Exactly. I think that many people see colorization as a mode of 'renew and replace'. But I see it as an addendum, or an addition to. It gives audiences more to choose from. I'd even love to see recoloring of existing color films. I think that many films nowadays live and die on their use of color alone.
In that case the people should know before watching the colorized version that they are going to watch an alternate cut, which is probably going to cause a change on the tone and quality of the movie (we don't want people disliking great classics because the colorization was bad)
The only idiot is you, disrepectful moron. The Earth was never flat, but those films were shot in B/W. Many of them were shot like that exactly because the author wanted that way, and not because he couldn't chose other way. Like Raging Bull, for example. The complete Film Noir style would loose it's meaning and value if films would be colored.
The reverse is true: Colorizing adds AHISTORICAL colors to historical films, something that matters very little with most works of fiction. Obviously, films shot in black and white as an artistic choice, like those of Ingmar Bergmann, should stay black and white (and be forgotten quickly), but the works of the old silent film stars were only shot that way because nothing better was available. Colorizing has become better. Just watch Buster Keaton's "Cops" here on TH-cam, to see it in a way that Keaton would almost certainly have enjoyed.
@RonBear That is indeed the implication. One should respect the director's choice, but the audience's choice, which must be respected likewise, will generally be for films that are a bit easier on the eye. Bergman's films, like (say) Tarkovsky's, are a minority choice. Younger audiences didn't grow up without the choice of color. The minority that will put up with black and white as a choice will necessarily become smaller and smaller. In fact, the choice will increasingly be seen as impertinent! Also, the number of films finding an audience must have a limit somewhere. As new films become available, many old films are necessarily forgotten, a process that will be much faster for black and white productions. I suspect that you don't agree with me, but in my view the artistic choice to make COMPLETE films that exclude half the visual system must always be questionable. Use of black and white for parts of a film can obviously make sense in rare circumstances. I am thinking of "Shock Corridor", set in black and white in a psychiatric hospital, with flashbacks to patients' earlier healthy lives in color. The film is essentially forgotten already, regardless of an Oscar-worthy performance in which a black patient delivers a racist rant, as he believes that he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Oblivion almost by design is simply a consequence artists must face. Unless it's colorized (and that fairly soon) Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" will be forgotten, too. I would miss that film, but I'd want to know more about its production history before I'd want it to be altered for modern audiences. "Psycho" was made on a ridiculously low budget. I would be surprised if Hitchcock would have had any objections to colorization, though I suspect that his own choice would be a complete remake. Tarantino's animated cartoon sequences work better for me than the inclusion of black and white, but then audiences differ at least as much as film makers do. If you like Bergman's films (I don't), I suggest that you buy them while they are still available.
I think it depends on the film. For some, the lack of color was an important part of the director's presentation. For others, it's merely an artifact of limited technology that the directors would have abandoned if color was a viable option of the time. For example, Hitchcock fully embraced Technicolor with _North by Northwest,_ yet a year later he not only intentionally shot _Psycho_ in black & white, the film would lose its tone if it were in color. A counter-example I think would be Fritz Lang's lavish production, _Metropolis._ The studio spent a lot of money to break many boundaries and rules for contemporary film making. It would be absurd to think Lang wouldn't have opted for full color as well if it was possible at the time. From the colorized clips I'd seen so far, it wouldn't seem too much out of place with other early color sci-fi films--ignoring the lack of sound and some anachronistic choices of course. On that note, I've seen some vintage clips with sound added, but I haven't heard of that being done with a full-length silent film. I'm sure it would be just as controversial.
While I think that's true, the fact that Lang was limited to Black and White means that he still made lighting and set-design decisions with Black and White in mind, meaning that Metropolis is still in its DNA a movie that is made for Black and White. The only way to get a true colorized version of Metropolis that fits whatever vision Lang might have had, is to resurrect Lang and have him start from scratch with color in mind.
I think its nice to see some of these old movies in color, but its also just not the way they were designed to be seen (not in some film purist "they are just better in black and white" type of way) as in the colors that were chosen for costumes and outfits were often like that to provide different shades of gray with nice contrast, so if you properly old films you realize some of the colors were really funky, like lots of pinks instead of reds and other oddities like that (if any of the automatic tools get that correct is yet to be seen)
It's worth noting that "Lord of the Rings" as a film was completely color graded in post production. So it's possible that the Neural Network rendition is actually more accurate to the original footage than the color graded final version we see in the movie.
@Sam Mills In which case the AI version is artistically inferior, because the world of Lord of the Rings is supposed to be set in a mythical, magical past.
I'm not totally against colorization IF they can do it right. The technology seems to be improving, but until they can add color without it being obviously fake, it's a distraction, not an improvement.
Public taste in film, as described in this video, suggests to me that a great many people who, had they been born two hundred years ago, would not have survived childhood, are now surviving to adulthood.
Given how neural networks are trained, it would probably require an entirely new dataset to work with to make any improvement on the cartoons in particular, since hand drawn animation is so different in its use of block colour from photography. The algorithm could optimised as well to take into account subject continuity across frames, but interesting video and great overview of where the technology is currently compared to where it might go in the future! Also, I wonder why the hall of mirrors scene from Citizen Kane ended up so red? I wonder what the algorithm "thinks" it's "seeing"? Hmm...
It's not just a question of black and white versus color; improved resolution is key. Without good resolution the coloring effort is a total waste of time. Ah, and new audiences also demand perfect sound, which most of the old movies either lost, or never had.
What i would really like to see is technology like this put to use to accurately colorize old news footage. Seeing a realistic Teddy Roosevelt in color could be much more engaging to a student, from an academic perspective.
Colorized films are their own artform. Imagine coloring every single frame of a movie, to create something that looks and feels incredibly different. Don't use it as a replacement, think of it as a reinterpretation of sort.
Photography is a reproducible medium. Whether you prefer the original or colourized version is of no importance because the original still exists and history has not been destroyed. It would be a rather different matter if I were to visit The Louvre and draw a moustache and glasses on The Mona Lisa.
