20 ms·

YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historians want them to stop

242 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

MontyCarloHall 6y ago
My cynical take is that these historians’ objections stem from jealousy: they lack the ability or means to create these restorations, and are thus envious that the upscaled versions are receiving more attention than the originals ever did.
- Traster 6y ago
  My cynical take is that there are no historians saying that we shouldn't upscale images. There are historians who are warning that lots of the information in the upscaled images are ahistorical (blue jeans in the 1910s) so people should view this images as interesting but not accurate views of history. The journalist is the only one saying anyone should stop anything. None of the historians in the article ever say the youtubers should stop. They're just saying pretty much: "Hey, history cares about the context and accuracy of sources and these images are worse sources than the originals, they're good entertainment but bad historical sources". Pump it through a journalist and this is what you get. It's at this point I make some ironic point about how the journalist is using his neural net to upscale the story, inserting innaccurate information to the picture to create a more entertaining piece than the underlying facts.
varrock 6y ago
This is the first time I am seeing these remarkable videos. I cannot tell you why, but I am feeling awfully emotional while watching them. It cannot be nostalgia, as I wasn't there during the recordings of these videos, so I'm not sure what it could be.
SirensOfTitan 6y ago
These academics seem to think they have some ownership of history because they study it. And it seems they’d rather historical content rot in an irrelevant pile than be accessible. All of this with an argument that “something” is lost by upscaling, without any real elaboration as to what is actually lost.
ludamad 6y ago
I don't get this sentiment personally - I found that I struggled less to imagine myself there with the "enhancements"
jackric 6y ago
This feels like clickbaity story generation - cool new tech doing something many enjoy.... not enough tension... go and find a handful of grumpy people who don't concur
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Not even. The historians aren't even grumpy. Wired is just trying to create drama.
paulcole 6y ago
Reminds me of the vinyl people. “It sounds warmer!”
rootsudo 6y ago
Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue - If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today. Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it." Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's. From the article...: "That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage. "For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”
- claudeganon 6y ago
  > Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
  - gadders 6y ago
    I thought it was silly as well. But then I bought a copy of The Colour of Time [1]. I don't know why it makes a difference, but it definitely does (at least for me). Obviously, your mileage may vary. [1] https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-history-of-the-world-1850-1960/ https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-histo...
slx26 6y ago
I'd like to see an actual survey with historians voting whether they oppose this or not. I just can't believe the headline.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  "historians" just means "at least 2 of them".
  - spiderfarmer 6y ago
    And even those 2 don't have any real arguments, just opinions. They really sound like they're trying to say something profound while they stroke their chin. "Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference." It's just an opinion. I can say the complete opposite and the opinion sounds just as valid: "Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it decreases the gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it removes differences."
code4tee 6y ago
This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep making them. It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
- detritus 6y ago
  Likewise, I've personally been in awe at some of the upscaled Nuclear testing footage that's cropped up on YouTube recently. It's literally awe-inspiring. So what if it's not 100% accurate?
  - mcguire 6y ago
    You could likely use modern digital techniques to make up some new testing footage that is even more awe-inspiring. So what if it's 100% inaccurate?
    - detritus 6y ago
      I guess because it's known that the other is 95% truth vs. 95% fiction?
- mnl 6y ago
  I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there. I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
growlist 6y ago
'“The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,” says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy.' Why do these academics always want to complicate things and dictate how we feel? Nobody put them in charge! '“There's something that's gained, but there's also something that's lost,” says Mark-FitzGerald. “And I think we need to have a conversation about what both of those things are.”' I'm guessing that would be a pretty one-way 'conversation'. Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. It's charming to think of them fooling around in the garden with new technology, 132 years ago this month.
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  > we need to have a conversation I'm not sure how they envisage such a "conversation" (whatever that means in this context) taking place.
- antientropic 6y ago
  They're not dictating anything. They're giving their opinion. Just as you are. > Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. I mean, isn't that exactly the issue that the critics are pointing out? The algorithm is inserting something - the behaviour of people - into the source material that may not have been there. It may be biased towards falsely making the past look like the present because that's what the algorithm has been trained on.
  - growlist 6y ago
    I really don't think it added the smiles etc.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Old men yelling at clouds. The whole thing is ridiculous, it’s not like the old films were captured in 1080p or something, it’s an analog medium. Yes you can argue that the colorized version is not a historical document. Does it matter? Neither is a movie about history.
- vmh1928 6y ago
  Old men yelling? For a second I thought you were commenting on the presidential debate.
hedberg10 6y ago
"The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there." I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time. So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic. I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  People didn't look like books either, and didn't look like pottery/statue fragments with the paint washed off, but historians aren't trying to ban that. There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in live performance.
  - djaque 6y ago
    I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that. I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white. My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.
Waterluvian 6y ago
One of the most eye opening videos for me was that sky train that ran through a city. Germany I think? Such high quality I could really begin to feel what that era was like in some ways. This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  The Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. Also, 'runs' not 'ran'. It's still there in daily use.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Modern-quality full-colour fairly-high-def (1080p) video reconstruction: https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg Erm, not reconstruction ;-)
vbezhenar 6y ago
AI sometimes adds things which were not present in the original scene. For example some upscaling algorithms love to draw tiny glasses. While I don’t see much harm in making some scenes more fun for people, it’s important to keep original sources, because they are ultimate truth, not algorithm outputs. And there’s danger that some people will destroy originals thinking that they are inferior.
- ludamad 6y ago
  I don't think so. I think eventually we would have an ensemble of restorations with different flairs, like how people see movies based on history almost
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  The originals are not ultimate truth. They are messy evidence.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    How true! Take the original Star Trek. Its color scheme is 'iconic' now but at the time most people watched it in black and white. They specifically picked those colors to look decent on the semi new color TV's but just as importantly to not smear out into the background on black and white TV's. Gilligans island was similar.
antoniuschan99 6y ago
This along with the ‘wandering’ videos are seemingly getting popular on youtube. Eg nippon wandering tv, rambalac. These colorized + hd historical videos are super fascinating. Love how AI has been the driving force for towards creating these
nsonha 6y ago
what are they even on about? As if people will watch these videos and spread some conspiracy theory about how the tree was greener in the past?
finnthehuman 6y ago
It's the artifice of presentation that gets me. The color's not real, the filled in scratches aren't real, and once upon a time a photographer sat and composed the shot in the first place. It's an artist illustration of history. Which is fine, those are important to have. But it's too easy to forget that it's not reality. As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.
talentedcoin 6y ago
It might not be to everyone’s taste but it’s impressive work. Why do these particular academic historians not trust people to understand the limitations of this? To me this is not dissimilar from translating a book from an ancient language - there are problems of bias and so on, but why not make good things a little more accessible? Nothing wrong with something that sparks the imagination.
