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Old film footage colourised using AI


Corbs
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This is a pretty cool use of deep learning AI, to colourise old black and white movies. The General is my favourite Buster Keaton film, and it's really impressive to see how it's coped with the colours. It doesn't always get it right, but I do enjoy it.

 

 

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I used to cherish 'The General' until a few years ago when I read of the raid which it inspired. It seems there were no survivors, those Union soldiers who weren't actually killed during the course of the raid were executed as spies by the Confederates. Took the gloss of it for me, and I'm left with the feeling that perhaps it's not something that should have been created as a comedy.

 

Cheers

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Fair enough. I don’t feel the same way. Perhaps that’s due to historical distance, but then again I do love ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ too so maybe I just have a different standpoint on that sort of thing.

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Saw Kelly's Heroes last night on Turner, being Armistice Day, its always an excuse to show war movies.  I am not really a fan of '70s war films, most seem to lack the authenticity of those from earlier post war years.  The British were very good at these in that era, very stiff upper lip and all that.

The General was quite remarkable for its years, I'm not sure about colorisation though.  It never approached the quality of Technicolor and some producers thought it demeaned their B/W photography.  Think John Ford B/W westerns in Monument Valley fr'instance; while he did colour films, his B/W works stand out!  The Union troops involved in the chase probably knew that they would be considered spies and their fate was possibly less terrifying than the prospect of being locked up in a Confederate prison such as Andersonville for the duration.

     Brian. 

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I'm out.

 

I'm all for restoring movies but colourising B&W movies leaves me a bit cold. I saw Casablanca and it had been colourised, I lasted a couple of minutes before turning it off as it just didn't seem right. I'm not even old enough to really remember B&W TV, but I think things should be kept as they are. YMMV.

 

I do understand that the youngsters won't watch things in B&W. They even remade Psycho shot for shot, but in colour. It was terrible....

 

 

My mum's funny though. She's started watching the old movies and TV programmes in the afternoon but didn't realise that half of them were in colour as back in the day they only had a B&W TV. :lol:

 

 

 

Jason

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There is a great deal of information available on the Andrew's Raid for example: Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor but much of the information is derived from one of the survivors, William Pittenger.  His memoirs are available to download FOC from Project Gutenberg, e.g. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36752/36752-h/36752-h.htm (incidentally PG has a wealth of fascinating content, albeit with a US bias),  Not all the raiders were executed but they were almost all captured.  I always found it intriguing that you could be a fugitive in your own country speaking the same language, etc but perhaps in rural Georgia any stranger would arouse suspicion and they didn't have MI9 and escape lines.

 

Last year I was able to spend a day at the museum at Kennesaw near Atlanta where the original, but much rebuilt General is preserved and on display.  The Texas is on display in Atlanta but I did not have enough time to visit both.  A couple of weeks ago I was able to spend a little time at the B&O museum at Mount Clare in Baltimore where they have William Mason which starred in the Fess Parker Disney film.  The locomotives in the Buster Keaton film were representative American types but without any connection to the Andrews Raid.

 

Regarding colourisation of monochrome photographs and films I am generally not in favour.  One recent book on railways in the Great War even showed some green L&YR coaches on its cover.  I watched Peter Jackson's partly colourised film of the Great War recently and much preferred the monochrome sections - a shame really as so many people must have worked really hard to achieve the transformation.  I had reservations about some of the sound dubbing too, but not the witness accounts from the 1960s and 70s.  I hold judgement on the revised Buster Keaton film.

 

P1010870_small.jpg.370fae039f517c6b120b4324b88a4548.jpg

 

P1030956.JPG.e77a32239f67675eee48c2c0cdedb8f6.JPG

Edited by Adam88
reinsert lost photos
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9 hours ago, PenrithBeacon said:

I used to cherish 'The General' until a few years ago when I read of the raid which it inspired. It seems there were no survivors, those Union soldiers who weren't actually killed during the course of the raid were executed as spies by the Confederates. Took the gloss of it for me, and I'm left with the feeling that perhaps it's not something that should have been created as a comedy.