I don't know why, but the auto colorized scene from the hobbit felt really natural compared to the original. I guess the original was a little idealistic to feel totally natural (I'm not going to be like "it looks so CGI!" or whatever, but that is probably why someone would say that). It's almost like it adds a bit of grit, almost like a far less favorable counterpart to adding film grain to a digital video clip.
In the Laurel & Hardy series, the interior of houses, furniture etc. looks much better than even if it had colour originally. So good colours and matching each other. That is I guess, if a let's say 80's colour movie videtaped it, would have come with shadows and darker than they are colorized. Plus painting it, the deffects the objects might have had otherwise - can't be seen, the colour erases them. It's kind of better, like a perfect reality, if the colorization process is good.
Yes, 1980's colorization sucks by today's standards. It's decent now, if you look at the WWI documentary, "They Shall Not Grow Old." Of course, there was no cinematography then in newsreel footage, nor were the hand cranked, single focus film cameras up to the challenge of capturing great images.
Wonderful narration, I could listen to you describing paint dry, in real time. You have a gift, I wish we heard more of your astounding and compelling voice.
I wonder how the Neural Network would colorize the original Godzilla (1954) and compare it to: - the 1977 Italian rerelease (The infamous "Cozzilla" release) - the studio recolorization done for the Godzilla 7 trailer/Godzilla vs. Destoroyah teaser trailer
Have never enjoyed watching colourised film, the original b/w versions always seem a lot better and atmospheric adding colour seems to change the mood of the film. Old films have a charm all of there own, and the directors have chosen the lighting and set dressings to optimise the look in black and white As an alternative option fine, but personally I'd go original version every time
as MoviesForLife has also mentioned it here in his comment, "I'm fine with colouring if it's considered as an alternate cut, it should never replace the original work." also, many directors and producers in the past loved to have their movies shot and shown in color but they couldn't do it simply because either the technology wasn't available at the time, or when it was, they just couldn't afford its higher costs ... so, what would be wrong with colorizing those movies really and still have the original B&W version too? btw, some colorized movies in this video are of much lower resolution than the original one ... that's another major reason why their colorized version doesn't catch up ... do the colorization correctly and onto a better original copy and the results would be quite good!
What do you mean by "some colorized movies in this video are of much lower resolution than the original one"? You mean that the "some colorized movies" were rendered in lower resolution afterwards than the original works? Did I catch it right?..
@@rassilontdavros3004 i know this is old, but it would be easy to modify the code to assign that part of the image to be grass. its not the colorization technology that cant do it, its the identification process that's almost impossible for a computer to do by itself.
They're already doing that with some movies. I think I saw a clip about them creating an IMAX version of "The Wizard of Oz" in 3D. They were also making the sound Surround and adding to the frequency range of it.
@@daveindezmenez There is a 3D version of The Wizard Of Oz and it's even available on bluray. It's actually _very_ good. They scanned the original negative in 8K, rotoscoped everything and created the 3D from there. They took their time and genuinely made of the best 3D conversions ever and it really suits the movie. It's an interesting thought exercise to think how directors like Victor Fleming, Orson Welles, Sergio Leone, Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock would have used Imax, digital photography or 3D had it been available to them. (Hitch did make a 3D movie but it was analog and far more cumbersome than a digital 3D rig is).
The Neural Network colorizations look like an old warn out print of a 2 strip Technicolor movie. The 80s through 90s colorization all looked like pastel colors and colored everything the same few colors and giving people a pink skin tone, it was just terrible. What is done today with a lot of colorization of old TV shows looks more natural and correct making the coloring process A LOT better.
You can't use a photo conversion NN to convert a video. A video conversion NN has to account for both spatial continuity within the frame and temporal continuity between frames - the latter of which is not at all necessary in a photo conversion tool.
Right now it seems that we need to color them manually frame by frame and since that is very expensive we need to only do it with very special releases like "Anne of Green Gables 100th anniversary" and have it as an option not the default.
GusMOfficialChannel No, I didn't say that, what I said is that people who shot down movies for the fact of being b/w are, because it's dumb, an ignorant is not the one who doesn't know but the one who decides not to know. In this case it's the magic of what a good filmaker can do without needing colour.
Why? Because I like paying attention to the actual scenes instead of staring at subtitles for a whole film?Don't get me wrong, I have seen movies with subtitles before, but I don't blame those who prefer to watch movies where they can actually hear and discern what is being said, without taking any attention away from what is on the screen.
Potterhead2082001 Dude, I'm mexican, most of the movies I can watch without subtitles are dumb comedies of Eugenio Derbez. If I had that mentality I would've never become a film buff
Only the most unsophisticated of film goers insist on colorizing everything. The problem with colorization is that it looks like those old black and white photos in yearbooks from the 1960's where color was added, but made the people in the photos look unnatural. That's because natural skin color can't be achieved by laying one shade of color onto a black and white portrait, which is what the colorization of "It's a Wonderful Life" looks like. Everyone in the picture looks as if they're suffering from jaundice. The second problem is that the production design for black and white demanded that whites, blacks, and grays had to be easily differentiated from one another to create depth and interest. Even costuming had to be adjusted. This meant that the colors used on the sets had to be adjusted, not to maximize color appeal, but to maximize the artistry and lighting for black and white photography. This is why the sets that look incredible in black and white look incredibly dull and uninteresting in color. Watch any colorized film and one of the first things that jumps out is how unappealing the sets look. They were literally designed for black and white photography, not color.
How did they get that footage of Citizen Cane? CST colorized those very frames of Citizen Kane as a test. And then it was revealed that the original contract Orson Wells had forbid any process similar to colorization and so the project was scrapped. Later the master tapes of the Citizen Kane test were stolen from the film vault. Are these those stolen tapes that we are seeing? Who produced this video?
I don't really care to be honest, I think both aspects of the original work and modern attempts at colorization are fantastic ideas. I love seeing two viewpoints to an identical film. It's also pretty neat to see how film makers originally made movies to be like.
People say like these films will improve with adding color, but the film will be exactly the same except you're having a worse visual experience. B&W it's an lost art specially because it takes advantage of lightning and framing. Adding color to films adds an unnecessary layer of information that isn't important and neither planned by the filmmakers. It's exactly the same as taking an Van Gogh painting and "correct" the colors.
