125 Years of Cat Videos

February 4, 2021 10:31 AM

A colorized, 1440p60 compilation of several of the Lumière Brothers films, starting with La petite fille et son chat ("The Little Girl and Her Cat", 1899). Don't mind the stock sound effects.

Another, earlier Lumière cat video, Déjeuner du chat (1895), is not included in the compilation. Alternate take on the same video with classical music instead. Lumière brothers previously.

posted by one for the books (14 comments total)

My favourite part of La petite fille et son chat is the implied off-camera frustrated Lumière Brother throwing the cat back into the shot.
posted by zamboni at 10:39 AM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

I used to feel weird about these kind of alterations but the tech has reached a point where this feels like peering into a straight up time machine.
posted by gwint at 10:44 AM on February 4, 2021

I like these upscaled videos because they really humanize their subjects. They don't seem quite so far away when they look like this.

I don't like them because of all the assumptions the algorithm makes. The trees in the background are green; how do we know this wasn't shot in autumn? Sure, there are other clues in the film, but I doubt the AI is looking at them.
posted by Ampersand692 at 10:49 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

People often balk at the idea of canned sound effects without realizing how much of it makes up their regular diet of film and TV. I'd love to see/hear what a really good post production crew could do with one of these.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:59 AM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't mind canned sound, but the ghostly murmurations don't help dispel the sensation of these films taking place in some ethereal plane instead of the familiar setting they were repaired to conjure.

That said, the exposure and saturation says "sixties" to me, while the framerate screams "nineties".
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 11:12 AM on February 4, 2021

Crap-o-rooney... The colors are not stable, it flickers between B&W and color on a frame by frame basis, there is a lovely green tinge off and on, shadows befuddle it, all in all a very amateurish effort. And for what? The canned sound is the least of its problems.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:42 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

I could do without the fake audio, but the visuals are compelling.
posted by furtive at 11:42 AM on February 4, 2021

The colorization was done with a GAN model which are set up to go one frame at a time. So the algorithm evaluates each B&W frame separately and decides how to color it with no consistency frame-to-frame. It's not a good choice for colorizing video, but it's a popular/easy one right now.

Actually it looks like DeOldify uses a NoGAN setup that is possibly designed to correct for this? Can't tell exactly how it improves on GANs but the examples look better than this.
posted by little onion at 11:58 AM on February 4, 2021

The third scene (child with fish in a bowl, held up by one of the Lumière brothers) is interesting. That's almost certainly a boy. Pink was a male color at the time.. Infants wore dresses regardless of sex. Vogue in 1900 outlined the stages of boy-dressing very specifically: long dresses until six months, then short dresses up until age three, then either Russian blouses with knickers or kilt suits up until the age of five or six
posted by blob at 12:56 PM on February 4, 2021

The colour choices on these AI processed videos always bothered me. So drab, so grey.

Contemporaneous painting of French beachgoers from someone like Eugene Boudin do show lots of black dresses and straw hats, but also more vibrant yellows and blues and reds.
posted by thecjm at 1:55 PM on February 4, 2021

I'm all in favor of making old footage more accessible to contemporary audiences, and to the extent this kind of digital manipulation is successful at that, OK, great for those audiences!

But to me, the "enhancements" here are at least as distracting as they are revelatory. Most of all, there's that weird thing that happens where the various digital algorithms involved make the film grain "crawl" across the screen in harmony with the moving objects. (I think the AI is interpreting film grain as photographed texture, and is trying to clean it up by freezing it and basically attaching it to different surfaces seen in the image?) There are motion artifacts (motion is herky-jerky and/or unnaturally smeary) presumably due to the target frame rate not being a whole multiplier of the acquisition frame rate. And also the vast majority of the picture is interpolated imagery (only ~18 out of those 60fps were actually captured by a movie camera, and the rest are digitally generated) and I feel like it's obvious that we're looking at an odd photo-digital hybrid rather than straight-up filmed footage.

There was a Peter Jackson WWI documentary a couple of years ago that used similar techniques to update old WWI footage and, while it was certainly striking, it had similar problems -- the slightly "smeary" motion and, especially on a big movie theater screen, the stiff, crawling patches of film grain. I suppose if I saw a lot of this kind of footage I'd get used to it.

Of course, what we have to look forward to is the next 10 years of improvement in the image-processing algorithms, which may possibly make this kind of image manipulation seamless. But for now, for me at least, they live in Uncanny Valley.
posted by Mothlight at 2:09 PM on February 4, 2021

Soooo, I used this online service that adds filters to videos and made a greyscale version. Looks so much better imo! (Just mute your audio for the full effect.)
posted by jeremias at 2:30 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

FWIW, the same youtube channel does already offer a version without color or sound effects.
posted by one for the books at 2:50 PM on February 4, 2021

I kinda liked the wonky colour treatment, it looked like it was meant to be interpreted.
posted by ovvl at 6:56 PM on February 4, 2021