Jack Dempsey colorized clips

Great find and great info from rez....thank you

 

So to colorize footage, you rotoscope everything on the screen. You basically draw an outline over everything with your mouse; the glove, the body, the ring, the hair, etc. Adobe After Effects will track the outlines frame by frame, and will attempt to follow the object being traced. But if the shot has a lot of movement, like boxing for instance, the tracking is usually inaccurate, and you have to basically trace things frame by frame.

So a shot of Louis with his arms folded staring into the camera is pretty easy to colorize.
Joe Louis throwing punches in the ring on the other hand, it incredibly tedious and difficult. It requires a crazy amount of precision, patience, and time.

Now you asked "Am I seeing what it actually looked like?"

The colorization portion of this Smithsonian documentary was done by Composite Films, a high quality film restoration firm. For this documentary they spent 5,000 hours, on just researching the colors. They have an in house person dedicated to finding out the actual colors of the objects in the film. So they sweat the details in making sure they are recreating the colors as accurately as possible. Which is very noble.

So let's say you want to colorize a quick 2 second slow-mo shot of Ali, right?
What you'll do first is track all the objects on frame (His body, his legs, his shorts, his gloves, his hair, the ring, the ring ropes.) Next, you will figure out the actual color for each object through research. Then, you will spend time matching and mixing colors to get the desired look.

Results vary, but it almost always turns out awesome.
Humans see in color. And even though colorized film isn't perfect, it is far better than trying to perceive things accurately through a black and white filter. (In those days it wasn't a filter.)
Get this: A study notorious in the film restoration world showed that 50% of audiences drop off as soon as they see black and white.

Technically, it can be considered animation. Because you are animating masks. But a more accurate term is just film colorization.

What I look forward to is AI and deep neural networking that will be able to colorize film automatically.
We're not very far from that at all.

 

Having said all that, I think it's important to note that not a single one of these shots used in this documentary would be acceptable for any kind of modern film project.

The quality wouldn't be acceptable for a student indie film project.
The colorization done here is fantastic, and a huge breath of fresh air.
But if you ignore the historical significance of the footage, the quality of the shots are unacceptable by todays media standards.

I think the biggest missing key for film restoration is an AI technique that can predict and create frames, to eliminate the jerky movements.

There are incredible possibilities just beyond the horizon!

 

Newfound respect to anyone that does some **** like that. It sounds like your the guy who's YouTube videos I've been watching for like 2 years if your YouTube name is Reznick too. If just like to thank you for that because watching some of the fights you post have literally been my only trainer I've had for boxing, which is a sport that's helped me a lot so thanks man

 

Yeah man that's me.
I really appreciate that, and thank you for sharing that with me.
Hearing stuff like that, and knowing it makes even the tiniest impact, really helps me stick to it.
Hope my stuff continues to bring you joy in the future.

 

no problem. Theoretically could you use an app to slow the video down, and then download the slowed copy, then use that video in hopes it would track the lines better, and when finished use the app to restore it to original speed?

 

It's pretty easy to change the speed of a clip.
The problem with old footage is the inconsistency in frames to movement.

For instance, sometimes you need to go forward four frames to see the video progress.
And in the next second, you will only need to go forward one frame to progress.

Theoretically you could slice up the footage into individual frames and adjust the speed for each one.
But I assume it would be extremely difficult executing it.

Even then, you have an issue with how these films were recorded. There are a lot of missing frames, which speed can't account for. The documentary we got the Dempsey footage from is top notch restoration work. But notice how every single shots has "skipping movements." For instance, a man will turn his head, and his head will sort of skip positions rather than rotate smoothly.

To fix this, you would need to create frames.
Well this sounds impossible. How can you recreate a frame of Joe Louis boxing?
AI.
A smart AI tool would use image recognition to map out a shot, and deep neural networking to accurately predict the movement in between frames.

This software would look at millions of pieces of footage of human movement, and determine the proper movement between the frames, in an instant. This would forever change historical film.

There are "baby" versions of this technology already available, and they typically do a poor job, for now. However, it shows tons of promise to the underlying concept. And this field is rapidly improving, exponentially to be exact. We should see some incredible improvements to our favorite fight films in the next decade or two.

 

I'm going to try this and show you what I get. This sounds like an art in itself that I had no idea existed. Thanks

 

Hey man, the more people messing around with this stuff, the better!
Huge respect for your interest and willingness to give it a shot.
lmk if you have questions or need help.
It's honestly pretty easy to figure out, but just really time consuming.

If you find rotoscoping/colorizing enjoyable, hit me up.
We could collab and do some really neat stuff.
And having two people doing masking/rotoscoping would be way faster than one.

That team that did the Dempsey footage is a professional firm of experts with serious resources, and it took them 9 months. I'm just one dude.

 

If I like it and I think I will as I can combine analysis, detail (which I enjoy), and historical research (also enjoy) I'll show you what I come up with.

 

Cheers man, no pressure.
Looking forward to anything you come up with

 

So, it's basically a fabrication.

Great.

 

I don't think you understand the workflow from a real moment, to a camera, to post, to the final product. Everything is a fabrication of the real moment.
Just because I'm taking you on the inside of the kinks to colorization, it doesn't mean that the process of filming something isn't just as hacked together.

Why is color restoration more fabricated than a black and white image? Explain this.
The image is black and white due to technical constraint, not choice. Colorization brings the piece closer to the intention.
The camera is not a magical tool bestowed upon humans by some higher power to allow us to capture reality. It's a man made hacked together contraption. We only shot in black and white because that's all we were physically capable of doing, and at the time, doing so in itself was a miracle. Today, we have the power to go back, and continue the work started by people 100 years ago. To accomplish the same exact goal.

Colorization is no more a hack than combining chunks of metal, mirrors and chemicals to attempt to capture a moment. It's different means to the same end.

Not seeing merit in colorization for a George Orwell film is one thing.
They set up the lighting, costumes, and props with the idea that it will be viewed in black and white. So when you colorize those films, you are usually taking careless liberties at what the director intended. Which is why Orwells dying demand was for no studio to colorize Citizen Kane.

But for historical footage, there is no artistic merit, it's documentation.
You are trying to get as close to the real moment as possible. And seeing the world through black and white is not real.

The merits of colorizing historical footage is solidified in the world of film.
A topic that has been covered and explored by lots of very smart people over the years who've developed their views with experience, philosophical consideration, theoretical scrutinization and long hours of experimentation, rather than simply a distaste for Jack Dempsey.

A long response for a short, careless statement, but the question has been brought up before (merits of colorization), so I wanted to address it.

 

An overly longwinded blowsy response that I am honestly too bored to read after the first paragraph..

You are adding to the artifact when coloring, yes or no? You can control shading and definition, but now with color also at your own choosing, yes or no? It is one more step more in the direction of artifice than in artifact, yes or no?

I am not saying that it is inherently dishonest as a process but that in the hands of someone agendized that it certainly can become so.

Nice cartoons, tho.