Just like giving just a 'yes' or 'no' vote - it does not cover a full range of colouring choices. The Wizard of Oz and other film used the contrast well. In some vampire movies, for example, sepia tones could suddenly introduce a vivid red for blood. Scenes can go from gently colourisation to vivid and so on. A film could even have a team just focused on the colourising effects. There can also be blends of different methods. My preference in old film would be to sharpen the image where the quality is poor or improve the sound quality. Sound can be what makes a film.
So, are the colors freely improvised? For example: If it shows a woman in a red shirt was her shirt really red at the time she was wearing it or was it just painted red?
The colorized Raging Bull in the preview picture looked interesting. It's non existence in the actual feature was a little puzzling. It's that simple. Any lengthy and raging debate about the good or evil of colorization is pretty much beside the point.
this is really good haha thanks for uploading I have recently become really interested in the cinematography of films thanks to this channel so I have a huge respect as to what you are doing :D
Algorithmia has been not trained on cartoons or whether hand drawed stuff so that’s why it just colorizes it orange, so i really want to see updates of it to make it happen.
I wonder how results would have varied given the ability to segment datasets. For example, for the mickey mouse clip if the neural network was only provided clips from other cartoons, or for the Hobbit scene if it was only using clips from fantasy films.
Many, and maybe most, B&W films would have been in color had that not been so expensive at the time. The design of films for B&W by directors, cinematographers, art directors, etc, was because they were only able to film in B&W. New colorization processes such as Legend Films are vastly superior to the old Ted Turner processes, and achieve great results. It's not done with an AI program. AI colorization is still hit & miss.
Many black and white films were made that way to reduce costs, and many would benefit from colour. I have several where this has been done expertly to the point where you cannot tell they were once black and white. Unfortunately it is easy to find movies which have suffered very poor colorisation, and such disasters rightly cause people to say that colorisation ruins movies, many such bad examples can easily be found on TH-cam where something called AI just gives most things various shades of shimmering unstable purple. It is people who use this inferior process who give colorisation a bad name.
I think it depends on whether Black & White was an artistic choice or a limitation of technology. You shouldn't colorize Schindler's List or the Kansas bookends to The Wizard of Oz for example.
Even if the black & white was dictated by technological limitations, that is still how the movie was shot. Shooting in black & white is completely different from shooting in colour, so colourization looks completely wrong in my opinion. The need to have your movies colourized to better connect with it, would be like saying: 'I like Van Gogh's paintings, but only when they're rendered in LEGO' (although that would make for an interesting art project, now that I think of it).
the scene from LOTR is -as narrator said- heavily color corrected to have an unrealistic fantasy feeling so AI actually did a fair job of painting the hills in bland neutral brown/green as it doesnt know if it is summer or autumn (only real problem was actually the flicker). it was not a fair choice of scene. not defending the damn robot, just making a point :) that being said, b&w films should be left b&w, their cinematography and lighting is different than a colour film and should be left in original monochrome. nothing wrong with a b&w movie
I don't know I kind of feel like the network is a more realistic view it's most likely based on its programming but with fine tuning it would be very different, thing that people forget is that footage of the hills in colour was also colour graded so it's really like interpreting it differently than simply getting it wrong
Some were made to be seen in Black and White. It is all about the mood of the film. Which colorization does take from the picture. Playing Chess with death, or Robert Mitchum as a sociopath preacher, and on and on.
So, what's the point here? Certainly colorization isn't most film historians favorite new trendy thing on the market, but, you have to admit, it is something. As long as you still preserve and sold the original black and white versions of film, why not add color? Maybe some of those directors wanted his or her films to be in color.
You don't know what the actual colors of the walls, clothes, cars, boats, etc. are. They are just conjecture. The colorization of fleshtones is hideous. Compare a real color movie to the colorized variety. They don't sparkle. The techniques differed in shooting black and white vs. color. They even show Raging Bull in the montage. Scorsese is not dead, and I dare say, not amused.
One more add I'm really interested in the perfection of the new color algorithm. So far not so good but just think one day it may just do the trick and look like the beautiful old Technicolor movies, who knows?
I'll give it a try.....(Unknown); Night of the Hunter; The Haunting; (Unknown); Citizen Kane; (Unknown); The Third Man; (Unknown); (Unknown); The Seventh Seal; that's 5 out of 10.
The commercial aspect of it seems pretty pointless when a lot of these older films don't attract large modern audiences anyway. So definitely don't do it just to do it!! That being said, some films were definitely meant to be colorized, such as Meliés' films. Others like It's a Wonderful Life and Citizen Kane were absolutely made with black-and-white in mind. Many films, especially the moodier ones, live right in the middle--often using tinted film for mood and time of day. I can't imagine watching the Cabinet of Dr Caligari in full black-and-white. So a lot of it comes to interpreting and respecting intent. I personally wouldn't mind colorizing Chaplin's shorts but his feature films have an entirely different tone that I would leave alone--maybe play lightly with a couple sequences. But the AI conceptually misses the mark if we are depending on it to interpret the scene and choose the colors for us. Early hand-painted and technicolor colorization was vibrant and intense and very purposeful in the hues they selected. Of course automating it would turn out to be a muddy mess! I think the AI would work much better if an artist gave it pre-sets and palettes for each scene.
The subtitle statistic only goes for American or other countries where they don't regularly show subtitles. Here in the Netherlands, we don't mind subs at all.
4:40 it's a bad example, because the bw Disney cartoons were never done with the colors used later. So there are no different gray tones to feed the artificial intelligence.
Original work will always be original & actually there is no need to play with the sentiment of golden era . It's our historical asset & it should be as it is.
the thing is, unless they are convinced that this very expensive process can actually make its money back, colourisation is simply not going to happen on a large scale People seem perfectly happy watching them in their original black and white formats
There are only 2 films I don’t want colourised, the wizard of oz because it’s not worth doing and it feels magical when you first see it in colour, I don’t know why you’d do this but who knows what studios think, the other is citizen Kane because of reasons I can’t put into words (great argument).
