A Controversial AI-Assisted "True Lies" Update

Plus: How David Fincher’s The Killer Was Edited on Adobe Premiere Pro

Author

Steve
December 19, 2023

Hello Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

💥 A Controversial AI-Assisted True Lies Update

💻️ How David Fincher’s The Killer Was Edited on Adobe Premiere Pro

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

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A Controversial AI-Assisted True Lies Update

This weekend I noticed Film Twitter (I refuse to say “Film X” for obvious reasons!) was abuzz over the new UHD version of James Cameron’s 1994 Schwarzenegger spy film True Lies.

Over on Threads, David Chen posted fascinating screenshot comparisons of the previous HD version and the new UHD version via Alexander Amendai. I’ve copied them below as Threads embeds are not yet functional on this newsletter platform:

As many on Twitter noted: these look sort of strange! What’s going on here? They remind me of the CG Peter Cushing head in Rogue One:

According to a review of the 4K version on The Digital Bits:

For its release on Ultra HD, Lightstorm, working with Park Road Post, has built a new 4K Digital Intermediate using recent 4K scans of the original camera negative (confirmed per Lightstorm). This footage has been “optimized” by Park Road’s proprietary deep-learning algorithms. Photochemical grain has been greatly reduced, though not eliminated entirely, while fine detail has been “enhanced” algorithmically. There are also occasional shots throughout the film that appear to have had a bit of old-school noise reduction applied, but it’s hard to be sure if it’s actual DNR or simply just that the Park Road process has been a little too heavy-handed in places.

If “Park Road Post” sounds familiar, it’s because they also worked on Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, with similarly controversial results.

I’ve previously written on the benefits of machine learning and AI to the restoration of films, but as with anything one can always take it too far without better guardrails.

A friend in post-production had a related story about how a desire for totally clean images plagued one of the major streaming platforms:

We had this title that [the platform] kept rejecting over and over again for “noise.” Eventually we contacted them and flat-out asked what they were talking about. They selected a few scenes to demonstrate and it turned out it was simply film grain because it was a movie made on 16mm in 1980. That’s the level of film expertise you’re getting from a lot of these tech companies.

Readers, what do you think of these algorithmically-assisted upgrades? Let me know at [email protected].

How David Fincher’s The Killer Was Edited on Adobe Premiere Pro

I really enjoyed this article from RedShark News on the editing process for David Fincher’s The Killer, which “like this year’s Academy Award for Editing winner Everything Everywhere All At Once… was cut on Adobe Premiere Pro.”

Hey, I also use Adobe Premiere Pro! I feel like I’m in a cool kid’s club, a club where some of us use Premiere to edit Michael Fassbender-starring action films, and some of us use it to make a wedding video when their Aunt Joan gets married for the third time.

Assistant editor Jennifer Chung describes a very useful Premiere tool called Simplify Sequence:

We're kind of on this running treadmill; we have a lot of departments in-house, and while this gives us the ability to just throw things to our in-house VFX artists or stabilizers, or throw things to color and testing even during production, we’ve had to get used to doing a lot of turnovers! And that can be a tedious process. Before, we would have to do it manually. I would have to go through and delete all of the muted or disabled clips, collapse things, and clean the sequences up for turnovers. Simplify Sequence saves a ton of time, especially for our type of workflow where we constantly have to do those same tasks.

Simplify Sequence is also a big help when your Aunt Joan can’t decide between three climactic wedding video montages edited to either “Con Te Partirò,” “My Heart Will Go On,” or “Funkytown”. I was able to quickly show her all possible permutations of her three hour video and she got exactly what she wanted, just in time for her upcoming divorce!

Make sure to read the entire thing, it’s great!

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

Why Oppenheimer didn’t make the Oscar VFX list. (link)

Looks like advertisers really were listening to conversations from your phone! (link)

How Tubi uses AI for movie recommendations. (link)