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The fourth "Alien" was released, and Cameron's "Alien 2" was also released in a high-definition Blu-ray restoration. Recently, he accepted an interview with "The Hollywood Reporter" and mentioned that he had watched "Alien: Reaper" as early as the rough cut stage and made some small comments.

However, Cameron's most shocking statement in this interview was his response to picky fans - after the restored version of "Alien 2" came out, fans were not satisfied with the effect of AI restoration, thinking that the restored effect was too refined and wrong.

A professional forum for Blu-ray movies, providing very detailed parameters and allowing you to experience and compare them yourself.

Although in comparison... the changes are very subtle, and you can't see it clearly if you don't put them together.

The new version of Blu-ray seems to have both the sharpening and contrast turned up a bit, which has the benefit of improved clarity, but it also causes a change in tone, resulting in a loss of some picture details.

Movie fans have mixed opinions about this loss of details, but what they can agree on is: it’s not that AI restoration is useless, but "Alien 2" already has a 2010 version as a scan base, and the original technological content of "Avatar" is not low, so is it necessary to increase the intensity?

Old Pixel Reemployment

The restoration function of artificial intelligence is already very common. There was a period of popularity before when "AI resurrects old photos". At the previous Olympic Games, Alibaba Cloud also supported the resurrection of archival images.

Park Road Post Production, the technical team that worked with Cameron, had long ago used similar technology to restore old films. The most classic result was the restoration and re-colorization of a World War I documentary.

Documentary They Shall Never Grow Old Image from: Park Road Post Production

Almost all of these old images have problems such as film scratches, cracks, and fading. AI can automatically restore the missing parts of the photos by learning the patterns and features of surrounding pixels through texture-based, area-based, or interpolation-based algorithms.

But in the eyes of movie fans, even scratches and blurs are part of the film. After extensive restoration, the effect is so exquisite that it is distorted.

Cameron's movie "True Lies" Image from: X user @RazorwireRyan

Facing criticism from fans, Cameron responded directly: Just live your own life.

He said that he reviewed every shot and every frame of the film, and the team he collaborated with were all old acquaintances. The colorist for the restoration of "Alien 2" was the same one as that for "Avatar".

Perhaps this "complete elimination" is going in the wrong direction.

Noise reduction is indeed a key link in all film restoration work. In the 2010 Blu-ray restoration of "Alien 2", he began to use digital tools for restoration. This version achieved a good balance between the graininess of the film and the details of the picture, making it a classic version.

Cameron's film "Alien 2" 2010 Blu-ray restoration

“We completely removed the noise and grain, upscaled the resolution, and color corrected every frame from start to finish. The results are incredible.”

Cameron has always been interested in researching new technologies. Unlike some directors who have a nostalgic complex, he does not have any special obsession with the "graininess" of old films. Therefore, in the process of restoring his old films again, he further smoothed out the texture of the original 35mm film and raised the clarity.

The price is that the rendering of skin texture, contours, and especially hair on the human face all appear unnatural, which is most obvious in "True Lies".

Cameron's film "True Lies" The picture below shows the effect after AI restoration. Image source: The New York Times

Movie fans are not being unreasonable: the negatives of old movies are not easy to preserve, which can easily lead to the loss of image quality, so technology is needed. However, some of Cameron's movies are not that old, and even movies like "Avatar" have high technological content. AI is used for restoration only because he has it.

This sounds reasonable. These criticisms are not about whether AI should not be used, but whether it is used where it should be used, or whether it is used just for the sake of using it.

Use for the sake of use

The technology used in film restoration is more of an "upgrade" rather than a "creation". If the Mid-journey and Runway technologies are "creating something out of nothing", then the goal of film restoration is to "change what already exists", with the original quality of the film as the starting point.

Then using technology for the sake of technology will become very weird. The recently released domestic film "Under the Alien" uses an "AI style transfer technique".

From the special footage released by the film company, we can see that Stable Diffusion WebUI was used to convert the parts originally shot by real people into comics. Wuershan said that because the original work is a comic, he chose this way to pay tribute to the original work.

And because AI transfer is unstable at this stage, the team also used LoRA's fine-tuning method to ensure that the final effect can restore the actor's performance. This is a method that only requires a small amount of material to effectively complete the fine-tuning of a large model.

The audience said: It is really unnecessary.

It is a tribute, but the AI ​​flavor is too strong. The style transfer of "Under the Alien" is actually based on the existing real-life imitation, plus the process of AI generation. The latter was originally intended to reproduce the style of the comics, but I don’t know what went wrong, and AI instead migrated the already animated material to the realistic direction again.

So there appearedPaper man becomes real man and then becomes paper man again", and it became a web movie. When it was put on the screen and was nearly half an hour long, the audience said they couldn't stand it.

Image from: B station user @哈尔的吃红辣椒

The most exaggerated failure was in "Legend", where Jackie Chan used AI to create a younger version of himself as the male protagonist and date Nazha. Because it was too outrageous, it caused doubts as to whether it was a repair or a direct replacement of the head.

Stills of Legend from Douban

Douban's rating is 5.1, and only 20,000 people rated it. It's so bad that no one cares...

The positive teaching material is "The Flowing Earth 2". During the filming, Li Xuejian had nasopharyngeal cancer, which affected the pronunciation of the lines, but his performance and interpretation of the role were moving. So the sound production team used machine learning and old movies as material to reproduce Li Xuejian's voice.

As you can see from the comparison video below, it is a truly effective restoration. If it weren’t for the behind-the-scenes footage, you would hardly notice that the sound was restored when watching the movie. And for good reason, AI really has the best of both worlds.

Using it just for the sake of using it is the worst thing, especially at this moment, when there are more and more playback methods, OLED screens and 4K standards are becoming more and more popular, and problems that would not be displayed on low-definition TV screens in the past will gradually be exposed and put under a magnifying glass.

Faced with criticism, the general manager of Cameron's cooperation team Park Road Production also realized that times have changed and audiences are making different demands on film effects.

In an interview with the New York Times, he said, "We can't go too far, or it will look like garbage. But as long as it can make it a little better, we will try."

Text | Selina