5:15 talking about black and white and subtitled films reminds me of the sketch on The Fast Show (called Brilliant! on BBC America in the US) Did you see that Bergman film on the telly? What a complete waste of time that was! One, it was in black and white. Two, it was subtitled. Three, no one got shot. Four, no one got their kit off. Five, I'll get me coat.
With the rise of Nvidia's Turing architecture that they have introduced as a part of their GeForce, Titan, Tesla, and Quadro RTX line of Graphics Cards, I feel that this program will need a Then and Now update sometime in the Early 202X decade: Through resources such as Nvidia's NGX software and the up to 072 RT Cores for Raytracing that are found in the Quadro RTX 6000 and 8000, Colour Restoration will only become much easier as the years progress, and this will become significantly faster, improved, and more well defined once the company comes out with their Ampere architecture in the next generation of GPUs to come from them. The Deep Learning demo for Colour Restoration shown in the program, while not perfect (I have tested it myself in recent months), it is a proof of what Volta and Turing Era cards have set out to assist in optimizing, and once more software becomes made to support those GPUs' Tensor and RT Cores proper, I've a good feeling that we will start seeing these be made noticeably faster, with better visual quality and efficiency all around; one notable case of where at least the Quadro RTX cards would be of a benefit are the HD Remasters of older CBS programs in colour, including (but not limited to) I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dark Shadows: Season 0I, The Twilight Zone (I959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (I955) (many of the opening scenes with Alfred were redrawn in colour for the Thirtieth Anniversary remake series in I985), Guiding Light, The Edge of Night, and As the World Turns, among plentiful others, the current way that they do it requires extreme Colour Masking in Adobe After Effects that is never always accurate (especially with Lucille Ball's Hair, that Orange mask is floating all over the place in Colour Remasters) and although there will be some work to optimize the look of certain colours on a frame by frame basis, the fact that this is becoming more Hardware~based and not fully dependent on software and pure skill truly does make all the difference, the industry will truly benefit as Raytracing becomes more mainstream and it will change up the dynamics of how we view shows and films alike (especially once you toss Frame Interpolation into the mix, but that's another story for another time), eventually nothing will ever be in Grayscale anymore as the times progress. (:
Perhaps, maybe, if a film being in black and white is a barrier to you seeing it or becoming interested in it, just accept that it’s probably not for you, and that you’ll just have to go through life missing out on something cool and wonderful, and then you’ll die a lonely, uninteresting death. OR, just for the second that it takes, realize that black and white cinematography is, and has always been, an aesthetic choice, and is not some deficiency.
every film has his own character, thats why a digital footage has to converted first to support specific film characteristics. dont rely on a AI that you dont have implemented by yourself.
It is kind of interesting to think of how things have changed in 5 years since this video was uploaded. Look at upscaling and AI enhancement since then - the Star Trek TNG blu rays are about 10 years old and had to do some upscaling for it's release and it was noticeable when done and yet now you have people using AI enhancement on dvd quality clips from Deep Space Nine and Voyager to get HD quality with shockingly good results. Why? It takes time for the neural networks to learn. While costly, you can now take any halfway decent SD show, like a lot of the shows done on video, and create an HD release that looks good. This is going to be no different, colorization is already much better than it was 5 years ago as people have tried it and the networks have developed further. I don't think it will ever get to the point where it is 100% perfect 100% of the time but I think we are getting to the point where for general use it is an option and a good one.
I'm fine with colouring if it's considered as an alternate cut, it should never replace the original work.
Exactly. I think that many people see colorization as a mode of 'renew and replace'.
But I see it as an addendum, or an addition to. It gives audiences more to choose from. I'd even love to see recoloring of existing color films. I think that many films nowadays live and die on their use of color alone.
In that case the people should know before watching the colorized version that they are going to watch an alternate cut, which is probably going to cause a change on the tone and quality of the movie (we don't want people disliking great classics because the colorization was bad)
what is this movement of idiots saying that is vandalism colouring old movies? is flat earth the next video you all watch after this?
who said that?
The only idiot is you, disrepectful moron. The Earth was never flat, but those films were shot in B/W. Many of them were shot like that exactly because the author wanted that way, and not because he couldn't chose other way. Like Raging Bull, for example. The complete Film Noir style would loose it's meaning and value if films would be colored.
The true value of all of this is in restoring historical films. Look at what Peter Jackson is doing with WW I footage.
The reverse is true: Colorizing adds AHISTORICAL colors to historical films, something that matters very little with most works of fiction. Obviously, films shot in black and white as an artistic choice, like those of Ingmar Bergmann, should stay black and white (and be forgotten quickly), but the works of the old silent film stars were only shot that way because nothing better was available.
Colorizing has become better. Just watch Buster Keaton's "Cops" here on TH-cam, to see it in a way that Keaton would almost certainly have enjoyed.
@RonBear That is indeed the implication. One should respect the director's choice, but the audience's choice, which must be respected likewise, will generally be for films that are a bit easier on the eye. Bergman's films, like (say) Tarkovsky's, are a minority choice. Younger audiences didn't grow up without the choice of color. The minority that will put up with black and white as a choice will necessarily become smaller and smaller. In fact, the choice will increasingly be seen as impertinent! Also, the number of films finding an audience must have a limit somewhere. As new films become available, many old films are necessarily forgotten, a process that will be much faster for black and white productions.
I suspect that you don't agree with me, but in my view the artistic choice to make COMPLETE films that exclude half the visual system must always be questionable. Use of black and white for parts of a film can obviously make sense in rare circumstances. I am thinking of "Shock Corridor", set in black and white in a psychiatric hospital, with flashbacks to patients' earlier healthy lives in color. The film is essentially forgotten already, regardless of an Oscar-worthy performance in which a black patient delivers a racist rant, as he believes that he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Oblivion almost by design is simply a consequence artists must face.
Unless it's colorized (and that fairly soon) Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" will be forgotten, too. I would miss that film, but I'd want to know more about its production history before I'd want it to be altered for modern audiences. "Psycho" was made on a ridiculously low budget. I would be surprised if Hitchcock would have had any objections to colorization, though I suspect that his own choice would be a complete remake.