- smusamashah 6y ago
  There are shades of green, brown, red, but not exactly and it doesn't stick or stay, just the way I remember colors in dreams. They are colorful, but I can not exactly recall vividly.
LockAndLol 6y ago
You can find this phenomenon of self-appointed protectors of values everywhere: the clergy, rap purists, rustaceans, Apple users... in their echo chambers they are always right and only they know how things should be done. If you somehow have the misfortune of treading upon their proverbial holy turf and doing something they consider against their teachings... boy will they get pissed. Especially if you make their world more understandable to those not in the know, then you're immediately a problem. This sounds like just another form of gatekeeping.
pjc50 6y ago
So what is the state of the art in auto upscaling and detail re- imagining? There's a lot of 240p VHS transfer music videos on youtube I'd like to see less bad versions of without regards to accuracy.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Here's an.. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkDUObv5iIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkDUObv5iIU Original: http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%2521+DOOR+STUCK%2521.mp4 http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%252...
renewiltord 6y ago
This is a manufactured controversy. There's always some people opposed to anything. It's a non-story to moderate something that is just far too awesome: a portal into the past.
kbuchanan 6y ago
As an avid reader of history, I tried hard to understand the points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do. A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.
- ev1 6y ago
  Note: My opinion is that I am neutral/do not like or dislike historical media, I am not a historian, but I do dislike those awful Twitter spammers that steal random "historical image of the day", often with a completely wrong caption, stolen content, no sourcing, and then post affiliate links all over them. I have previously done professional work with ML/AI. -- I can kind of understand this if it was made very obvious that it was "AI generated"; that is, the colours are totally invented and made out of thin air, that spaces might be filled in with random computer generated content to support upscaling and make it look better. I don't want a machine-generated random filler content to be repurposed for "oh, here is a source video for the skin colour of specific people back in the day" or "you see those marks in the corner (that didn't exist in the original source), those are hieroglyphs" AI does not mean you magically get colour restored to an image that did not have any in the first place, it is invented, machine created content that potentially has absolutely zero bearing on the real world. Additionally, stuff like this ends up ranking higher than the original source content; preference is given to HD+ videos in search, "viral cool colourised version of the past" on instagram will rank higher than "actual history"; it is potentially a large problem when you have people that don't actually know how to separate genuine primary source vs computer generated content.
- croes 6y ago
  The problem is the user doesn't know which information is accurate and which just an estimation of the software. It's a fake accuracy.
  - kzrdude 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
I strongly disagree with these historians, for historical reasons. Our limited recordings of the recent past make it hard for us to understand that it wasn’t that long ago and things weren’t that and people weren’t that different. By 1911, the railroad I used to get to from Westchester NY to Manhattan was already electrified, thanks to an investment from JP Morgan, where my brother works today. By 1910 the subway line running down Lexington Ave I’d take all the time had already been built. So had the Grand Central Post Office, on top of which the office building I used to work at was later built. By 1910, all of Manhattan had been electrified for decades, and you had electric refrigerators and curling irons and stoves. By 1910, vaccines had been developed and the first antibiotics were coming out. It’s important not to forget how close in time we are to history. Imagine if, instead of always seeing black and white pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., people saw him in 4K color. Maybe they’d remember he was shot for his civil rights activism when Bill Gates was already a teenager, just a couple of heads before Unix and C.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
outworlder 6y ago
I've never seen a more 'academic' discussion. So people are 'enhancing' videos and photos. Just like we've been doing for decades. Only the process was manual and labor-intensive. And usually NOT performed by historians. As long as we don't destroy the originals, I can't see why there's even a debate. Every medium captures an interpretation of reality, they are not reality itself.
rkachowski 6y ago
The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned. The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just approximation
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The sky did not literally look like that either, when Van Gogh painted it. You are missing the point.
  - rkachowski 6y ago
    I don't understand, van gogh made art in his own style whilst these films and photos attempted to document and capture the state of the world
    - shard 6y ago
      Photographers and filmmakers also make art in their own style. There is no such thing as a perfect representation of the world on film: they are compressing the dynamic range and adjusting the color/brightness profiles through the film they use, the exposure settings and any added filters on the camera, the development process for the film (chemicals, timing, pushing/pulling), the paper for the print (photography) or the film for the positive print (movies), the dodging/burning of the print, and others. It's not about correcting the image to match what their eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get their message across.
      - rkachowski 6y ago
        I totally in no way meant to imply that camerawork has somehow less artistic value than any other medium, but just as pencil and paper can be used to produce technical drawings of architecture and field sketches to outline geography, documentary footage can be recorded with the primary intent of capturing a scene and setting before rendering a creative work.
awhitby 6y ago
I wonder if it is possible - if not practical - to extract color information from processed black and white film negatives. It seems plausible that there are trace chemical imperfections in the film medium, and these might react differently to different wavelengths, so that if you could inspect the image at a molecular level you could make pretty good guesses about colors.
jedberg 6y ago
Every comment in the article from a historian says "this is bad" but not a single one gives any reason why, other than they just don't like it.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  This is the fault of the journalist, not the historians. My wife is a history professor. Trust me when I say that historians don't hold opinions just for the sake of it.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Now I'm curious, what is your wife's opinion on this matter?
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      She thinks that this is an unusual opinion among most historians but perhaps more common among art historians. She doesn't see much problem with this sort of work, but it is possible for this sort of thing to be done badly. She doesn't doubt that the cited historians have formed a detailed opinion here (rather than just being emotionally upset at somebody touching their things) but doesn't agree with them. She rolled her eyes hard at the name "deOldify" and mentioned that there are a lot of dumb attempts at doing this that don't have any empathy for people (ex. redoing Shakespeare as rap to connect with young people without actually trying to understand young people, ironically this sort of thing was actually mentioned by Shiryaev). There is a cost to careless distribution of primary sources (a good example I never considered was the loss of marginalia when digitizing books badly) but it is the job of historians to do this well and it can be done well.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Plenty of professionals hold unjustified opinions just for the sake of it. I don't see why you would think historians are exempt.
bishalb 6y ago
These historians are saying as if these new 4kncolor videos will make the original ones disappear from the face of the earth.
rmrk 6y ago
I for one enjoy these adaptations of old footage. I suppose these historians would also object to me watching star trek tng on streaming in HD since it was clearly meant to be only ever be seen transmitted over radio waves to a cathode ray tube.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Here's some authentic high-resolution video from the past: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY https://youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY
- strictnein 6y ago
  I really enjoy video from that time period for one particular reason: no cell phones. Seeing people walk not hunched over anything. One of my favorite music videos (of sorts) is just a song over what appears to be a Mountain Dew street team passing out free soda on a random night outside bars, while filming their efforts. Apologies in advance, as they definitely focus on a particular gender, but it's still an interesting slice of life in the mid 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng
caseysoftware 6y ago
I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project digitizing and archiving their collections. When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up being important. For something like an album, you don't just have the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes, and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way? When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way, you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result, it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone. It's not a matter of "most accurate" representation of a moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in time. The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.
