I am a fan of '50s sci-fi, and It Came From Outer Space" is one of the better examples of the genre. It's no blockbuster, but it touches on all the tropes you expect and love in an "invaders from out there" flick from the golden age of monster movies. It's been a few years since I saw the film, so I was looking forward to rewatching it on Amazon Prime in color, in a newly "restored and enhanced" version by a company called "The Last Picture Show."
I figured with modern artificial intelligence driving the restoration, this would look good, and certainly would have to be better than Ted Turner's regrettable and deservedly much-maligned "colorization" efforts of the 1990s.
Wow, what a let-down. The "RINNUVA" process used by The Last Picture Show (I'll just called them TLPS) is just god-awful. This is even worse than "colorization." I don't know if they did anything to the audio (it sounded just fine) but the picture was ridiculously bad. The colors are way too saturated, and shift and flash constantly, especially when there's a lot of motion. Color from one object bleeds over into the surrounding area (a face with and area of sky adjacent to it) or fail to pick up the correct color at all. For example, in an early scene, the faces of several characters are all bright orange with occasional shifts to blue or red when they move, while their hands, motioning in front of their dark jackets, remain gray.
Motion is a problem for them too. Helicopter rotors are moving too fast for the AI to figure out, and instead of resolving as a dark blur in front of the sky background as they should be, are broken up into jumbled blocks that randomly flash through that area of the picture, which is otherwise sky-blue and not darkened at all.
Rather than "enhancing" the viewing experience, TLPS makes a dsitracting mess that only distracts from the charm of the original movie. If this is the state of artificial intelligence, we don't have to worry about the machines taking over just yet.
Go find another way to see "It Came From Outer Space," which is widely available on DVD or Bluray, in glorious black-and-white (those old-school cinematographers knew how to balance light and dark even without color, so it looks pretty good. And TLPS, keep your hands off these B/W sci-fi classics until you figure out what the hell you're doing. You're not there yet.
I figured with modern artificial intelligence driving the restoration, this would look good, and certainly would have to be better than Ted Turner's regrettable and deservedly much-maligned "colorization" efforts of the 1990s.
Wow, what a let-down. The "RINNUVA" process used by The Last Picture Show (I'll just called them TLPS) is just god-awful. This is even worse than "colorization." I don't know if they did anything to the audio (it sounded just fine) but the picture was ridiculously bad. The colors are way too saturated, and shift and flash constantly, especially when there's a lot of motion. Color from one object bleeds over into the surrounding area (a face with and area of sky adjacent to it) or fail to pick up the correct color at all. For example, in an early scene, the faces of several characters are all bright orange with occasional shifts to blue or red when they move, while their hands, motioning in front of their dark jackets, remain gray.
Motion is a problem for them too. Helicopter rotors are moving too fast for the AI to figure out, and instead of resolving as a dark blur in front of the sky background as they should be, are broken up into jumbled blocks that randomly flash through that area of the picture, which is otherwise sky-blue and not darkened at all.
Rather than "enhancing" the viewing experience, TLPS makes a dsitracting mess that only distracts from the charm of the original movie. If this is the state of artificial intelligence, we don't have to worry about the machines taking over just yet.
Go find another way to see "It Came From Outer Space," which is widely available on DVD or Bluray, in glorious black-and-white (those old-school cinematographers knew how to balance light and dark even without color, so it looks pretty good. And TLPS, keep your hands off these B/W sci-fi classics until you figure out what the hell you're doing. You're not there yet.