I’ve been watching “Time to Remember” on Netflix lately and there are loads of old silent movies/newsreels, but they all suffer from that jittery motion due to the crank being off. It tends to make people who were performing back then look all hyped up but I’m sure the actual dances, movements were not that crazy looking. I was wondering if there have been any attempts by programmers or restoration people who have come up with a method to “normalize” the frame rate so that it looks as if the movie was filmed today.
Does anyone know if this can be done or if any company has ever attempted it?
The technology for that’s been around for years. They used to duplicate frames, and once video came along it was a simple matter to project at the correct speed and record them.
Camera operators of the time were highly skilled and could keep a steady crank speed all day. Take a look at Buster Keaton’s The Playhouse, which required an extremely steady hand by the cameraman.
Also, current thought was that the overcranked scenes in silent movies were there originally, to make things look funnier.
I’ve seen it done frequently with documentary footage in recent (last 20 years?) productions, so that, say, the Wright brothers walk around their latest creation at something like a normal pace. Since the typical frame rate then was around 15-16 fps, adjusting it to 30 means not-quite doubling the frames, which causes other effects something like a quick slide-show. It sometimes seems to be more distracting than the jig-step version, although maybe that’s because we’re accustomed to fast and jerky over normal and stuttering.
This is not an easy thing to do. If the film was originally shot at 15-16 fps then for movement to appear normal it would have to be projected at that speed. Of course the problem with this is the human brain will see annoying flicker in anything projected at less than around 24 fps. Merely doubling the frames isn’t going to look right either. You’d have to interpolate and computer generate extra frames in between each existing one, which is computationally intensive (i.e. expensive). It also begins to approach the same issues as colorization. Half the images become artificial creations only based on the original.
Count me as an ‘aficionado’ who would not care for that. You’d be better off just filming a recreation.
I understand that a silent movies may have intentionally done it to enhance the humor, but a lot of the newsreels from the day (which are documentary in nature) suffer from the same effect. And I was wondering more or less if the software ability exists not to merely double the frames or whatever, but to actually meld the motions into something that appeared like the way movies do now.
Also, as far as “aficionados” are concerned, I’m not talking about colorizing a classic movie, I’m talking about seeing what life would have actually looked like back then in normal motion. Like the coronation of a king without it looking like a Keystone Kops movie.
This is what I referred to above, taking a scene of someone walking and analyzing frame 10 and frame 11 and generating an image that has there leg motion etc. halfway between 10 and 11 and inserting it between the two. This would be fairly expensive for any great length of film.
As far as seeing what life would look like, ah, I don’t think the way people walk or wave or anything has changed much. Any quality Hollywood film reenacting an historical event would have gotten it right.
The footage in the relatively recent WWI documentary “Apocalypse: WWI” uses colorized, speed corrected film with added background sound effects and the overall effect is quite impressive. Some of the speed corrected footage is “jumpy”, but it really isn’t distracting.
A lot of old films had frames removed to shorten the run time and reduce the cost of duplicating the film. Fixing the timing doesn’t always produce great motion though. There are other ways of smoothing out the motion but they may add other artifacts to the motion. The same thing happens with colorization, without a lot of manual intervention a great deal of detail can get lost. Colorizing has improved over time, if there were sufficient demand re-timing slow rate movies could eventually be pretty good. It’s more likely to be used to insert short clips into modern movies. Something like this was done in Stone’s JFK movie with the Zapruder film.