mcv 6y ago
I disagree with the criticism. Experiencing the original artifacts of history, like the original unenhanced film, is still possible. And totally understand that it's vital that that is still possible. But experiencing history is not just about experiencing its old, degraded artifacts. It's also useful and enlightening to experience history as it might actually have been back then. Of course that's partially an illusion, and it's important to be aware of that. But it's still a useful illusion. It's not for nothing that many ancient ruins have been restored so people can get a better impression of what they were actually like. With ruins this is actually a lot more questionable than with film, because you actually change the original historic artifact (which is probably why nobody repaints those ancient statues that probably used to have colour). But we do restore even ancient paintings that have been darkened by the passing of time. With that in mind, why would we not take this opportunity to create a much clearer window to the past?
- ijidak 6y ago
  As an African-American it was actually useful to watch some of these colorized videos and get a better since for how African-Americans integrated into the society at that time. Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more real and relatable. For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded grasp of the era. Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and allow more time for digestion. I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old videos because of the off-speed of the recordings. But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of history. But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life back in those times. Btw, this is the video I watched: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    The dance scene from Hellzapoppin' is my favorite use of the colorization algorithms so far- it's so much easier to follow the dancers when the color pops them out of the background. Color contrast helps a lot. In that case the whole setup- the costumes, the lighting, etc, are all artificial in the first place, adding some fake color on top doesn't seem like a historical sin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzc7vY9VTnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzc7vY9VTnk Personally, I don't find frame interpolation to be as effective as colorization; the artifacts it causes are often more distracting than just leaving the framerate alone. It can create a sort of artificial floating feeling to the motion- a problem that people often complain about with native 60fps, and is much worse with interpolated 60fps. Algorithms keep improving though, eventually I might find them more satisfying.
jchw 6y ago
I just tried watching one of the upscaled and interpolated videos, and then comparing it to the source. Please consider doing this before commenting, because in my opinion it really illuminates how silly this all is. 4K: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw Original: https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0 https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0 The colorization, of course, is lies. The upscaling and interpolation, however, is harder to argue about. Sure, if you were to freeze a frame and zoom in, you are looking at data that may not directly correspond to what was recorded. But it didn’t come out of thin air either - its upscaled and interpolated. I have read the arguments and some of the comments on this page and I still cannot figure out how this isn’t just rationalizing elitism. Of course we need to keep the source material, but nobody is suggesting to not do that.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Wow, I played those in sync and for me the 4K version is significantly more relatable. Even though the colours are obviously fake, the smoothness of the movements of the people in the video is what makes it great because I can actually relate and feel the emotions through the body language. It also feels more immersive because the nature's physical behaviour looks more accurate.
  - shard 6y ago
    After reading your comments, I was curious so watched the two clips as well. Although the 4K version was a bit nicer to watch (which I watched first), I didn't feel a significant difference compared with the original. Perhaps I am biased, as I do enjoy watching old (or new) B&W movies.
- paxys 6y ago
  Even the "fake" colors are a lot more representative of reality than black and white.
  - the_pwner224 6y ago
    The fake colors are completely made up by the computer. The people could have been wearing drab green or bright red or hot pink suits and it would show up as the same sepia/navy blue that the computer makes all the clothes look like in the colorized video.
tt433 6y ago
As someone with a historian's training, I don't mind it at all. Every narrative and theory of history is based on some element of fiction. Some in the field don't like being reminded of that.
IshKebab 6y ago
I though there might be some reasonable arguments in here, like restorations might be misleading and badly labeled, it might make it harder to find originals because all you find are restored versions, etc. But no, it's just "I'm a proper historian and let me tell you I don't like the way other people are doing history. Making it all accessible and whatnot. History should be hard, or you're cheating."
Animats 6y ago
Fixing film speed problems is fine. Increasing resolution is OK if not overdone. 2x, maybe; 4x, no, as Photoshop users know. Remove dust, scratches, camera sprocket drive jitter, no problem - those are all mechanical problems with the original camera. Colorization is bad, though, because it's often a total guess. The article linked to the Wuppertall monorail shows this. Look at the monorail supports. They keep changing color. The system doing the colorizing has no baseline data for "color of late 19th century monorail supports". It might match them to elevated railway supports, but there's no official color for those. The Wuppertall monorail was a different color in the 1960s than it is now, a much darker green. Parts were brown. Colorization can probably be stopped by claiming it's racist, when it guesses wrong and makes a Black face white.
abeppu 6y ago
I think we're also jaded now, in that all expectation that a photo is a totally truthful artifact produced by a physical process has long since been eroded. Phone camera software tries to create the 'best' image. When the Bay Area had orange skies, everyone noted how their phone cameras were auto-balancing out the orange. Zoom touches up your face. Yesterday's Pixel announcements emphasized changing lighting after a photo is taken. You kind of have to go out of your way to see a recent photo which _isn't_ manipulated in some content-informed way. So when we see an upscaled, colorized image ... maybe it's not an accurate reflection of the past. But we're no longer used to seeing an accurate reflection of the present, so of course we don't balk at the plausible-but-perhaps-mistaken color choices or interpolations.
vmh1928 6y ago
Some Youtube accounts post recordings of video games, some of which are set in a historical context. Nobody takes those for a view of reality. By the same argument art restoration should not be attempted because cleaning paintings discolored by centuries of candle soot may alter the historical context of the painting and confuse the lay person about what the art really looked like. Or not. Mostly the argument by the Academic Historians seems to be an attempt to retain control of the historical narrative and colorizing and sharpening old movies means the historian has less room to maneuver.
vmh1928 6y ago
In studying history I find some of the most useful documents are older histories. For instance, reading about World War 1, finding the account written in the 20's or 30's can be very informative. Of course those histories have bias but so do modern histories. Reading both and comparing the two provides even more benefit. Newer histories, in spite of their bias, may have more accurate facts or facts from records that were not available to the historian of 1920. But the mores and culture of the 1920's also plays a role and no modern historian can reproduce that.
vffhfhf 6y ago
What a dumb argument. Humans learn by watching shit. Colorize the history, HDfy it. Just coz you got your useless history degree toiling 3 years doesnot make you a better historian than 5 year old reciting a old story. Also imagine getting a history degree. What failures.
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  Learning from, teaching about, and documenting history is extremely important. The fact that you or I disagree with some historians about the proper balance between accuracy and relatability does not mean we should denigrate the study of history. I tend to agree with you that exposing more people to history is a higher priority than painstaking color accuracy, but I also believe that there is plenty of room for the kinds of historians that care more about accurate documentation than about public outreach.
Swayworn 6y ago
"He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they'd started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they'd slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin." - William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)
janee 6y ago
I dunno, I saw the title and scanned through...it just feels like click bait to me. I would love my peers to be more interested in history even if it's as trivial as being amazed by some fleeting vids of altered old footage, even if colors are incorrectly assigned. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it sortta seems to me like an interesting view point that's more akin to something you'll see in the comment section of these vids than a whole drawn out article on the matter.
