
How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New - IfOnlyYouKnew
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/movies/peter-jackson-war-movie.html
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pan69
About 10 years ago Peter Jackson made a "short" movie called Crossing the
Line. It was the first real footage shot with a Red camera. It's kinda like a
trailer for a movie that was never made. It clearly shows Jackson fascination
with WW1.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QleIfcA8mRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QleIfcA8mRQ)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Line_(2008_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Line_\(2008_film\))

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te_chris
Oh man you don’t know the half of it. He’s been working on The Dambusters for
years [1]. Also, he owns this incredible collection of old WWI and II planes,
most of which have been restored from scratch! [2]

[1]
[https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/108520139/...](https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/108520139/sir-
peter-jackson-hasnt-given-up-hope-of-making-the-dam-busters)

[2] [https://www.omaka.org.nz/](https://www.omaka.org.nz/)

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mprovost
He also owns a company that builds and sells brand new, airworthy WWI replica
planes.

[http://thevintageaviator.co.nz/](http://thevintageaviator.co.nz/)

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mung
This is great film, I highly recommend it. It was released here about a month
ago (NZ).

Though I didn't know that there was a 3D version as well.

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linux_devil
What is the name of the film?

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grzm
From the second paragraph of the article:

> _”With “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Jackson has applied new technology to
> century-old World War I footage to create a vivid, you-are-there feeling
> that puts real faces front and center and allows us to hear their stories in
> their own words.”_

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combatentropy
> The footage had a herky-jerky feel because it had been shot on hand-cranked
> cameras [...]. Jackson’s team retimed the footage, speeding up the frame
> rate, adding extra frames digitally and smoothing out the movement.

I don't know how they did this. Sure, I can understand filling in frames at
regular intervals, to bring one speed up to another speed, say from 18 to 24
frames per second. But if it was hand-cranked, then the old speed wasn't
exactly 18 frames per second, and I don't know how you can tell precisely what
speed the cameraman was cranking at any given time.

Someone might suggest watching for when the movement of the subject or camera
changed speed, but how do you know that it wasn't the person himself who
slowed down or sped up, in real life, or that the cameraman's handheld pan
wasn't really slowing down or speeding up?

Either this was a lot of manual trial and error, or software for this kind of
thing is far better than I can imagine.

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tinco
I'd say it's a little bit like automatic stabilisation. If everything in your
frame moves in the same direction at the same speed, then it's probably the
camera moving, so you correct for it and the video becomes stable.

Similarly you could see multiple things in the frame accelerating and
decelerating at the same time and deduce it's not the things, but the camera
that's doing that. That's the retiming part. Filling in frames is probably a
whole lot more magic though..

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mjsweet
Just out of interest, could a GAN be used to clean up video, filling in all
the blanks and creating a higher resolution, cleaner image and of course
colouring too? From what I have seen of moving GAN images, they can jump
around and be a bit jittery.

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shaki-dora
Yes, sort of: You can use a GAN to do almost everything described in the
article. That's really interesting in a way, because they mention several
distinct steps, and all of them seem readily amendable to machine learning,
including the totally-unrelated-to-coloring lip reading they did to add sound,
etc.

BUT: reading the article with ML in mind already, I noticed the frequent
references to their work with historians and other experts to get it right.

In other words: ML could possibly get you results that are entirely plausible,
yet wrong. They mention the color of buttons on the uniforms and, even less
likely to be amendable to technology, commands and other speech shouted off-
screen.

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joaomacp
Probably the best solution would be a combination of the two: the ML algorithm
would also learn from human examples and corrections.

I think this will be the solution in a lot of problems and industries: ML does
the boring and repetitive work, and a human sanity-checks it and fixes the
edge cases where ML is 'dumb'

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peteretep
I wonder if the before and after could be used to train a computer to do this
automatically, well, for the future. Obviously not the sound, but the picture.

~~~
devadvance
There was a popular post a little over a month ago [2] about this very topic.
That particular example used deep learning in a similar way to what you
described.

It looks like there are previous attempts [2] that have even been turned into
APIs [3]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363870)

[2]
[https://github.com/richzhang/colorization](https://github.com/richzhang/colorization)

[3] [https://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-
photos/](https://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-photos/)

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WalterBright
There are many excellent hires copies of silent movies run on TV now and then.
With colorization, and adding a soundtrack with dubbed dialog, they'd make
fine modern movies.

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dylan604
Why the request for colorization and dubbed dialog? Metropolis did just fine
for a restore and without any of those changes.

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WalterBright
For the same reason Jackson has.

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jacobush
Upvoted, though remember, much of silent film is acted in a particular,
stylized manner because of the lack of sound. But in documentary footage,
people actually speak in a normal manner.

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jim_bailie
That's remarkable. I'll be in an audience somewhere on the 27th.

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anjc
Pity this article has been released after the limited run has seemingly ended

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Markoff
it's available for download all over internet, just watching 720P X265 BRrip

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anjc
Yep I'm going to buy it, but unfortunately there's no 3D version available

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captainperl
I'm ambivalent about WW1 since the US didn't do much fighting (too late into
the war), and it was mostly trench warfare that wiped out European royalty,
not necessarily a bad thing IMO.

But the inter-war years and WW2 are a fascinating epic.

The WW2 European conflict resulted from Germany losing WW1, but not being
occupied. The WW2 Pacific conflict resulted from the USA embargoing Japan
after they "colonized" Manchuria.

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mattbierner
Royals start wars; commoners fight them and bear their hardships

(A point exemplified by World War One)

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Pinckney
The first world war is a bad example. While the war was absolutely started by
royalty, they did send their sons to the front to die along with commoners.

> Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working
> class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by
> WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the
> way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example
> to their men.

> Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war,
> compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former
> pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith
> lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony
> Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an
> uncle was captured.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836)

Also, Princes Oskar and Eitel Friedrich of Prussia both served in front-line
combat roles and both were wounded.

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Jaruzel
The hubris of the British at the time, where they fully believed that the war
would only last a few weeks and they'd be 'Home for Christmas', is mainly what
led to many sons of the Upper Class willingly signing up to fight in droves.

Alas, as we all know, the war lasted a lot longer than 'a few weeks'.

WW1 directly impacted the ability of many large estates across the UK to
survive beyond the 1940s. It changed the cultural and class landscape of the
UK significantly.

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darkerside
This has probably been thought, at least publicly, about almost every
offensive war waged by a democratic nation. Few civilizations (there are
exceptions) would stomach a war that they knew from the outset would last for
years.