Tarantino's animated cartoon sequences work better for me than the inclusion of black and white, but then audiences differ at least as much as film makers do.
If you like Bergman's films (I don't), I suggest that you buy them while they are still available.
"Restoring" means returning something to its original condition. Colorization *never* does, no matter the circumstances/purposes of filming.
@@derdritte7957 Yes, colourization has nothing to do with restoration, in fact, it's quite the opposite.
What Jackson is doing with historical footage doesn’t bother me. Footage isn’t art.
I think it depends on the film. For some, the lack of color was an important part of the director's presentation. For others, it's merely an artifact of limited technology that the directors would have abandoned if color was a viable option of the time. For example, Hitchcock fully embraced Technicolor with _North by Northwest,_ yet a year later he not only intentionally shot _Psycho_ in black & white, the film would lose its tone if it were in color. A counter-example I think would be Fritz Lang's lavish production, _Metropolis._ The studio spent a lot of money to break many boundaries and rules for contemporary film making. It would be absurd to think Lang wouldn't have opted for full color as well if it was possible at the time. From the colorized clips I'd seen so far, it wouldn't seem too much out of place with other early color sci-fi films--ignoring the lack of sound and some anachronistic choices of course.
On that note, I've seen some vintage clips with sound added, but I haven't heard of that being done with a full-length silent film. I'm sure it would be just as controversial.
The Frankenstein movies are better in bw
While I think that's true, the fact that Lang was limited to Black and White means that he still made lighting and set-design decisions with Black and White in mind, meaning that Metropolis is still in its DNA a movie that is made for Black and White. The only way to get a true colorized version of Metropolis that fits whatever vision Lang might have had, is to resurrect Lang and have him start from scratch with color in mind.
I think seeing those colorized Citizen Kane scenes will give me nightmares
You must go to a psychiatrist as soon as possible.
Living Abstraction Then don't watch it lol
@@CaptenMidnite13 He already saw them you moron LoL
Agreed! But I didn't mind seeing some scenes from "My Man Godfrey", as the cinematography isn't as important as in Kane.
I think its nice to see some of these old movies in color, but its also just not the way they were designed to be seen (not in some film purist "they are just better in black and white" type of way) as in the colors that were chosen for costumes and outfits were often like that to provide different shades of gray with nice contrast, so if you properly old films you realize some of the colors were really funky, like lots of pinks instead of reds and other oddities like that (if any of the automatic tools get that correct is yet to be seen)
A colorization of Citizen Kane makes it almost look like an abstract horror movie, it's really creepy looking.
MrMortsnarg If is done right, no it will not.
It's worth noting that "Lord of the Rings" as a film was completely color graded in post production. So it's possible that the Neural Network rendition is actually more accurate to the original footage than the color graded final version we see in the movie.
@supernumery ?,ok
not talking about how the Neural Network was trained, most likely with sRGB JPGs grabbed from Instagram. hahah
@Sam Mills In which case the AI version is artistically inferior, because the world of Lord of the Rings is supposed to be set in a mythical, magical past.
Those hills were almost certainly green on set as well and not brown.
how about a step further; convert it to volumetric VR, so that we can sit inside the scene?
I'm not totally against colorization IF they can do it right. The technology seems to be improving, but until they can add color without it being obviously fake, it's a distraction, not an improvement.
Automatic colonization cause sometimes rusty clothing and wrong colors, especially when the colors are known.
It's often horrifying. Just as bad as can be.
I'm that guy who actually stops channel surfing to check out anything in black and white, driving everyone else in the room nuts...
Public taste in film, as described in this video, suggests to me that a great many people who, had they been born two hundred years ago, would not have survived childhood, are now surviving to adulthood.
Given how neural networks are trained, it would probably require an entirely new dataset to work with to make any improvement on the cartoons in particular, since hand drawn animation is so different in its use of block colour from photography. The algorithm could optimised as well to take into account subject continuity across frames, but interesting video and great overview of where the technology is currently compared to where it might go in the future! Also, I wonder why the hall of mirrors scene from Citizen Kane ended up so red? I wonder what the algorithm "thinks" it's "seeing"? Hmm...
It's not just a question of black and white versus color; improved resolution is key. Without good resolution the coloring effort is a total waste of time. Ah, and new audiences also demand perfect sound, which most of the old movies either lost, or never had.
a good job in colorization will look good. a bad job will look bad.
I'll be happy when the DeOldify software everyone keeps using is replaced by something that doesn't default everything to purple and beige.
What i would really like to see is technology like this put to use to accurately colorize old news footage. Seeing a realistic Teddy Roosevelt in color could be much more engaging to a student, from an academic perspective.
3 minutes into the video, I went to the colorizing website and spent the last hour going through family black and white photos and colorized them!
Would it he possible to color multiple photos?
Colorized films are their own artform. Imagine coloring every single frame of a movie, to create something that looks and feels incredibly different. Don't use it as a replacement, think of it as a reinterpretation of sort.
Go back to Russia.
@@Soul74 Bro not everyone who disagrees with you is a communist
Photography is a reproducible medium. Whether you prefer the original or colourized version is of no importance because the original still exists and history has not been destroyed. It would be a rather different matter if I were to visit The Louvre and draw a moustache and glasses on The Mona Lisa.
I don't know why, but the auto colorized scene from the hobbit felt really natural compared to the original. I guess the original was a little idealistic to feel totally natural (I'm not going to be like "it looks so CGI!" or whatever, but that is probably why someone would say that). It's almost like it adds a bit of grit, almost like a far less favorable counterpart to adding film grain to a digital video clip.
They should colorize The Invisible Woman 1940 version, including Gregory Peck's To Kill a Mockingbird.
In the Laurel & Hardy series, the interior of houses, furniture etc. looks much better than even if it had colour originally. So good colours and matching each other. That is I guess, if a let's say 80's colour movie videtaped it, would have come with shadows and darker than they are colorized. Plus painting it, the deffects the objects might have had otherwise - can't be seen, the colour erases them. It's kind of better, like a perfect reality, if the colorization process is good.
Yes, 1980's colorization sucks by today's standards. It's decent now, if you look at the WWI documentary, "They Shall Not Grow Old." Of course, there was no cinematography then in newsreel footage, nor were the hand cranked, single focus film cameras up to the challenge of capturing great images.