dorkwood 6y ago
“Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” I don't buy this argument. I feel like the reason these upscaled videos are going viral is because it makes the events in the footage feel like something that actually happened, rather than an old-timey silent movie. Having said that, I'm not always a fan of upscaled historical footage. I think the best argument against it is that it's a distortion of reality. Regular people don't have the technological sophistication to understand that what they're seeing is the result of a machine filling in the gaps and making a "best guess". They assume all the new information they're seeing was already hidden somewhere in the original image and just had to be pulled out. I think if everyone was on the same page as to what these videos were, there wouldn't be a problem.
fizixer 6y ago
Ridiculous luddites are ridiculous. 4K the hell out of everything, and ignore the crybabies.
WalterBright 6y ago
Colorizing and upscaling is marvelous technology, and greatly improves my enjoyment of old photos and films. (I saved many colorized photos as wallpaper.) I know it isn't historically accurate, but the originals are not destroyed, and the historian has those available.
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
Colorized historical videos: pros: more emotional connection, easier to visualize the scene in front of the camera cons: misrepresents the epistemic status of the captured scene What more is there to say... things often have two (or more) sides to them.
aaron695 6y ago
What people are really pissed about is how fucking lazy it is to watch colorized and upscaled media. Seen it before with wide screening and dubbed media. Everything about the past you have not lived is made up anyway. That's both philosophical and literal. Being annoyed is gatekeeping. But I'll justify it myself as a dumbing down of the populace by them not looking at source materials.
rokweom 6y ago
I can't believe people actually find those results to be amazing. None of these algorithms, or as they call them - "AIs", are yet capable of adding detail (be it spatial or temporal) in a way that actually makes it look believable. It's all approximation, a very, very poor approxiation. I'm sure we'll reach that level one day, but for now, we are far away from it. Add to that the fact that those film scans are rarely shared in their original framerate and you're getting an absolutely terrible result.
vaccinator 6y ago
Cable does that with HD TV by compressing it to the max
ezoe 6y ago
It can be comparable to old manuscript, hand-copied many times and each copy modified the original. We certainly wish the original text be survived. But it won't happen anyway. It was copied, modified thus increasing the value along the way. It's either valuable enough to be copied or not to be copied and lost. We have certain old text because it has been copied and modified. If they have time and resource to complain it, they should rather start copying the original photo and films in order to preserve the historically important materials. The more copied, more change to survive.
turdnagel 6y ago
> “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,” > “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” I don't find either of these stances intuitive, but the article doesn't help. A simple follow up question of "why?" would have gone a long way. The technology is clearly explained -- there is interpolation happening -- but clearly the opinions expressed by these historians are philosophical in nature. It's worth having the discussion but the article doesn't go far enough, IMHO.
kbos87 6y ago
There are romantic arguments to be made on both sides here - historians saying that something is lost when this transformation happens, and that this is simply progress that people react to positively on the side of the doers. Both of those seem misguided and rooted in one paradigm or the other. When I think about the tangible effects of something like this, I don’t see many downsides. One thing that sticks in my mind - how easy it is for people to look at photos and videos from, for example, the Holocaust, and say “wow, the world was so very messed up way, way back then.” The technology of the time isn’t telling the story in the full fidelity of those who lived it. Instead, it looks nothing like the reality that it was, and makes it feel further removed. Fine as an art form, but not a service to reality.
realradicalwash 6y ago
The academic 'controversy' aside -which I think is BS, at least as it is presented in the article-, two things truly amaze me: 1) How beautiful of a city Wuppertal was in 1902. I have been to Wuppertal about 5 years ago, and it's ... well, not beautiful. Great people, though! 2) The appetite for engineering, for creating things, and the audacity of the late 19th century, early 20th century. A freaking flying train for a city of less than half a million of people. Contrast this to the changes over the past two decades in my hometown, which is about the same size as Wuppertal. The changes were marginal; a cancelled train route is what pops to mind.
ppod 6y ago
The rarely seen positivist-luddite niche.
alliao 6y ago
I don't see an issue, as long as we have links to the original; we can do that right? /s
dbeley 6y ago
Is it only me that finds the article quite poorly written? There is no lead throughout the different section, the exact same ideas are repeated over and over, etc. I think che content could have been reduced to something like 50% of its original length.
pixelpoet 6y ago
As long as the originals (as much original data as possible) are archived, anything additional is not a problem.
kazinator 6y ago
If historians want this to stop, they should first reduce history to a chronologically sorted collection of bare facts, free of opinion and interpretation. Fact is that if you watch the original footage, you mind "upscales" it anyway. You recognize objects in the scene and forms a description. That description consists of idealized objects. If you see someone's face, you remember that you saw a face, not that you saw a blurry 64x80 grid of pixels with specific defects in resolution and noise.
karaterobot 6y ago
I suspect this article is trying to problematize the issue more than describing an existing, widespread controversy among historians. It lumps digital restoration, upscaling, frame interpolation, and colorization together, but all of these techniques are different, and some are more controversial than others. For example, it's hard to think of an argument against using AI to remove imperfections from an image, if you are not troubled by having a human do the same thing. In both cases, information is being added where it had been lost. There's no way around that. Colorization is a different thing altogether. But, pretending that historians view noise removal and colorization as equally problematic is misleading.
bawolff 6y ago
Seems a bit gatekeeper-y. Like people shouldn't read the Aeneid in english because then they miss out on the joy of the original latin.
rurp 6y ago
I think these videos are analogous to historical fiction novels. Those books are a niche pretty far removed from academic research and serve a very different purpose. If you want to learn the most detailed academic knowledge of a time period, reading stories written by James Clavell or Colleen McCullough wouldn't make any sense. On the other hand, for a person who's casually interested in a historical time period and wants a fun immersive way to learn and think about it, reading well written novels about that period is an excellent way to go about it. For that same person, reading primary documents and research papers would probably be quite tedious. I think the videos from this article are a fun and unique way to explore past time periods, while also being of little value to academic research. There's nothing wrong with different niches serving different purposes, even if they cover the same topic.
cblconfederate 6y ago
ugh, historians have done much bigger damage to actual original artifacts, at least these deoldifying methods are not as biased, or, at least, their bias is quantifiable. The most interesting thing about these films is watching the mannerisms of the people, something which is generally not observable on the orignal, due to choppy motion/artifacts/cartoonish quality. I don't know how accurate the restoration method for the motion is, but I can never trust historic movies or documentaries to accurately recreate the way people walk, talk or just comport themselves.
S_A_P 6y ago
I support the upscale for the exact same reason as the criticism. Old photos and film almost seem fake or fictional to me. Seeing a more realistic portrayal humanizes the pictures for me. I guess the other question I have is why is this mutually exclusive? We can’t both preserve and digitize as it was and also enhance?
chrononaut 6y ago
It seems other fields have already been doing this sort of alteration for some time. For example, space-related research that often relies upon computer-assisted rendering to help the average consumer better understand context and "what things would look like." Alternatively, many statues from the classical era were actually painted, not bare marble. Is it frowned upon to create an image that renders those statues in color based on trace pigments still remaining on those statues?
dpc_pw 6y ago
> But historians argue the process is nonsense This article is nonsense. It absolutely fails to make a point. It's not like up-scaling stuff with neural networks is going to introduce a random mobile phone into the medium being upscaled or introduce any other glaring misrepresentations. The upscaling is purely for improving quality. Accuracy of the colors is rather secondary. And if anything, historians should just help out if they can. Personally I've spent a lot of time watching upscaled&colorized videos on YT, and I'm just mesmerized. It's sooo much more vivid and gripping to look at the past like we can look at the present.

