
Step into a time machine: welcome to Amsterdam in 1922, in color and HD - Udik
https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2020/stap-in-een-tijdmachine-welkom-in-het-amsterdam-van-1922-in-kleur-en-hd~v380368/
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anyfoo
Be careful, these are not actual videos of the past.

The original pictures and videos may have been limited in resolution (spatial,
temporal, color), but they are an actual sample of the reality that was at
that time. They may be missing things, but what's there was there.

The "processed" videos are made up. By an algorithm with limited to no
contextual clues, no less. The algorithm was trained to make things _look_
real, it does not know about things making sense for the place and time. Some
details, colors, movements may have been counterintuitive in reality, they may
even have had a "fake" seeming look by today's standards. The algorithm does
not know that.

I am not discounting the value of those interpolations. The processed videos
do give you a better idea of what life was like. By making it feel more
"real", you can connect much better. It makes the past seem less abstract.
They do still convey the fact that a train was there, or that people were
wearing hats (as another commenter pointed out).

But they are not historical documents. It is important to the documents as
such, essentially as dramatizations of the past. Do not try to draw
conclusions from individual elements of what you see, they may lead you to the
wrong conclusions.

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butz
And where is a button if you do not want to accept cookies?

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JeanMarcS
Exactly. Not very GDPR compliant...

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ClikeX
I detest full-page cookie walls like these. Many Dutch news outlets use them.
Sometimes combined with paywalls after a few "free" visits.

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epicureanideal
Here's an idea for the next round of reworking these old videos, but it would
be a LOT more work... orders of magnitude more work...

Find people from the same region today, ideally descendants of people who were
in the video, and deepfake their faces onto the video. Possibly go a step
further and find period clothing, and deepfake the clothing in higher
resolution onto the video. Or at least get samples of the materials and use
that to deepfake improvements to the "resolution" of the video. Could do
something similar with the audio.

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garmaine
If you're going to that much effort, why not re-film it with the new people?

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garmaine
Everyone is wearing hats....

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jansan
How did they delete all the fat prople?

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dang
Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
You've done it repeatedly lately, and we eventually ban such accounts.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

