Step into a time machine: welcome to Amsterdam in 1922, in color and HD

https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2020/stap-in-een-tijdmachine-welkom-in-het-amsterdam-van-1922-in-kleur-en-hd~v380368/

by Udik • 6 years ago

22 9 6 years ago

volkskrant.nl

jansan• 6 years ago

How did they delete all the fat prople?

dang• 6 years ago

Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. You've done it repeatedly lately, and we eventually ban such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

epicureanideal• 6 years ago

Here's an idea for the next round of reworking these old videos, but it would be a LOT more work... orders of magnitude more work...

Find people from the same region today, ideally descendants of people who were in the video, and deepfake their faces onto the video. Possibly go a step further and find period clothing, and deepfake the clothing in higher resolution onto the video. Or at least get samples of the materials and use that to deepfake improvements to the "resolution" of the video. Could do something similar with the audio.

garmaine2• 6 years ago

If you're going to that much effort, why not re-film it with the new people?

garmaine2• 6 years ago

Everyone is wearing hats....

butz• 6 years ago

And where is a button if you do not want to accept cookies?

JeanMarcS• 6 years ago

Exactly. Not very GDPR compliant...

ClikeX• 6 years ago

I detest full-page cookie walls like these. Many Dutch news outlets use them. Sometimes combined with paywalls after a few "free" visits.

anyfoo• 6 years ago

Be careful, these are not actual videos of the past.

The original pictures and videos may have been limited in resolution (spatial, temporal, color), but they are an actual sample of the reality that was at that time. They may be missing things, but what's there was there.

The "processed" videos are made up. By an algorithm with limited to no contextual clues, no less. The algorithm was trained to make things look real, it does not know about things making sense for the place and time. Some details, colors, movements may have been counterintuitive in reality, they may even have had a "fake" seeming look by today's standards. The algorithm does not know that.

I am not discounting the value of those interpolations. The processed videos do give you a better idea of what life was like. By making it feel more "real", you can connect much better. It makes the past seem less abstract. They do still convey the fact that a train was there, or that people were wearing hats (as another commenter pointed out).

But they are not historical documents. It is important to the documents as such, essentially as dramatizations of the past. Do not try to draw conclusions from individual elements of what you see, they may lead you to the wrong conclusions.

Step into a time machine: welcome to Amsterdam in 1922, in color and HD

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