242 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

My cynical take is that these historians’ objections stem from jealousy: they lack the ability or means to create these restorations, and are thus envious that the upscaled versions are receiving more attention than the originals ever did.

Traster 6y ago
My cynical take is that there are no historians saying that we shouldn't upscale images. There are historians who are warning that lots of the information in the upscaled images are ahistorical (blue jeans in the 1910s) so people should view this images as interesting but not accurate views of history. The journalist is the only one saying anyone should stop anything. None of the historians in the article ever say the youtubers should stop. They're just saying pretty much: "Hey, history cares about the context and accuracy of sources and these images are worse sources than the originals, they're good entertainment but bad historical sources". Pump it through a journalist and this is what you get. It's at this point I make some ironic point about how the journalist is using his neural net to upscale the story, inserting innaccurate information to the picture to create a more entertaining piece than the underlying facts.

varrock 6y ago

This is the first time I am seeing these remarkable videos. I cannot tell you why, but I am feeling awfully emotional while watching them. It cannot be nostalgia, as I wasn't there during the recordings of these videos, so I'm not sure what it could be.

SirensOfTitan 6y ago

These academics seem to think they have some ownership of history because they study it. And it seems they’d rather historical content rot in an irrelevant pile than be accessible. All of this with an argument that “something” is lost by upscaling, without any real elaboration as to what is actually lost.

ludamad 6y ago

I don't get this sentiment personally - I found that I struggled less to imagine myself there with the "enhancements"

jackric 6y ago

This feels like clickbaity story generation - cool new tech doing something many enjoy.... not enough tension... go and find a handful of grumpy people who don't concur

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Not even. The historians aren't even grumpy. Wired is just trying to create drama.

paulcole 6y ago

Reminds me of the vinyl people. “It sounds warmer!”

rootsudo 6y ago

Wow, I never would've thought this would be an issue - If more people knew of how the past looked like, and could relate to it, and understand - they would be shocked at the world we have today. Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. They just see an exposure, thats a photo, enlarged and think "that's it." Even, ironically, there's the expression/meme that kids/younger generation thought "the past wasn't in color." I remember hearing this when I was a kid in school, during the 90's and 00's. From the article...: "That’s not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. “It is a nonsense,” he wrote. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” But on the flipside, this argument does bring to light why it may be bad, but still - I don't think it's good enough to be up in arms about someone upscaling archive footage. "For Mark-FitzGerald and other historians of photography tools like DeOldify and Neural Love might make pictures look amazing, but they risk obscuring the past rather than illuminating it. “Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?”

claudeganon 6y ago
> Especially since most people can not relate to black and white videos/photos because they don't have the context required to expand on that thought. Can anyone expand on this sentiment? I’ve heard it expressed, especially around movies, but it’s always been incomprehensible to me. What is it about being black and white that makes it unrelatable?
- gadders 6y ago
  I thought it was silly as well. But then I bought a copy of The Colour of Time [1]. I don't know why it makes a difference, but it definitely does (at least for me). Obviously, your mileage may vary. [1] https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-history-of-the-world-1850-1960/ https://marinamaral.com/books/the-colour-of-time-a-new-histo...

slx26 6y ago

I'd like to see an actual survey with historians voting whether they oppose this or not. I just can't believe the headline.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
"historians" just means "at least 2 of them".
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  And even those 2 don't have any real arguments, just opinions. They really sound like they're trying to say something profound while they stroke their chin. "Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference." It's just an opinion. I can say the complete opposite and the opinion sounds just as valid: "Colourisation brings us closer to the past; it decreases the gap between now and then. It enables immediacy; it removes differences."

code4tee 6y ago

This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep making them. It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.

detritus 6y ago
Likewise, I've personally been in awe at some of the upscaled Nuclear testing footage that's cropped up on YouTube recently. It's literally awe-inspiring. So what if it's not 100% accurate?
- mcguire 6y ago
  You could likely use modern digital techniques to make up some new testing footage that is even more awe-inspiring. So what if it's 100% inaccurate?
  - detritus 6y ago
    I guess because it's known that the other is 95% truth vs. 95% fiction?
mnl 6y ago
I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there. I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.

growlist 6y ago

'“The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,” says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy.' Why do these academics always want to complicate things and dictate how we feel? Nobody put them in charge! '“There's something that's gained, but there's also something that's lost,” says Mark-FitzGerald. “And I think we need to have a conversation about what both of those things are.”' I'm guessing that would be a pretty one-way 'conversation'. Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. It's charming to think of them fooling around in the garden with new technology, 132 years ago this month.

alexgmcm 6y ago
> we need to have a conversation I'm not sure how they envisage such a "conversation" (whatever that means in this context) taking place.
antientropic 6y ago
They're not dictating anything. They're giving their opinion. Just as you are. > Edit: looking at the Leeds video it's clear to me the processed version adds a great deal - you can even see clearly how much fun they are having by the smiles on their faces, which is pretty hard to spot on the raw footage. I mean, isn't that exactly the issue that the critics are pointing out? The algorithm is inserting something - the behaviour of people - into the source material that may not have been there. It may be biased towards falsely making the past look like the present because that's what the algorithm has been trained on.
- growlist 6y ago
  I really don't think it added the smiles etc.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Old men yelling at clouds. The whole thing is ridiculous, it’s not like the old films were captured in 1080p or something, it’s an analog medium. Yes you can argue that the colorized version is not a historical document. Does it matter? Neither is a movie about history.

vmh1928 6y ago
Old men yelling? For a second I thought you were commenting on the presidential debate.

hedberg10 6y ago

"The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there." I've tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let's try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That's just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time. So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn't very realistic. I don't think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn't look like you think it did. You're just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
People didn't look like books either, and didn't look like pottery/statue fragments with the paint washed off, but historians aren't trying to ban that. There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in live performance.
- djaque 6y ago
  I can empathasize with the argument to keep the film unmolested and not for snobby reasons like that. I watched Peter Jackson's "They Shall not Grow Old" which is a collection of restored WW1 footage. Was super hyped going in, but when I saw the footage itself, it just felt off. Like the colors maybe weren't quite right or the motion was super messed up and the whole thing just felt weird and made watching it unenjoyable. I would have prefered to see it in black and white. My other gripe with the film was that he also loaded it up with sound effects and even added not well mixed VFX like extra explosions and shingles falling off roofs that appear from nowhere (hence why I'm pretty sure they were added in post). Dumping that kind of cheap blockbuster action elements actually felt pretty disrepectful of the soldiers that got filmed. Kind of like they were using them as action figures to tell a story that wasn't quite what happened in reality.

Waterluvian 6y ago

One of the most eye opening videos for me was that sky train that ran through a city. Germany I think? Such high quality I could really begin to feel what that era was like in some ways. This feels like what happens when someone with technology tries to merge it with another discipline that has failed to utilize the technology: gate keeping and stubbornness about the right way to do things.

Freak_NL 6y ago
The Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. Also, 'runs' not 'ran'. It's still there in daily use.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Modern-quality full-colour fairly-high-def (1080p) video reconstruction: https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg Erm, not reconstruction ;-)

vbezhenar 6y ago

AI sometimes adds things which were not present in the original scene. For example some upscaling algorithms love to draw tiny glasses. While I don’t see much harm in making some scenes more fun for people, it’s important to keep original sources, because they are ultimate truth, not algorithm outputs. And there’s danger that some people will destroy originals thinking that they are inferior.

ludamad 6y ago
I don't think so. I think eventually we would have an ensemble of restorations with different flairs, like how people see movies based on history almost
srtjstjsj 6y ago
The originals are not ultimate truth. They are messy evidence.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  How true! Take the original Star Trek. Its color scheme is 'iconic' now but at the time most people watched it in black and white. They specifically picked those colors to look decent on the semi new color TV's but just as importantly to not smear out into the background on black and white TV's. Gilligans island was similar.

antoniuschan99 6y ago

This along with the ‘wandering’ videos are seemingly getting popular on youtube. Eg nippon wandering tv, rambalac. These colorized + hd historical videos are super fascinating. Love how AI has been the driving force for towards creating these

nsonha 6y ago

what are they even on about? As if people will watch these videos and spread some conspiracy theory about how the tree was greener in the past?

finnthehuman 6y ago

It's the artifice of presentation that gets me. The color's not real, the filled in scratches aren't real, and once upon a time a photographer sat and composed the shot in the first place. It's an artist illustration of history. Which is fine, those are important to have. But it's too easy to forget that it's not reality. As the production value of video gets better (in general, not just historical film), people forget the little bit of McLuhan they once half-understood. And the more time we spending looking at screens, the more we WANT to forget that the pictures on the screen don't reflect reality. For example: go tweet what you really think about the world. About politics, about sex, about all the white lies we tell eachother to keep society functioning. Don't want to? OK, now ask yourself why you treat anything you read as less artificially constrained than what you, a relative nobody, are willing to tweet.

talentedcoin 6y ago

It might not be to everyone’s taste but it’s impressive work. Why do these particular academic historians not trust people to understand the limitations of this? To me this is not dissimilar from translating a book from an ancient language - there are problems of bias and so on, but why not make good things a little more accessible? Nothing wrong with something that sparks the imagination.

smusamashah 6y ago
There are shades of green, brown, red, but not exactly and it doesn't stick or stay, just the way I remember colors in dreams. They are colorful, but I can not exactly recall vividly.

