Netflix Used AI To Upscale 'A Different World' and It's a Melted Nightmare (vice.com) 27
Netflix has deployed AI upscaling on the 1987-1993 sitcom "A Different World," resulting in significant visual artifacts documented by technology commentator Scott Hanselman. The AI processing, intended to enhance the original 360p footage for modern displays, has generated distortions resembling "lava lamp effects" on actors' bodies, improperly rendered mouths, and misshapen background objects including posters and tennis rackets. This marks Netflix's second controversial AI implementation in recent months, following December's AI-powered dubbing and mouth morphing on "La Palma."
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has generated distortions resembling "lava lamp effects" on actors' bodies, improperly rendered mouths, and misshapen background objects including posters and tennis rackets.
Sounds just like translivergrunt posts!
What is a "translivergrunt" post? I can't find anything on DuckDuckGo and then I tried Google.
Re:Sounds just like... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Also my stalker is now commenting even before I do. Which is hilarious.
What else can AI do? (Score:1, Funny)
Can it slice? Can it dice? Can it prepare a five-star, three-course dinner out of a can of beans, an onion, and leftover cold cuts?
Can it replace too-big-for-their-britches skeptics who doubt the flawlessness of AI-generated content?
Can it down-vote my post before breakfast?
Can it play a game?
Can it dominate all the slashdot headlines for days on end to stay relevant?
Who knows?
Where's a link to the video? (Score:5, Informative)
There's one screenshot on there, I think .. but where's a video showing this? A link I could find was https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] but it doesn't look terrible. I think this is a great idea though, though they definitely need to keep improving the technology. I would like to see my favorite 70s and 80s shows get upscaled.
Re: Where's a link to the video? (Score:3)
There's a funny thing with video where if you distort anything other than the focus of the scene the core audience doesn't notice it. You pretty much have to be neurodivergent to notice because it isn't the part of the scene that is intended to be the focus.
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But did you notice the moonwalking gorilla?
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Lots of people today have very large 8K TVs at arms length almost, in their living rooms. Pixelation and smoothing/blurring of older videos that looked fine in low resolution is a thing that people do notice, especially after they've gotten used to the higher resolution.
Not everyone watches videos on their smartphone.
The ***** Show (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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"Where's the video" is exactly what I came here to write. All they have is a long non-fast-forwardable vertical video of a guy ranting about upscaling. Terrible "journalism".
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The original 360p video (Score:3, Funny)
Was the summary written by AI as well? Standard definition NTSC video would be described as 480i, come on now.
Re: The original 360p video (Score:1)
If the article was written by AI, it would have probably been less shitty in general.
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The 360p is likely the source resolution netflix serves up. Converting 480i60 to 360p30 doesn't lose much fidelity so it's common for streaming.
I don't understand why a less-than-ideal upscaling is a "nightmare". It's not like they destroyed the source and can't do it over with a better, future AI.
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Hard to believe they don't have a higher quality source but I could see some AI systems working almost as well with a smaller size and running much faster. If it's going to not look so great anyway why run slower? Also you can see what people will put up with... I remember a fractal scaling app from the 90s which produced results kind of like that and it was slow. Looked sort of like a smart blur.
Do they have any quality control? (Score:2)
Does anybody critically watch it before release?
Or do they simply not care
Old-school upscaling doesn't require AI and it's probably all the show needs
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Not "360p" (Score:4, Informative)
Programs shot for NTSC television were the analog equivalent of 720X486i (interlaced) at D1 aspect ratio. This is a whole lot of stuff that few people remember now.
The frame rate was 60 fields per second, with every odd line producing a 1/2 vertical resolution frame at 30 FPS and every even line producing same. With an overall refresh rate of 15khz on an NTSC CRT TV, it was easy to get a noticeable flicker artifact if graphics and camera images were too sharp, so there was a lot of filtering and anti-aliasing going on to give the 'perfect picture' you would see on broadcast television - crisp but not too sharp.
When upscaling, if not done properly it can look terrible. AI is getting better at this when not overdone. You first need to combine the two fields to either make 60 full frames per second or 30 full frames per second, and up-res along the way. It's not magic, and if you go too far (480 / 486i to 4K/30P or 60P) it's gonna look pretty terrible and be a waste of processing time. Right now a good compromise for software like Topaz video is to go for 1280X720, or 2K at the most. That gives you some interpreted sharpness without looking like a Salvador Dali painting. I am sure it will improve over time, but it will be making up a lot of data that was never there to begin with. Modern TVs are so large that this is not a bad thing when done right, NTSC content is noticeably soft on our modern sets.
These TVs are already caable of performing frame doubling of films in realtime, creating the dreaded 'soap opera' effect - because it looks very close to NTSC 60i footage, which all soap operas and lower budget sitcoms were shot, using television cameras instead of film. (higher budget series like Cheers were shot on 35mm and then transferred with a 'pulldown' where frames were doubled or blended to go from 24 FPS to 60i - the end result was seamless and looked like 24 FPS film.)
Anyway, random trivia of technical knowledge slowly being lost to time.
-A former broadcast engineer from the 90s
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Thanks for your insights. I think AI can eventually (10 years from now?) do a good job of "filling in the missing information" in a credible manner. Frankly what Netflix has done doesn't seem like AI .. a lot of it looks like they simply vectorized the scene and then enlarged it to more pixels. The AI would have to be about 10 times smarter than what we have today. For example if a close up shot in the original of a person reveals he has a mole, that mole better needs to be there in wider shots that have b
"Netflix Used AI To..." (Score:1)
People are effing crazy (Score:2)
The upscaled version looks leaps and bounds better, except for a few glitches that you have to actively look for, but it's "not good enough". OK, watch your blurry 240x360 VHS copy with no details whatsoever.
Gratitude is completely lost on this one.
Huh? (Score:2)
Netflix Used AI To Upscale 'A Different World' and It's a Melted Nightmare
... and this wondrous technology is supposed to end all human labor by 2030, solve cancer and climate change, take us to the stars and make us a post scarcity civilization (according to the AI bros).