History
Welcome to History!
This community is dedicated to sharing and discussing fascinating historical facts from all periods and regions.
Rules:
NOTE WELL: Personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Stick to talking about the historical topic at hand in your comments. Insults and personal attacks will get you an immediate ban for a period of time determined by the moderator who bans you.
-
Post about history. Ask a question about the past, share a link to an article about something historical, or talk about something related to history that interests you. Please encourage discussion whenever possible.
-
No memes. No ads. No promos. No spam.
-
No porn.
-
We like facts and reliable sources here. Don't spread misinformation or try to change the historical record.
view the rest of the comments
So I think in this case the motion interpolation can legitimately increase the verisimilitude of the footage. The pace and fluidity of the movement being more natural is not a bad thing for the showing off the times, though it is important that it be noted it's a particularly poor reflection on the history of cinema and its cultural impact. The two thirds that are missing have the 1/18 of a second on either side there, so I think there's a particularly low risk in introducing misleading information.
My bigger concerns are actually the upscaling (a bit) and the colorization (more). The former, I guess if you're just sort of presenting this to create the impression of these people's faces and to enhance the immersion in the era for a modern audience, it's not that bad, but you'd want to be very clear what you were doing, and you certainly wouldn't want to say something like, "See what your great-grandfather's face really looked like?" For the colorization, I'd want to know what were the sources, techniques, and tools used. Those would befit from genuine historical research and could be actively misleading about what we're seeing, providing a false certainty in a way that motion interpolation mostly doesn't, and upscaling sort of doesn't.
Yeah. I think that's fair. Although I'm interested to know why they chose 60fps rather than 24. It seems like a flex as opposed to a genuine desire to show fluid movement.
I suspect that, in a very pure way, the study of the colourisation could be an interesting academic pursuit that would reveal more about what we are looking at. Though that would require a ton of work and would still require a fair amount of presumption to be "complete".
But there's the rub. "Modern audiences". Rather than pander to an expectation that things have to look a particular way now surely we should encourage people to see how it was recorded then?
The very fact there is film documentation of a scene in 1896 is interesting in its own right, and for want of a better phrase, it is what it is. This is what footage from over a hundred years ago looks like. I guess I'm not that comfortable with a revisionist history of media.