The work on the colour - image / motion done on 'They Shall not grow old' is the new benchmark.
Wonderful narration, I could listen to you describing paint dry, in real time. You have a gift, I wish we heard more of your astounding and compelling voice.
Employ her! don't fall in love with her 😂
I wonder how the Neural Network would colorize the original Godzilla (1954) and compare it to:
- the 1977 Italian rerelease (The infamous "Cozzilla" release)
- the studio recolorization done for the Godzilla 7 trailer/Godzilla vs. Destoroyah teaser trailer
how can they tell what's black or brown or dark red.... or yellow from white or any other light color?
but the site in question only colors the photos and in your demonstration you talk about video dilemma
Have never enjoyed watching colourised film, the original b/w versions always seem a lot better and atmospheric
adding colour seems to change the mood of the film.
Old films have a charm all of there own, and the directors have chosen the lighting and set dressings to optimise the look in black and white
As an alternative option fine, but personally I'd go original version every time
as MoviesForLife has also mentioned it here in his comment, "I'm fine with colouring if it's considered as an alternate cut, it should never replace the original work."
also, many directors and producers in the past loved to have their movies shot and shown in color but they couldn't do it simply because either the technology wasn't available at the time, or when it was, they just couldn't afford its higher costs ... so, what would be wrong with colorizing those movies really and still have the original B&W version too?
btw, some colorized movies in this video are of much lower resolution than the original one ... that's another major reason why their colorized version doesn't catch up ... do the colorization correctly and onto a better original copy and the results would be quite good!
What do you mean by "some colorized movies in this video are of much lower resolution than the original one"? You mean that the "some colorized movies" were rendered in lower resolution afterwards than the original works? Did I catch it right?..
To be fair. At 4:02 neural network have the colors right. It's the original who have colors digitally corrected.
Mr. Deadman
To be fair, that’s pretty much the point- it can’t replicate the director’s intent.
@@rassilontdavros3004 i know this is old, but it would be easy to modify the code to assign that part of the image to be grass. its not the colorization technology that cant do it, its the identification process that's almost impossible for a computer to do by itself.
Nope that place is that green in real life
Next step: add third dimension.
They're already doing that with some movies. I think I saw a clip about them creating an IMAX version of "The Wizard of Oz" in 3D. They were also making the sound Surround and adding to the frequency range of it.
@@daveindezmenez There is a 3D version of The Wizard Of Oz and it's even available on bluray. It's actually _very_ good. They scanned the original negative in 8K, rotoscoped everything and created the 3D from there. They took their time and genuinely made of the best 3D conversions ever and it really suits the movie. It's an interesting thought exercise to think how directors like Victor Fleming, Orson Welles, Sergio Leone, Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock would have used Imax, digital photography or 3D had it been available to them. (Hitch did make a 3D movie but it was analog and far more cumbersome than a digital 3D rig is).
That's what 3D conversation is.
The automatic colorizing thing makes everything look like an old movie
I'd say if you re issue a b/w film on Blu Ray, throw in a colorized copy on DVD.
4:48 thats because they were drawn in black and white.
The Neural Network colorizations look like an old warn out print of a 2 strip Technicolor movie. The 80s through 90s colorization all looked like pastel colors and colored everything the same few colors and giving people a pink skin tone, it was just terrible. What is done today with a lot of colorization of old TV shows looks more natural and correct making the coloring process A LOT better.
You can't use a photo conversion NN to convert a video.
A video conversion NN has to account for both spatial continuity within the frame and temporal continuity between frames - the latter of which is not at all necessary in a photo conversion tool.
Why would you add color to raging bull!?
Hey excelent video, appreciate the hard work put in this. Keep it up!! Hug from Argentina
Right now it seems that we need to color them manually frame by frame and since that is very expensive we need to only do it with very special releases like "Anne of Green Gables 100th anniversary" and have it as an option not the default.
How can i colorize videos please by using algorithma
I'm surprised this channel doesn't have more subs. Excellent video keep up the good work!
The amount of work and effort in these videos are amazing. Keep it up, Solomon Society.
but why did the studio manual colorisation leave Kong in black and white?
The best channel in TH-cam!!
Hello from Chile 🇨🇱
People who shot down the movie if it's black and white or in subtitles are ignorants
so if you see black and white movies you're smarter? there's nothing to do with ignorance or knowledge, it's just personal preferences
GusMOfficialChannel No, I didn't say that, what I said is that people who shot down movies for the fact of being b/w are, because it's dumb, an ignorant is not the one who doesn't know but the one who decides not to know. In this case it's the magic of what a good filmaker can do without needing colour.
Why? Because I like paying attention to the actual scenes instead of staring at subtitles for a whole film?Don't get me wrong, I have seen movies with subtitles before, but I don't blame those who prefer to watch movies where they can actually hear and discern what is being said, without taking any attention away from what is on the screen.
Potterhead2082001 Dude, I'm mexican, most of the movies I can watch without subtitles are dumb comedies of Eugenio Derbez. If I had that mentality I would've never become a film buff
Diego Vera Well you can obviously write English pretty well, so I doubt that.
Only the most unsophisticated of film goers insist on colorizing everything. The problem with colorization is that it looks like those old black and white photos in yearbooks from the 1960's where color was added, but made the people in the photos look unnatural. That's because natural skin color can't be achieved by laying one shade of color onto a black and white portrait, which is what the colorization of "It's a Wonderful Life" looks like. Everyone in the picture looks as if they're suffering from jaundice. The second problem is that the production design for black and white demanded that whites, blacks, and grays had to be easily differentiated from one another to create depth and interest. Even costuming had to be adjusted. This meant that the colors used on the sets had to be adjusted, not to maximize color appeal, but to maximize the artistry and lighting for black and white photography. This is why the sets that look incredible in black and white look incredibly dull and uninteresting in color. Watch any colorized film and one of the first things that jumps out is how unappealing the sets look. They were literally designed for black and white photography, not color.
The Lord of the Rings segment looks like it was recorded on a camera in a theater.
the program (2 years ago) was outputting the colorized pictures in a lower resolution, that's why.
