The most grotesque videos on YouTube fit into a specific category. It consists of old footage run through an AI upscaler. Sometimes the videos are colorized, sometimes they’re interpolated to 60 frames per second. Uniformly they look atrocious, smeary, and garish, unless you don’t know what a film is supposed to look like. Increasingly that’s a lot of people, including, evidently, the people responsible for the latest transfers of the movie True Lies and to a lesser extent Aliens, The Abyss, and Titanic.

Right off the bat – this is a shit article. The purpose of those reconstructions isn’t to “make film look good.” It’s an exercise in lifting data from a limited source and then feeding it through a process to generate data from nothing. No one is trying to preserve film. In fact, those old cameras are a timing tragedy and a lot of time the film is fed too slow or too fast because the clock timing on those ancient cameras was wind-up-mechanical and inaccurate as fuck.

This author is an idiot and the article is stupid.