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I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, ev

I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's? I was recently sent a link to this recording of a David Bowie & Nine Inch Nails concert, and I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPg... It turned out that the video was "AI-upscaled" from an original which is really blurry and sometimes has a low frame rate. These are artistic choices, and I think the original, despite being low resolution, captures the intended atmosphere much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1IkkIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1Ikk... We have pretty good cameras and lenses now. We don't need AI to "improve" the quality.

yahoozoo 1y ago
It’s surprising how many people don’t notice when frame smoothing is on, when it looks so bad.
rightbyte 1y ago
The closeups of the bass player are like 6 slowmotion frames in the original and look like an interpolated mess with unhuman body joints upscaled.
kg 1y ago
Wow, you're not kidding. In some shots David Bowie barely looks like David Bowie because the algorithm's taken such liberties with the original image to try and make it look sharp.
conradfr 1y ago
That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png
- moefh 1y ago
  That's insane. Here's the same-ish frame from the original: https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video). The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces".
  - ygra 1y ago
    Seems like they ignored the non-square pixel aspect ratio as well for the upscaling, which may have changed face shapes as well.
  - janfoeh 1y ago
    Between 2:07 and 2:08, the guy on the right loses his glasses. Over the course of a couple frames, they just fade into nothingness.
black_puppydog 1y ago
Holy... wtf... At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible.
- MrGilbert 1y ago
  Also, David Bowie looks like a 20-something-year old man in this shot.
justinator 1y ago
That is terrible. I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
SanjayMehta 1y ago
The first video induced actual physical nausea. I had to stop playback or I’m sure I would have thrown up. And I don’t suffer from motion sickness etc. There’s definitely something “uncanny valley” about it.
ageitgey 1y ago
The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  Rick Astley is so ubiquitous now, thanks to Memes, the AI is never gonna give him up.
  - latentsea 1y ago
    We know the rules, and so do AI
    - matula 1y ago
      * slow clap *
energy123 1y ago
The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!"
brap 1y ago
I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad. Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV. It was the auto-smoothing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect
- chneu 1y ago
  It also has to do with how basically everything is filmed for Netflix/streaming nowadays.
  - topranks 1y ago
    Not really sure I get why that would be a factor
- ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
  It is especially bad for animated shows that have made an explicit artistic choice to let (parts of) the animation progress at a lower frame rate. My kids watched "spider-man: across the spider-verse" at a friends place where smoothing was not turned off, and it completely ruined the artistic feel and made the movie feel like a stuttering video game.
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.
    - ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
      I think that's a matter of taste, but it definitely doesn't make it easier to watch them when the frame rate randomly switches between low and high all the time :).
    - 1y ago
hliyan 1y ago
This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  When stock price has to grow 8% more than gdp this is inevitable.
- wickedsight 1y ago
  > pushing technology that end consumers don't want Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was.
  - lifestyleguru 1y ago
    Failure of 3D TVs was one unprecedented glorious victory of a customer, where customers not buying it indeed led to its disappearance. Otherwise I'm furiously not buying other ridiculous stuff but my consumer decision does nothing.
    - vrighter 1y ago
      I still have one! But there is, of course, pretty much no 3d content to view on it. Maybe Gran Turismo on ps3
- ddq 1y ago
  After decades of consumerism, most consumers already have most of what they need/want, so in order to keep selling widgets, corporations must manufacture demand. Enough big screen TVs have already been built and sold to give every American a fully functional 60"+ screen in every room in their residence, enough lightly used ones to go around to completely negate the need to manufacture more. But profit must not go down for any reason, so they must invent gimmicks to push the latest and greatest model onto a public that can't even tell the difference without marketing propaganda. The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit. I say enough is enough.
prmoustache 1y ago
The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this. Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.
- ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
  Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content. It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses. It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology. It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies.
    - Sammi 1y ago
      I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences.
internet_points 1y ago
Wow, that is horrible! The 2:07 mark where AI put in some generic Rick Astley-alike for Bowie, just made me feel sick
omnimus 1y ago
What makes it uneasy is not only upscaling but they are generating new frames to make it 60fps. 60fps by itself feels fake (check some footage of The Hobbit that tried 48fps). It feels like video games. It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural. The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps.
- petralithic 1y ago
  It is just habitual and I feel it's making movies look terrible, especially panning shots look like a stuttery mess that is almost unwatchable for me at 24 FPS.
- i80and 1y ago
  I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.
robotbikes 1y ago
This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.
Retr0id 1y ago
I also think it looks like garbage, but I wonder if maybe it looks better on small mobile screens - where you can't actually see the mangled details, but can perceive that it "looks sharper"
cercatrova 1y ago
I like upscaling and frame interpolation but as always, the TV does not have the hardware to do a good job. If you use neural network models, it works and looks a lot better without looking plastic-like.
alienbaby 1y ago
I think its preferred to get this kind of smooth unreal effect for services like youtube, but not because it looks better; but rather because it compresses better for storage. Less fine detail overall helps video compression.
andrepd 1y ago
> I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception When I took LSD for the first time, I realised it was hitting when everything started looking like stable diffusion
lm28469 1y ago
> Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's? Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations. Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers.
- hliyan 1y ago
  This sounds like two completely different things. I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off. This is neurological, not generational.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    > I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird
    - hliyan 1y ago
      In that case the answer is even simpler: what few young people I know (yes, N = small) have been the loudest in complaining about the feature. They seem to prefer "cinema quality" the same way some people of my generation like vinyl records.
latexr 1y ago
> Who seriously thinks this looks better I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference. Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online). > I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s Looking at the original, it’s obvious why: that section was really blurry. The AI version doesn’t understand camera effects. https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126 https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126 Thank you for providing both links, it made the comparison really simple.
- justsid 1y ago
  If you watch the average person watch TV, they don’t actually pay attention to it. Everyone is just on their phone. It drives me crazy watching just about anything with people because I look around and no one even has their eyes on the TV. It’s just background noise.
raffael_de 1y ago
Yes, 2:07 is just ridiculous. That's more Matt Damon than David Bowie. To be fair, though, this upscale was not committed by Youtube. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127 https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127
maplethorpe 1y ago
Your post just made me realise that as soon as the technology is ready, built-in AI upscaling will be just as ubiquitous as motion smoothing.
- incone123 1y ago
  Not sure if you're serious, but wouldn't it be more efficient to upscale at source and stream the result? Extra bandwidth versus a million TVs all doing the same computation.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Yeah but that wouldn't let them slap AI on the TV box as a selling point
  - maplethorpe 1y ago
    I mean, I imagine that will be happening as well, but I don't think it would stop TV manufacturers from adding their own layers on top. Just like you can choose from different color and sound profiles, maybe you could choose a "cinematic" AI filter, which adds artificial rim lights to everything on screen. Obviously this is a nightmare scenario for filmmakers, but it also feels like the logical conclusion of where we're heading.
chrsw 1y ago
I pulled up a podcast on YouTube the other week of just two people facing the camera and their faces side-by-side the screen. I had to just use audio only. I couldn't actually look at the video. The guest on the show was using some kind of AI filter for his video stream. I guess because he was on a low-quality phone camera, and he thought the filter would be better?? But the result was very disturbing. I almost barfed on my desk when his image came up.
actionfromafar 1y ago
I think the only way to future-proof 24 fps content is to render it as 120fps, but repeat every frame 5 times. 5 * 24 = 120fps. I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  It was probably a Technology Connections video or something but I learned that film projectors actually flash each frame 3 times before progressing to the next so the light is flickering 72 times a second, while the image is only changing 24 fps.
jdhzzz 1y ago
You will see the same thing on any online real estate listing. I spend more time wondering why it looks so weird than I do looking at what the picture is attempting to show.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

