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> What information has this person added? What have they taken away? That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watchin

> What information has this person added? What have they taken away? That bit is quite relevant. These upscaled videos are interesting, but most people watching them won't know what was there originally and what was added through interpretation and extrapolation. The colours in particular are tricky and not likely to always reflect reality very well, and any sounds added seem to be an amateur's best guesses using what's available in audio libraries mostly. But it is not just the present-day processing of the material; as Mark-FitzGerald notes, photographs and videos from that age were taken with an objective in mind which may not be as neutral as one might assume. It's not always straight-up propaganda, but whoever took the pictures (or paid for them) had their motives as well. That is part of the context that you need to fully understand what you are seeing (and what you are not seeing), and which is understandably missing from Youtube.

mannykannot 6y ago
It is unclear to me how viewing the originals, as opposed to these derived works, gives you any greater insight into the motives of those who made them. The only corner-case I can think of is the erasure of obvious signs of faking, but that does not seem to be the issue that people are getting worked up over. Is anyone even wasting their effort on upscaling faked film?
- monkpit 6y ago
  I think it’s so strange to see all of the arguments saying “if this building is colored as gray instead of blue, then it is making it harder to understand the past”. A layperson does not care about the exact color of a building or a jacket or a hat, and if it is really that important then it’s probably documented somewhere. It might be important to historians and that is ok. But they are not the intended audience of these type of upscaled/colorized clips.

mannykannot 6y ago

It is unclear to me how viewing the originals, as opposed to these derived works, gives you any greater insight into the motives of those who made them. The only corner-case I can think of is the erasure of obvious signs of faking, but that does not seem to be the issue that people are getting worked up over. Is anyone even wasting their effort on upscaling faked film?

monkpit 6y ago
I think it’s so strange to see all of the arguments saying “if this building is colored as gray instead of blue, then it is making it harder to understand the past”. A layperson does not care about the exact color of a building or a jacket or a hat, and if it is really that important then it’s probably documented somewhere. It might be important to historians and that is ok. But they are not the intended audience of these type of upscaled/colorized clips.