I think colorizing black and white movies has a place. But it will never be a replacement for the original b/w. Just an alternative version.
Exact! I am passionate about black and white movies and still, I could not resist doing this video haha th-cam.com/video/E6Vrvunjccc/w-d-xo.html
What do you guys think about my work?
Can't watch it on speakers, volume input too low
How did they get that footage of Citizen Cane? CST colorized those very frames of Citizen Kane as a test. And then it was revealed that the original contract Orson Wells had forbid any process similar to colorization and so the project was scrapped. Later the master tapes of the Citizen Kane test were stolen from the film vault. Are these those stolen tapes that we are seeing? Who produced this video?
I don't really care to be honest, I think both aspects of the original work and modern attempts at colorization are fantastic ideas. I love seeing two viewpoints to an identical film. It's also pretty neat to see how film makers originally made movies to be like.
finally someone who has a brain and think. I agree with you, not with this stupid bitch from the video.
People say like these films will improve with adding color, but the film will be exactly the same except you're having a worse visual experience. B&W it's an lost art specially because it takes advantage of lightning and framing. Adding color to films adds an unnecessary layer of information that isn't important and neither planned by the filmmakers. It's exactly the same as taking an Van Gogh painting and "correct" the colors.
Just like giving just a 'yes' or 'no' vote - it does not cover a full range of colouring choices. The Wizard of Oz and other film used the contrast well. In some vampire movies, for example, sepia tones could suddenly introduce a vivid red for blood. Scenes can go from gently colourisation to vivid and so on.
A film could even have a team just focused on the colourising effects. There can also be blends of different methods.
My preference in old film would be to sharpen the image where the quality is poor or improve the sound quality. Sound can be what makes a film.
So, are the colors freely improvised? For example: If it shows a woman in a red shirt was her shirt really red at the time she was wearing it or was it just painted red?
I wanted to see raging bull
The colorized Raging Bull in the preview picture looked interesting. It's non existence in the actual feature was a little puzzling. It's that simple. Any lengthy and raging debate about the good or evil of colorization is pretty much beside the point.
this is really good haha thanks for uploading I have recently become really interested in the cinematography of films thanks to this channel so I have a huge respect as to what you are doing :D
*Some of those clips look better in Black and White than in colour*
Looks like the Neural Network needs some more work.
Algorithmia has been not trained on cartoons or whether hand drawed stuff so that’s why it just colorizes it orange, so i really want to see updates of it to make it happen.
Can I get a list of the films featured in this video?
What's the classic piece of music that starts playing at 0:26 and continues throughout the video?
3:40 i dont see a problem, its the VHS version of it after played the film about 200 times or so.
I wonder how results would have varied given the ability to segment datasets. For example, for the mickey mouse clip if the neural network was only provided clips from other cartoons, or for the Hobbit scene if it was only using clips from fantasy films.
Many, and maybe most, B&W films would have been in color had that not been so expensive at the time. The design of films for B&W by directors, cinematographers, art directors, etc, was because they were only able to film in B&W. New colorization processes such as Legend Films are vastly superior to the old Ted Turner processes, and achieve great results. It's not done with an AI program. AI colorization is still hit & miss.
Many black and white films were made that way to reduce costs, and many would benefit from colour. I have several where this has been done expertly to the point where you cannot tell they were once black and white.
Unfortunately it is easy to find movies which have suffered very poor colorisation, and such disasters rightly cause people to say that colorisation ruins movies, many such bad examples can easily be found on TH-cam where something called AI just gives most things various shades of shimmering unstable purple. It is people who use this inferior process who give colorisation a bad name.
I think it depends on whether Black & White was an artistic choice or a limitation of technology. You shouldn't colorize Schindler's List or the Kansas bookends to The Wizard of Oz for example.
Even if the black & white was dictated by technological limitations, that is still how the movie was shot. Shooting in black & white is completely different from shooting in colour, so colourization looks completely wrong in my opinion. The need to have your movies colourized to better connect with it, would be like saying: 'I like Van Gogh's paintings, but only when they're rendered in LEGO' (although that would make for an interesting art project, now that I think of it).
What are the movies shown in this video? :c
the scene from LOTR is -as narrator said- heavily color corrected to have an unrealistic fantasy feeling so AI actually did a fair job of painting the hills in bland neutral brown/green as it doesnt know if it is summer or autumn (only real problem was actually the flicker). it was not a fair choice of scene. not defending the damn robot, just making a point :) that being said, b&w films should be left b&w, their cinematography and lighting is different than a colour film and should be left in original monochrome. nothing wrong with a b&w movie
I don't know I kind of feel like the network is a more realistic view it's most likely based on its programming but with fine tuning it would be very different, thing that people forget is that footage of the hills in colour was also colour graded so it's really like interpreting it differently than simply getting it wrong
Some were made to be seen in Black and White. It is all about the mood of the film. Which colorization does take from the picture. Playing Chess with death, or Robert Mitchum as a sociopath preacher, and on and on.
So, what's the point here? Certainly colorization isn't most film historians favorite new trendy thing on the market, but, you have to admit, it is something. As long as you still preserve and sold the original black and white versions of film, why not add color? Maybe some of those directors wanted his or her films to be in color.
Optimistic I am, sure, but I'm not an elitist.
Searched up Chad Cuervo and here I am. True though man.
You don't know what the actual colors of the walls, clothes, cars, boats, etc. are. They are just conjecture. The colorization of fleshtones is hideous. Compare a real color movie to the colorized variety. They don't sparkle. The techniques differed in shooting black and white vs. color. They even show Raging Bull in the montage. Scorsese is not dead, and I dare say, not amused.
@@xanthus798 I t works best with black and white cartoons.
One more add I'm really interested in the perfection of the new color algorithm. So far not so good but just think one day it may just do the trick and look like the beautiful old Technicolor movies, who knows?
Can anyone identify any of the black and white films shown from 0:40 to 1:05 please??
I'll give it a try.....(Unknown); Night of the Hunter; The Haunting; (Unknown); Citizen Kane; (Unknown); The Third Man; (Unknown); (Unknown); The Seventh Seal; that's 5 out of 10.