yahoozoo 1y ago

It’s surprising how many people don’t notice when frame smoothing is on, when it looks so bad.

rightbyte 1y ago

The closeups of the bass player are like 6 slowmotion frames in the original and look like an interpolated mess with unhuman body joints upscaled.

kg 1y ago

Wow, you're not kidding. In some shots David Bowie barely looks like David Bowie because the algorithm's taken such liberties with the original image to try and make it look sharp.

conradfr 1y ago

That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png

moefh 1y ago
That's insane. Here's the same-ish frame from the original: https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video). The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces".
- ygra 1y ago
  Seems like they ignored the non-square pixel aspect ratio as well for the upscaling, which may have changed face shapes as well.
- janfoeh 1y ago
  Between 2:07 and 2:08, the guy on the right loses his glasses. Over the course of a couple frames, they just fade into nothingness.

black_puppydog 1y ago

Holy... wtf... At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible.

MrGilbert 1y ago
Also, David Bowie looks like a 20-something-year old man in this shot.

justinator 1y ago

That is terrible. I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

SanjayMehta 1y ago

The first video induced actual physical nausea. I had to stop playback or I’m sure I would have thrown up. And I don’t suffer from motion sickness etc. There’s definitely something “uncanny valley” about it.

ageitgey 1y ago

The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago
Rick Astley is so ubiquitous now, thanks to Memes, the AI is never gonna give him up.
- latentsea 1y ago
  We know the rules, and so do AI
  - matula 1y ago
    * slow clap *

energy123 1y ago

The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!"

brap 1y ago

I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad. Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV. It was the auto-smoothing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect

chneu 1y ago
It also has to do with how basically everything is filmed for Netflix/streaming nowadays.
- topranks 1y ago
  Not really sure I get why that would be a factor
ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
It is especially bad for animated shows that have made an explicit artistic choice to let (parts of) the animation progress at a lower frame rate. My kids watched "spider-man: across the spider-verse" at a friends place where smoothing was not turned off, and it completely ruined the artistic feel and made the movie feel like a stuttering video game.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.
  - ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
    I think that's a matter of taste, but it definitely doesn't make it easier to watch them when the frame rate randomly switches between low and high all the time :).
  - 1y ago

hliyan 1y ago

This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc.