LockAndLol 6y ago

You can find this phenomenon of self-appointed protectors of values everywhere: the clergy, rap purists, rustaceans, Apple users... in their echo chambers they are always right and only they know how things should be done. If you somehow have the misfortune of treading upon their proverbial holy turf and doing something they consider against their teachings... boy will they get pissed. Especially if you make their world more understandable to those not in the know, then you're immediately a problem. This sounds like just another form of gatekeeping.

pjc50 6y ago

So what is the state of the art in auto upscaling and detail re- imagining? There's a lot of 240p VHS transfer music videos on youtube I'd like to see less bad versions of without regards to accuracy.

floatboth 6y ago
Here's an.. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkDUObv5iIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkDUObv5iIU Original: http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%2521+DOOR+STUCK%2521.mp4 http://www.mediafire.com/file/49cg1k64057f0ga/DOOR+STUCK%252...

renewiltord 6y ago

This is a manufactured controversy. There's always some people opposed to anything. It's a non-story to moderate something that is just far too awesome: a portal into the past.

kbuchanan 6y ago

As an avid reader of history, I tried hard to understand the points the points these academics made, however, it's difficult for me to come to any other conclusion that their position is rooted in elitism—that "true history" can only be discovered by straining and toiling, as they do. A book is a tool to help us connect with others' experiences. Colorization and other techniques—done sincerely and as accurately as possible—are additional tools that can accomplish this in other ways.

ev1 6y ago
Note: My opinion is that I am neutral/do not like or dislike historical media, I am not a historian, but I do dislike those awful Twitter spammers that steal random "historical image of the day", often with a completely wrong caption, stolen content, no sourcing, and then post affiliate links all over them. I have previously done professional work with ML/AI. -- I can kind of understand this if it was made very obvious that it was "AI generated"; that is, the colours are totally invented and made out of thin air, that spaces might be filled in with random computer generated content to support upscaling and make it look better. I don't want a machine-generated random filler content to be repurposed for "oh, here is a source video for the skin colour of specific people back in the day" or "you see those marks in the corner (that didn't exist in the original source), those are hieroglyphs" AI does not mean you magically get colour restored to an image that did not have any in the first place, it is invented, machine created content that potentially has absolutely zero bearing on the real world. Additionally, stuff like this ends up ranking higher than the original source content; preference is given to HD+ videos in search, "viral cool colourised version of the past" on instagram will rank higher than "actual history"; it is potentially a large problem when you have people that don't actually know how to separate genuine primary source vs computer generated content.
croes 6y ago
The problem is the user doesn't know which information is accurate and which just an estimation of the software. It's a fake accuracy.
- kzrdude 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

I strongly disagree with these historians, for historical reasons. Our limited recordings of the recent past make it hard for us to understand that it wasn’t that long ago and things weren’t that and people weren’t that different. By 1911, the railroad I used to get to from Westchester NY to Manhattan was already electrified, thanks to an investment from JP Morgan, where my brother works today. By 1910 the subway line running down Lexington Ave I’d take all the time had already been built. So had the Grand Central Post Office, on top of which the office building I used to work at was later built. By 1910, all of Manhattan had been electrified for decades, and you had electric refrigerators and curling irons and stoves. By 1910, vaccines had been developed and the first antibiotics were coming out. It’s important not to forget how close in time we are to history. Imagine if, instead of always seeing black and white pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., people saw him in 4K color. Maybe they’d remember he was shot for his civil rights activism when Bill Gates was already a teenager, just a couple of heads before Unix and C.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

outworlder 6y ago

I've never seen a more 'academic' discussion. So people are 'enhancing' videos and photos. Just like we've been doing for decades. Only the process was manual and labor-intensive. And usually NOT performed by historians. As long as we don't destroy the originals, I can't see why there's even a debate. Every medium captures an interpretation of reality, they are not reality itself.

rkachowski 6y ago

The past was also not black and white and grey, or sepia toned. The original photographs and film are imperfect captures of the environment at the time. Given this it feels there's a fallacy in holding the source material as somehow more accurate because it was produced by then contemporary technology - it's all just approximation

gridlockd 6y ago
The sky did not literally look like that either, when Van Gogh painted it. You are missing the point.
- rkachowski 6y ago
  I don't understand, van gogh made art in his own style whilst these films and photos attempted to document and capture the state of the world
  - shard 6y ago
    Photographers and filmmakers also make art in their own style. There is no such thing as a perfect representation of the world on film: they are compressing the dynamic range and adjusting the color/brightness profiles through the film they use, the exposure settings and any added filters on the camera, the development process for the film (chemicals, timing, pushing/pulling), the paper for the print (photography) or the film for the positive print (movies), the dodging/burning of the print, and others. It's not about correcting the image to match what their eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph/movie can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers/filmmakers have to interpret the image to get their message across.
    - rkachowski 6y ago
      I totally in no way meant to imply that camerawork has somehow less artistic value than any other medium, but just as pencil and paper can be used to produce technical drawings of architecture and field sketches to outline geography, documentary footage can be recorded with the primary intent of capturing a scene and setting before rendering a creative work.

awhitby 6y ago

I wonder if it is possible - if not practical - to extract color information from processed black and white film negatives. It seems plausible that there are trace chemical imperfections in the film medium, and these might react differently to different wavelengths, so that if you could inspect the image at a molecular level you could make pretty good guesses about colors.

jedberg 6y ago

Every comment in the article from a historian says "this is bad" but not a single one gives any reason why, other than they just don't like it.

UncleMeat 6y ago
This is the fault of the journalist, not the historians. My wife is a history professor. Trust me when I say that historians don't hold opinions just for the sake of it.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Now I'm curious, what is your wife's opinion on this matter?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    She thinks that this is an unusual opinion among most historians but perhaps more common among art historians. She doesn't see much problem with this sort of work, but it is possible for this sort of thing to be done badly. She doesn't doubt that the cited historians have formed a detailed opinion here (rather than just being emotionally upset at somebody touching their things) but doesn't agree with them. She rolled her eyes hard at the name "deOldify" and mentioned that there are a lot of dumb attempts at doing this that don't have any empathy for people (ex. redoing Shakespeare as rap to connect with young people without actually trying to understand young people, ironically this sort of thing was actually mentioned by Shiryaev). There is a cost to careless distribution of primary sources (a good example I never considered was the loss of marginalia when digitizing books badly) but it is the job of historians to do this well and it can be done well.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Plenty of professionals hold unjustified opinions just for the sake of it. I don't see why you would think historians are exempt.

bishalb 6y ago

These historians are saying as if these new 4kncolor videos will make the original ones disappear from the face of the earth.

rmrk 6y ago

I for one enjoy these adaptations of old footage. I suppose these historians would also object to me watching star trek tng on streaming in HD since it was clearly meant to be only ever be seen transmitted over radio waves to a cathode ray tube.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

Here's some authentic high-resolution video from the past: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY https://youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY

strictnein 6y ago
I really enjoy video from that time period for one particular reason: no cell phones. Seeing people walk not hunched over anything. One of my favorite music videos (of sorts) is just a song over what appears to be a Mountain Dew street team passing out free soda on a random night outside bars, while filming their efforts. Apologies in advance, as they definitely focus on a particular gender, but it's still an interesting slice of life in the mid 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sYupd5dng

caseysoftware 6y ago

I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project digitizing and archiving their collections. When an archivist analyzes a piece of media, everything ends up being important. For something like an album, you don't just have the audio but the physical media itself, the sleeve, the notes, and the settings of every piece of equipment used in capturing each of those things. Imagine for example, you realize the Photoshop filters were off/wrong in some way? When you modify the media and treat it as definitive in some way, you're introducing your own analysis (good or bad), just like a Photoshop filter. Even if you're 100% "correct" in the result, it's no longer the same and the next person is applying their analysis on top of yours. It's effectively a game of telephone. It's not a matter of "most accurate" representation of a moment in time but an "unmodified" representation of a moment in time. The difference between that and editing books, movies, music, etc applying current norms and expectations becomes semantic.

