“What makes all of this worse is that True Lies, […], did not need to be shoved through the AI wringer. […] Park Road Post had a recent 4k scan of True Lies from the original camera negative. Park Road Post’s own website claims they have a Lasergraphics Director 10K film scanner on the premises. So what is the purpose of adding AI to this mix? Why do that to a perfectly fine-looking film?”

This part makes me think of the loudness war. Editors will overuse digital tools that degrades the original media if it “pops” more to the average public. More and more and more.

Nothing undermines an argument from “look at this missing detail!” like exclusively sharing 480p images.

Don’t want to host 4K screenshots? Crop, dude. Show off the bits you’re talking about. Maybe with a comparison to a higher-end DVD transfer?

This article would benefit immensely from some side by side comparisons, and an actual breakdown of the details the AI altered versions get wrong.

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.