hdgvhicv 1y ago
When stock price has to grow 8% more than gdp this is inevitable.
wickedsight 1y ago
> pushing technology that end consumers don't want Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was.
- lifestyleguru 1y ago
  Failure of 3D TVs was one unprecedented glorious victory of a customer, where customers not buying it indeed led to its disappearance. Otherwise I'm furiously not buying other ridiculous stuff but my consumer decision does nothing.
  - vrighter 1y ago
    I still have one! But there is, of course, pretty much no 3d content to view on it. Maybe Gran Turismo on ps3
ddq 1y ago
After decades of consumerism, most consumers already have most of what they need/want, so in order to keep selling widgets, corporations must manufacture demand. Enough big screen TVs have already been built and sold to give every American a fully functional 60"+ screen in every room in their residence, enough lightly used ones to go around to completely negate the need to manufacture more. But profit must not go down for any reason, so they must invent gimmicks to push the latest and greatest model onto a public that can't even tell the difference without marketing propaganda. The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit. I say enough is enough.

prmoustache 1y ago

The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this. Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.

ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content. It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses. It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology. It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies.
  - Sammi 1y ago
    I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences.

internet_points 1y ago

Wow, that is horrible! The 2:07 mark where AI put in some generic Rick Astley-alike for Bowie, just made me feel sick

omnimus 1y ago

What makes it uneasy is not only upscaling but they are generating new frames to make it 60fps. 60fps by itself feels fake (check some footage of The Hobbit that tried 48fps). It feels like video games. It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural. The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps.

petralithic 1y ago
It is just habitual and I feel it's making movies look terrible, especially panning shots look like a stuttery mess that is almost unwatchable for me at 24 FPS.
i80and 1y ago
I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.

robotbikes 1y ago

This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.

Retr0id 1y ago

I also think it looks like garbage, but I wonder if maybe it looks better on small mobile screens - where you can't actually see the mangled details, but can perceive that it "looks sharper"

cercatrova 1y ago

I like upscaling and frame interpolation but as always, the TV does not have the hardware to do a good job. If you use neural network models, it works and looks a lot better without looking plastic-like.

alienbaby 1y ago

I think its preferred to get this kind of smooth unreal effect for services like youtube, but not because it looks better; but rather because it compresses better for storage. Less fine detail overall helps video compression.

andrepd 1y ago

> I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception When I took LSD for the first time, I realised it was hitting when everything started looking like stable diffusion

lm28469 1y ago

> Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's? Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations. Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers.

hliyan 1y ago
This sounds like two completely different things. I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off. This is neurological, not generational.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird
  - hliyan 1y ago
    In that case the answer is even simpler: what few young people I know (yes, N = small) have been the loudest in complaining about the feature. They seem to prefer "cinema quality" the same way some people of my generation like vinyl records.

latexr 1y ago

> Who seriously thinks this looks better I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference. Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online). > I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s Looking at the original, it’s obvious why: that section was really blurry. The AI version doesn’t understand camera effects. https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126 https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126 Thank you for providing both links, it made the comparison really simple.

justsid 1y ago
If you watch the average person watch TV, they don’t actually pay attention to it. Everyone is just on their phone. It drives me crazy watching just about anything with people because I look around and no one even has their eyes on the TV. It’s just background noise.

raffael_de 1y ago

Yes, 2:07 is just ridiculous. That's more Matt Damon than David Bowie. To be fair, though, this upscale was not committed by Youtube. https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127 https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127

maplethorpe 1y ago

Your post just made me realise that as soon as the technology is ready, built-in AI upscaling will be just as ubiquitous as motion smoothing.

incone123 1y ago
Not sure if you're serious, but wouldn't it be more efficient to upscale at source and stream the result? Extra bandwidth versus a million TVs all doing the same computation.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Yeah but that wouldn't let them slap AI on the TV box as a selling point
- maplethorpe 1y ago
  I mean, I imagine that will be happening as well, but I don't think it would stop TV manufacturers from adding their own layers on top. Just like you can choose from different color and sound profiles, maybe you could choose a "cinematic" AI filter, which adds artificial rim lights to everything on screen. Obviously this is a nightmare scenario for filmmakers, but it also feels like the logical conclusion of where we're heading.

chrsw 1y ago

I pulled up a podcast on YouTube the other week of just two people facing the camera and their faces side-by-side the screen. I had to just use audio only. I couldn't actually look at the video. The guest on the show was using some kind of AI filter for his video stream. I guess because he was on a low-quality phone camera, and he thought the filter would be better?? But the result was very disturbing. I almost barfed on my desk when his image came up.

actionfromafar 1y ago

I think the only way to future-proof 24 fps content is to render it as 120fps, but repeat every frame 5 times. 5 * 24 = 120fps. I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended.

jazzyjackson 1y ago
It was probably a Technology Connections video or something but I learned that film projectors actually flash each frame 3 times before progressing to the next so the light is flickering 72 times a second, while the image is only changing 24 fps.

jdhzzz 1y ago

You will see the same thing on any online real estate listing. I spend more time wondering why it looks so weird than I do looking at what the picture is attempting to show.

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