mcv 6y ago

I disagree with the criticism. Experiencing the original artifacts of history, like the original unenhanced film, is still possible. And totally understand that it's vital that that is still possible. But experiencing history is not just about experiencing its old, degraded artifacts. It's also useful and enlightening to experience history as it might actually have been back then. Of course that's partially an illusion, and it's important to be aware of that. But it's still a useful illusion. It's not for nothing that many ancient ruins have been restored so people can get a better impression of what they were actually like. With ruins this is actually a lot more questionable than with film, because you actually change the original historic artifact (which is probably why nobody repaints those ancient statues that probably used to have colour). But we do restore even ancient paintings that have been darkened by the passing of time. With that in mind, why would we not take this opportunity to create a much clearer window to the past?

ijidak 6y ago
As an African-American it was actually useful to watch some of these colorized videos and get a better since for how African-Americans integrated into the society at that time. Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more real and relatable. For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded grasp of the era. Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and allow more time for digestion. I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old videos because of the off-speed of the recordings. But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of history. But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life back in those times. Btw, this is the video I watched: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw
- roywiggins 6y ago
  The dance scene from Hellzapoppin' is my favorite use of the colorization algorithms so far- it's so much easier to follow the dancers when the color pops them out of the background. Color contrast helps a lot. In that case the whole setup- the costumes, the lighting, etc, are all artificial in the first place, adding some fake color on top doesn't seem like a historical sin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzc7vY9VTnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzc7vY9VTnk Personally, I don't find frame interpolation to be as effective as colorization; the artifacts it causes are often more distracting than just leaving the framerate alone. It can create a sort of artificial floating feeling to the motion- a problem that people often complain about with native 60fps, and is much worse with interpolated 60fps. Algorithms keep improving though, eventually I might find them more satisfying.

jchw 6y ago

I just tried watching one of the upscaled and interpolated videos, and then comparing it to the source. Please consider doing this before commenting, because in my opinion it really illuminates how silly this all is. 4K: https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://youtu.be/hZ1OgQL9_Cw Original: https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0 https://youtu.be/aohXOpKtns0 The colorization, of course, is lies. The upscaling and interpolation, however, is harder to argue about. Sure, if you were to freeze a frame and zoom in, you are looking at data that may not directly correspond to what was recorded. But it didn’t come out of thin air either - its upscaled and interpolated. I have read the arguments and some of the comments on this page and I still cannot figure out how this isn’t just rationalizing elitism. Of course we need to keep the source material, but nobody is suggesting to not do that.

mrtksn 6y ago
Wow, I played those in sync and for me the 4K version is significantly more relatable. Even though the colours are obviously fake, the smoothness of the movements of the people in the video is what makes it great because I can actually relate and feel the emotions through the body language. It also feels more immersive because the nature's physical behaviour looks more accurate.
- shard 6y ago
  After reading your comments, I was curious so watched the two clips as well. Although the 4K version was a bit nicer to watch (which I watched first), I didn't feel a significant difference compared with the original. Perhaps I am biased, as I do enjoy watching old (or new) B&W movies.
paxys 6y ago
Even the "fake" colors are a lot more representative of reality than black and white.
- the_pwner224 6y ago
  The fake colors are completely made up by the computer. The people could have been wearing drab green or bright red or hot pink suits and it would show up as the same sepia/navy blue that the computer makes all the clothes look like in the colorized video.

tt433 6y ago

As someone with a historian's training, I don't mind it at all. Every narrative and theory of history is based on some element of fiction. Some in the field don't like being reminded of that.

IshKebab 6y ago

I though there might be some reasonable arguments in here, like restorations might be misleading and badly labeled, it might make it harder to find originals because all you find are restored versions, etc. But no, it's just "I'm a proper historian and let me tell you I don't like the way other people are doing history. Making it all accessible and whatnot. History should be hard, or you're cheating."

Animats 6y ago

Fixing film speed problems is fine. Increasing resolution is OK if not overdone. 2x, maybe; 4x, no, as Photoshop users know. Remove dust, scratches, camera sprocket drive jitter, no problem - those are all mechanical problems with the original camera. Colorization is bad, though, because it's often a total guess. The article linked to the Wuppertall monorail shows this. Look at the monorail supports. They keep changing color. The system doing the colorizing has no baseline data for "color of late 19th century monorail supports". It might match them to elevated railway supports, but there's no official color for those. The Wuppertall monorail was a different color in the 1960s than it is now, a much darker green. Parts were brown. Colorization can probably be stopped by claiming it's racist, when it guesses wrong and makes a Black face white.

abeppu 6y ago

I think we're also jaded now, in that all expectation that a photo is a totally truthful artifact produced by a physical process has long since been eroded. Phone camera software tries to create the 'best' image. When the Bay Area had orange skies, everyone noted how their phone cameras were auto-balancing out the orange. Zoom touches up your face. Yesterday's Pixel announcements emphasized changing lighting after a photo is taken. You kind of have to go out of your way to see a recent photo which _isn't_ manipulated in some content-informed way. So when we see an upscaled, colorized image ... maybe it's not an accurate reflection of the past. But we're no longer used to seeing an accurate reflection of the present, so of course we don't balk at the plausible-but-perhaps-mistaken color choices or interpolations.

vmh1928 6y ago

Some Youtube accounts post recordings of video games, some of which are set in a historical context. Nobody takes those for a view of reality. By the same argument art restoration should not be attempted because cleaning paintings discolored by centuries of candle soot may alter the historical context of the painting and confuse the lay person about what the art really looked like. Or not. Mostly the argument by the Academic Historians seems to be an attempt to retain control of the historical narrative and colorizing and sharpening old movies means the historian has less room to maneuver.

vmh1928 6y ago

In studying history I find some of the most useful documents are older histories. For instance, reading about World War 1, finding the account written in the 20's or 30's can be very informative. Of course those histories have bias but so do modern histories. Reading both and comparing the two provides even more benefit. Newer histories, in spite of their bias, may have more accurate facts or facts from records that were not available to the historian of 1920. But the mores and culture of the 1920's also plays a role and no modern historian can reproduce that.

vffhfhf 6y ago

What a dumb argument. Humans learn by watching shit. Colorize the history, HDfy it. Just coz you got your useless history degree toiling 3 years doesnot make you a better historian than 5 year old reciting a old story. Also imagine getting a history degree. What failures.

sacred_numbers 6y ago
Learning from, teaching about, and documenting history is extremely important. The fact that you or I disagree with some historians about the proper balance between accuracy and relatability does not mean we should denigrate the study of history. I tend to agree with you that exposing more people to history is a higher priority than painstaking color accuracy, but I also believe that there is plenty of room for the kinds of historians that care more about accurate documentation than about public outreach.