 

Cheers

Not accurate.

There were no injuries during the raid itself, but most of the raiders were captured.  Some escaped, but 8, including Andrews, were hanged.

 

Imagine a raid on the Somerset and Dorset by a party of Yorkshiremen.

 

Keaton's film is very far from history; the Disney one is more accurate.

None of the original equipment was usable so they borrowed from the B & O museum, I think.

 

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I'm not a great fan of colourised films (the colourised version of Laurel & Hardy's "A Chump at Oxford" gives the Queen Mary turquoise funnels!). That said, colourisation often brings out details not easily discernible in B&W (and when I'm using L&H films for observation quizzes at Boys' Brigade the colour gives me more to ask questions about!).

 

However there are a couple of examples of colourisation I am in favour of - Laurel & Hardy's "Toyland" was originally intended to be shot in colour but they spent so much money on colourful sets and costumes that they couldn't afford the colour film and had to shoot it in b & w (much to Stan Laurel's distress) so it's nice to be able to see it as it was intended to be seen.

 

Likewise the colour version of the Dad's Army episode "Room at the Bottom" was lost, leaving only a black & white version which was colourised some years ago. However the colour version was shown once to great fanfare, but subsequent repeats and the DVD box set have been the b/w version!

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With very few exceptions, the creatives who made films did so in the knowledge of the limitations of the technology they were using. They designed the end result as they wanted it to be seen.

 

Colourisation is, to me, a completely weird thing to do. A bit like going to an art gallery to see Picasso's Guernica but insisting on colouring it in with my nice new crayons, as if I knew better than the artist what his painting should look like.

 

YMMV.

 

Paul

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I confess, I've not seen either film on the Andrews Raid, but I shall watch these colourised films with interest.  if done well, I think colourisation gives us a great perspective on the past. 

 

I've always seen the Andrews Raid as an ill-conceived farce that had no material military benefit. From the 'raiders' who overslept and missed it to Andrews' impotence in the face of the Confederate train dispatchers, who forced them to wait while southbound military traffic was given priority, the "raid" was a joke.  The little damage they managed to do was temporary and inconsequential. The hero of the story is surely Fuller, the train Guard who took exception to the hi-jacking and who showed conspicuous determination and initiative.  His pursuit left the Raiders no time or opportunity to achieve any of their objectives and he eventually ran them to ground, leading to their capture.  

 

For me, the more interesting and significant event was Grierson's Raid.  This is event that inspired The Horse Soldiers, a film I have seen and, indeed, cherish as a firm favourite, though it is a highly fictionalised account.  Whereas John Wayne's tough and irascible Colonel Marlowe was an railroad engineer who started out "driving hand spikes at 10 cents a day", IIRC, the real Colonel Grierson was a music teacher!

 

Grierson's Raid was a thoroughly worthwhile exercise, not just a great story. Take it away Wiki:

 

Grierson and his 1,700 horse troopers ... rode over six hundred miles through hostile territory ..., over routes no Union soldier had traveled before. They tore up railroads and burned crossties, freed slaves, burned Confederate storehouses, destroyed locomotives and commissary stores, ripped up bridges and trestles, burned buildings, and inflicted ten times the casualties they received, all while detachments of his troops made feints confusing the Confederates as to his actual whereabouts, intent and direction. Total casualties for Grierson's Brigade during the raid were three killed, seven wounded, and nine missing. Five sick and wounded men were left behind along the route, too ill to continue.

 

 

 

 

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Regarding colourisation, the interesting thing about these examples is that it's not a case of someone colouring in bits frame-by-frame by hand, this is a computer program that rewrites its own code in order to achieve a desired result.

 

The user specifies the required outcome, feeds in the B&W footage, but also adds tons and tons of colour footage as reference material. The software makes changes to the B&W footage, then checks it against the colour film over and over again, millions of times, until it has achieved a result. This is why so much is possible compared to the human-controlled colourisation before.