Thanks! I also realized that turning on closed captions gives the titles of each film shown
Amazing! Really insightful.
I suppose the scene mood has to be given in the colouration process.
The commercial aspect of it seems pretty pointless when a lot of these older films don't attract large modern audiences anyway. So definitely don't do it just to do it!!
That being said, some films were definitely meant to be colorized, such as Meliés' films. Others like It's a Wonderful Life and Citizen Kane were absolutely made with black-and-white in mind. Many films, especially the moodier ones, live right in the middle--often using tinted film for mood and time of day. I can't imagine watching the Cabinet of Dr Caligari in full black-and-white. So a lot of it comes to interpreting and respecting intent. I personally wouldn't mind colorizing Chaplin's shorts but his feature films have an entirely different tone that I would leave alone--maybe play lightly with a couple sequences.
But the AI conceptually misses the mark if we are depending on it to interpret the scene and choose the colors for us. Early hand-painted and technicolor colorization was vibrant and intense and very purposeful in the hues they selected. Of course automating it would turn out to be a muddy mess! I think the AI would work much better if an artist gave it pre-sets and palettes for each scene.
BONJOUR
COMMENT VOUS CONTACTER ?..MERCI
looking for ai color correcting for video
The subtitle statistic only goes for American or other countries where they don't regularly show subtitles. Here in the Netherlands, we don't mind subs at all.
Just wait. The AI is getting better at exponential rate. Soon it will be able to colorize better than original.
4:40 it's a bad example, because the bw Disney cartoons were never done with the colors used later. So there are no different gray tones to feed the artificial intelligence.
How about use the neural network to do the initial colorizing, then have a person touch it up? I.e. have the neural network do 90% of the work.
Colour of color
Original work will always be original & actually there is no need to play with the sentiment of golden era . It's our historical asset & it should be as it is.
5:05
Any info on where I can see the entire lost world Colorized? Seriously that actually looks really good in color
the thing is, unless they are convinced that this very expensive process can actually make its money back, colourisation is simply not going to happen on a large scale
People seem perfectly happy watching them in their original black and white formats
There are only 2 films I don’t want colourised, the wizard of oz because it’s not worth doing and it feels magical when you first see it in colour, I don’t know why you’d do this but who knows what studios think, the other is citizen Kane because of reasons I can’t put into words (great argument).
thats what i wanted to know. How will it know what color is a pair of slacks from the 1040s? 4:44
i never cared for the look of film projection in general.
Hello from Indonesia 👋
Like it!!!
5:15 talking about black and white and subtitled films reminds me of the sketch on The Fast Show (called Brilliant! on BBC America in the US)
Did you see that Bergman film on the telly? What a complete waste of time that was!
One, it was in black and white.
Two, it was subtitled.
Three, no one got shot.
Four, no one got their kit off.
Five, I'll get me coat.
With the rise of Nvidia's Turing architecture that they have introduced as a part of their GeForce, Titan, Tesla, and Quadro RTX line of Graphics Cards, I feel that this program will need a Then and Now update sometime in the Early 202X decade: Through resources such as Nvidia's NGX software and the up to 072 RT Cores for Raytracing that are found in the Quadro RTX 6000 and 8000, Colour Restoration will only become much easier as the years progress, and this will become significantly faster, improved, and more well defined once the company comes out with their Ampere architecture in the next generation of GPUs to come from them.
The Deep Learning demo for Colour Restoration shown in the program, while not perfect (I have tested it myself in recent months), it is a proof of what Volta and Turing Era cards have set out to assist in optimizing, and once more software becomes made to support those GPUs' Tensor and RT Cores proper, I've a good feeling that we will start seeing these be made noticeably faster, with better visual quality and efficiency all around; one notable case of where at least the Quadro RTX cards would be of a benefit are the HD Remasters of older CBS programs in colour, including (but not limited to) I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dark Shadows: Season 0I, The Twilight Zone (I959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (I955) (many of the opening scenes with Alfred were redrawn in colour for the Thirtieth Anniversary remake series in I985), Guiding Light, The Edge of Night, and As the World Turns, among plentiful others, the current way that they do it requires extreme Colour Masking in Adobe After Effects that is never always accurate (especially with Lucille Ball's Hair, that Orange mask is floating all over the place in Colour Remasters) and although there will be some work to optimize the look of certain colours on a frame by frame basis, the fact that this is becoming more Hardware~based and not fully dependent on software and pure skill truly does make all the difference, the industry will truly benefit as Raytracing becomes more mainstream and it will change up the dynamics of how we view shows and films alike (especially once you toss Frame Interpolation into the mix, but that's another story for another time), eventually nothing will ever be in Grayscale anymore as the times progress. (:
Perhaps, maybe, if a film being in black and white is a barrier to you seeing it or becoming interested in it, just accept that it’s probably not for you, and that you’ll just have to go through life missing out on something cool and wonderful, and then you’ll die a lonely, uninteresting death.
OR, just for the second that it takes, realize that black and white cinematography is, and has always been, an aesthetic choice, and is not some deficiency.
Is it a website
every film has his own character, thats why a digital footage has to converted first to support specific film characteristics. dont rely on a AI that you dont have implemented by yourself.
The Neural Network colorization of the Lord of the Rings sample clip reminds me of Wizard of Oz when we first see Munchkin Land
5:04 Holy Poop! That Looks Good!
It is kind of interesting to think of how things have changed in 5 years since this video was uploaded. Look at upscaling and AI enhancement since then - the Star Trek TNG blu rays are about 10 years old and had to do some upscaling for it's release and it was noticeable when done and yet now you have people using AI enhancement on dvd quality clips from Deep Space Nine and Voyager to get HD quality with shockingly good results. Why? It takes time for the neural networks to learn. While costly, you can now take any halfway decent SD show, like a lot of the shows done on video, and create an HD release that looks good. This is going to be no different, colorization is already much better than it was 5 years ago as people have tried it and the networks have developed further. I don't think it will ever get to the point where it is 100% perfect 100% of the time but I think we are getting to the point where for general use it is an option and a good one.