Swayworn 6y ago

"He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they'd started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they'd slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin." - William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)

janee 6y ago

I dunno, I saw the title and scanned through...it just feels like click bait to me. I would love my peers to be more interested in history even if it's as trivial as being amazed by some fleeting vids of altered old footage, even if colors are incorrectly assigned. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it sortta seems to me like an interesting view point that's more akin to something you'll see in the comment section of these vids than a whole drawn out article on the matter.

dorkwood 6y ago

“Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” I don't buy this argument. I feel like the reason these upscaled videos are going viral is because it makes the events in the footage feel like something that actually happened, rather than an old-timey silent movie. Having said that, I'm not always a fan of upscaled historical footage. I think the best argument against it is that it's a distortion of reality. Regular people don't have the technological sophistication to understand that what they're seeing is the result of a machine filling in the gaps and making a "best guess". They assume all the new information they're seeing was already hidden somewhere in the original image and just had to be pulled out. I think if everyone was on the same page as to what these videos were, there wouldn't be a problem.

fizixer 6y ago

Ridiculous luddites are ridiculous. 4K the hell out of everything, and ignore the crybabies.

WalterBright 6y ago

Colorizing and upscaling is marvelous technology, and greatly improves my enjoyment of old photos and films. (I saved many colorized photos as wallpaper.) I know it isn't historically accurate, but the originals are not destroyed, and the historian has those available.

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

Colorized historical videos: pros: more emotional connection, easier to visualize the scene in front of the camera cons: misrepresents the epistemic status of the captured scene What more is there to say... things often have two (or more) sides to them.

aaron695 6y ago

What people are really pissed about is how fucking lazy it is to watch colorized and upscaled media. Seen it before with wide screening and dubbed media. Everything about the past you have not lived is made up anyway. That's both philosophical and literal. Being annoyed is gatekeeping. But I'll justify it myself as a dumbing down of the populace by them not looking at source materials.

rokweom 6y ago

I can't believe people actually find those results to be amazing. None of these algorithms, or as they call them - "AIs", are yet capable of adding detail (be it spatial or temporal) in a way that actually makes it look believable. It's all approximation, a very, very poor approxiation. I'm sure we'll reach that level one day, but for now, we are far away from it. Add to that the fact that those film scans are rarely shared in their original framerate and you're getting an absolutely terrible result.

vaccinator 6y ago

Cable does that with HD TV by compressing it to the max

ezoe 6y ago

It can be comparable to old manuscript, hand-copied many times and each copy modified the original. We certainly wish the original text be survived. But it won't happen anyway. It was copied, modified thus increasing the value along the way. It's either valuable enough to be copied or not to be copied and lost. We have certain old text because it has been copied and modified. If they have time and resource to complain it, they should rather start copying the original photo and films in order to preserve the historically important materials. The more copied, more change to survive.

turdnagel 6y ago

> “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are,” > “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.” I don't find either of these stances intuitive, but the article doesn't help. A simple follow up question of "why?" would have gone a long way. The technology is clearly explained -- there is interpolation happening -- but clearly the opinions expressed by these historians are philosophical in nature. It's worth having the discussion but the article doesn't go far enough, IMHO.

kbos87 6y ago

There are romantic arguments to be made on both sides here - historians saying that something is lost when this transformation happens, and that this is simply progress that people react to positively on the side of the doers. Both of those seem misguided and rooted in one paradigm or the other. When I think about the tangible effects of something like this, I don’t see many downsides. One thing that sticks in my mind - how easy it is for people to look at photos and videos from, for example, the Holocaust, and say “wow, the world was so very messed up way, way back then.” The technology of the time isn’t telling the story in the full fidelity of those who lived it. Instead, it looks nothing like the reality that it was, and makes it feel further removed. Fine as an art form, but not a service to reality.

realradicalwash 6y ago

The academic 'controversy' aside -which I think is BS, at least as it is presented in the article-, two things truly amaze me: 1) How beautiful of a city Wuppertal was in 1902. I have been to Wuppertal about 5 years ago, and it's ... well, not beautiful. Great people, though! 2) The appetite for engineering, for creating things, and the audacity of the late 19th century, early 20th century. A freaking flying train for a city of less than half a million of people. Contrast this to the changes over the past two decades in my hometown, which is about the same size as Wuppertal. The changes were marginal; a cancelled train route is what pops to mind.

ppod 6y ago

The rarely seen positivist-luddite niche.

alliao 6y ago

I don't see an issue, as long as we have links to the original; we can do that right? /s

dbeley 6y ago

Is it only me that finds the article quite poorly written? There is no lead throughout the different section, the exact same ideas are repeated over and over, etc. I think che content could have been reduced to something like 50% of its original length.

pixelpoet 6y ago

As long as the originals (as much original data as possible) are archived, anything additional is not a problem.

kazinator 6y ago

If historians want this to stop, they should first reduce history to a chronologically sorted collection of bare facts, free of opinion and interpretation. Fact is that if you watch the original footage, you mind "upscales" it anyway. You recognize objects in the scene and forms a description. That description consists of idealized objects. If you see someone's face, you remember that you saw a face, not that you saw a blurry 64x80 grid of pixels with specific defects in resolution and noise.

karaterobot 6y ago

I suspect this article is trying to problematize the issue more than describing an existing, widespread controversy among historians. It lumps digital restoration, upscaling, frame interpolation, and colorization together, but all of these techniques are different, and some are more controversial than others. For example, it's hard to think of an argument against using AI to remove imperfections from an image, if you are not troubled by having a human do the same thing. In both cases, information is being added where it had been lost. There's no way around that. Colorization is a different thing altogether. But, pretending that historians view noise removal and colorization as equally problematic is misleading.

bawolff 6y ago

Seems a bit gatekeeper-y. Like people shouldn't read the Aeneid in english because then they miss out on the joy of the original latin.

rurp 6y ago

I think these videos are analogous to historical fiction novels. Those books are a niche pretty far removed from academic research and serve a very different purpose. If you want to learn the most detailed academic knowledge of a time period, reading stories written by James Clavell or Colleen McCullough wouldn't make any sense. On the other hand, for a person who's casually interested in a historical time period and wants a fun immersive way to learn and think about it, reading well written novels about that period is an excellent way to go about it. For that same person, reading primary documents and research papers would probably be quite tedious. I think the videos from this article are a fun and unique way to explore past time periods, while also being of little value to academic research. There's nothing wrong with different niches serving different purposes, even if they cover the same topic.

cblconfederate 6y ago

ugh, historians have done much bigger damage to actual original artifacts, at least these deoldifying methods are not as biased, or, at least, their bias is quantifiable. The most interesting thing about these films is watching the mannerisms of the people, something which is generally not observable on the orignal, due to choppy motion/artifacts/cartoonish quality. I don't know how accurate the restoration method for the motion is, but I can never trust historic movies or documentaries to accurately recreate the way people walk, talk or just comport themselves.

S_A_P 6y ago

I support the upscale for the exact same reason as the criticism. Old photos and film almost seem fake or fictional to me. Seeing a more realistic portrayal humanizes the pictures for me. I guess the other question I have is why is this mutually exclusive? We can’t both preserve and digitize as it was and also enhance?

chrononaut 6y ago

It seems other fields have already been doing this sort of alteration for some time. For example, space-related research that often relies upon computer-assisted rendering to help the average consumer better understand context and "what things would look like." Alternatively, many statues from the classical era were actually painted, not bare marble. Is it frowned upon to create an image that renders those statues in color based on trace pigments still remaining on those statues?

dpc_pw 6y ago

> But historians argue the process is nonsense This article is nonsense. It absolutely fails to make a point. It's not like up-scaling stuff with neural networks is going to introduce a random mobile phone into the medium being upscaled or introduce any other glaring misrepresentations. The upscaling is purely for improving quality. Accuracy of the colors is rather secondary. And if anything, historians should just help out if they can. Personally I've spent a lot of time watching upscaled&colorized videos on YT, and I'm just mesmerized. It's sooo much more vivid and gripping to look at the past like we can look at the present.