 

As for the results, I get a completely different feeling from watching the originals. With the jerky B&W footage (e.g. the original Lumiere Brothers footage), it feels distant and abstract, it doesn't feel 'real' to me as it doesn't resemble things I see in everyday life.

When I saw They Shall Not Grow Old, the moment when it switched from B&W to colour took my breath away as I felt like I was watching a video feed direct from WW1.

What really 'sold' the effect for me was the sound design, the way they had looked at what people could have been saying at the time and created a soundscape that felt believable.

 

The novelty of film cameras at the time also brought out that human instinct to look directly into the lens, which made me feel like a , intruding in their space.

 

With fiction like The General, I do understand that the creators understood and played to the strengths and weaknesses of the technology. The colourised version isn't 'better' in my opinion, but for me it gives an interesting insight into how things could have looked on set.

 

TL:DR - I find both original and colourised versions interesting in their own way.

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Only viewed the first few minutes of "The General", but I'll watch it through later.

 

For what its worth, the colourisation has come out pretty well, the tonal rendition reminds me of Autochrome* photographs of the era in which the original film was made and in that sense, provide an authentic visual appearance.  So long as the black and white originals don't disappear, then the coloured versions may make older classics more accessible to modern sensibilities.

 

Referring to "They Shall Not Grow Old", as well as the excellent colourisation, I believe that the production used lipreaders to decipher what was being said when lip movements were visible, and a script produced for voice actors.

 

* Google "autochrome photographs" for some stunning real-colour images from the beginning of the 20th century.

 

Here's an Autochrome image which can be compared to the shot in "The General" at 2:26.

 

autochrome-2.jpg.fec15436772de4f3e980393e52e61eb9.jpg

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/autochrome-lumiere-colour-photos-oldest-potato-starch-dyes-a8190846.html

 

 

Edited by Hroth
minor rephrasing
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7 hours ago, Corbs said:

As for the results, I get a completely different feeling from watching the originals. With the jerky B&W footage (e.g. the original Lumiere Brothers footage), it feels distant and abstract, it doesn't feel 'real' to me as it doesn't resemble things I see in everyday life.

 

When I saw They Shall Not Grow Old, the moment when it switched from B&W to colour took my breath away

 

 

Corbs, absolutely. There's a bit in that sequence about 30sec in where a young lad wearing a black hat and holding his belongings in a white bag/holdall thingy walks into centre screen, ok so his coat is strobing colour on my screen, but his look, manner and expression are just so now. Ok, so maybe apart from the natty felt pork pie hat, he could be any "youf" waiting on any train platform roday.

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Just now, TT-Pete said:

 

Corbs, absolutely. There's a bit in that sequence about 30sec in where a young lad wearing a black hat and holding his belongings in a white bag/holdall thingy walks into centre screen, ok so his coat is strobing colour on my screen, but his look, manner and expression are just so now. Ok, so maybe apart from the natty felt pork pie hat, he could be any "youf" waiting on any railway platform roday.

 

(Aargh. Used "train" instead of "railway" which I hate. But now looking at it, is "train platform" actually more correct?)

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16 hours ago, Corbs said:

Another impressive one.

 

New York in 1911. The sheer amount of trolleys and L trains is amazing.

 

 

 

I wonder if the Lumiere film of Liverpool will get the treatment?

 

As for New York, even then you got idiot members of the public mugging for the camera!  (2:20)  The other thing is that its amazing how low-rise and open NY was back then.

 

 

 

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On 03/03/2020 at 03:32, Corbs said:

Another impressive one.

 

New York in 1911. The sheer amount of trolleys and L trains is amazing.

 

 

Note the 2 cars about halfway through, both of which are RHD! Standard I believe at the time, so drivers could step straight on the footpath and not horse droppings!

 

Did Britain have LHD cars in the early days for the same reason?

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