs. Not to everyone’s taste, but equally valid.
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I love looking at things like this for the same reason I enjoy old tv shows like Adam-12. You can see what it was like at that moment in time in context. Seeing the cars moving or old buildings and stores or advertising. Sure there are quality photos of the era but seeing it moving with people interacting is awesome.
As far as the quality, looked good to me, both the original and the newer version. Of course I’m not looking at the technical stuff, I’m looking at the stuff.
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I had the same observation. I spent most of the time looking for and geeking out on classic 40s, 50s, and 60s cars.
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