Everyday life in Tokyo, 1913-1915

July 20, 2020 7:56 AM

Footage has been colorized, set to sound and in 60 fps. Original source.
posted by Foci for Analysis (46 comments total)

man rambalac has been at it a long time
posted by anazgnos at 8:18 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

There are some very dapper hats.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:20 AM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

kids taking off their coats when they're not supposed to never changes i guess.
posted by affectionateborg at 9:07 AM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thanks for this! One thing that struck me was how few people were wearing glasses...
posted by HarrysDad at 9:09 AM on July 20, 2020

I appreciate the alterations; the upscaling really makes this more enjoyable and I like the sound, although it seems very wrong for Tokyo. It's the colorization that bothers me. Why so washed out? It looks like they were trying to emulate very old bad color film
posted by Nelson at 9:17 AM on July 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

A few face masks here and there! Almost like their efficacy at curtailing the transmission of respiratory aerosol and droplet-borne disease were something that's been established for over a century.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:23 AM on July 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

Watch the faces. They shift from B&W to color as the head turns. Disconcerting. Why do people waste their time colorizing things. Especially when they admit up front that it is not historically accurate?
posted by njohnson23 at 9:24 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

It's the colorization that bothers me. Why so washed out? It looks like they were trying to emulate very old bad color film

I had the same reaction. I had thought SOTA colorization using ML had improved beyond this from awhile now.

Still super cool to watch tho.
posted by gwint at 9:46 AM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

The original source is actually this much longer film called Japan of Today, hosted by the Eye Film Museum in the Netherlands.
posted by vacapinta at 10:26 AM on July 20, 2020 [12 favorites]

Maybe the colorization algorithm is struggling with the low resolution of the source material. I suspect it was trained on much clearer sources.

I am also skeptical of auto colorization, but in my opinion old dance clips are substantially improved by it. It can really add contrast and make it easier to find faces and figures against a background.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:28 AM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

I am also not sure about the frame rate interpolation. It really damages scenes where anything is moving unpredictability, like the kids bouncing balls, which flicker out every few frames. But it works well on the others. Maybe a less aggressive 30fps would have worked better? Or just disable it on the scenes where it kinda failed?
posted by BungaDunga at 10:32 AM on July 20, 2020

In my opinion, there's too much missing data to upscale effectively to 4k, and the colorizing and faked sound don't do anything for the viewing experience.

I would rather they had worked on getting rid of some of the noise, smoothed the motion and left it at that.

man rambalac has been at it a long time

That made me laugh out loud. I really enjoy the current day city videos of Japan from both rambalac and NIPPON WANDERING TV. They're somehow very calming.
posted by SteveInMaine at 11:17 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

I thought they were face masks too but I actually think it’s an artifact of the face-detailing software they’re using.
posted by affectionateborg at 11:38 AM on July 20, 2020

That semicircular bridge is so beautiful. I agree that the sound is wrong, all the outdoor spaces sound like indoor spaces.
posted by oulipian at 11:41 AM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

The drum bridge is super famous and you've seen it in lots of ukiyo-e woodcuts.

At 3:08 the film changes to Nakamise dori in Asakusa, and the nearby inner lantern gate of Senso-ji temple. Hozomon is not as famous as the outer lantern gate, Kaminarimon, but you've also seen it in woodcuts.
posted by sukeban at 12:30 PM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

I've recently been watching some other footage on Youtube with the same treatment, sped up but not necessarily colorized from America and Europe. It's amazing how different it looks at normal speed. It takes away the sensation of it being in "The Past ".
*Actually just noticed it's the same YouTube channel.
posted by Liquidwolf at 12:40 PM on July 20, 2020

BungaDunga: that clip from 1941 has some bad racist tropes but holy moly the music and dancing in that scene is all amazing! SO MUCH going on in that short clip! Never saw that before, thanks.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:47 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I love seeing speed correction but the interpolation is painful and it would be nice if they just took out the dropped frames instead of smearing thought the splices. Still cool.
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:27 PM on July 20, 2020

Maybe the colorization algorithm is struggling with the low resolution of the source material. I suspect it was trained on much clearer sources.

Why wouldn’t the colorization be done on the clean, up-sampled version, and not the original small, grainy version? The result of the colorization in the video is, imho, worse than just leaving it b/w.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:11 PM on July 20, 2020

I wish people would just let old films be old films and stop trying to "fix" them.
posted by octothorpe at 2:19 PM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

The original footage definitely looks better to me. I appreciate what they're trying to do in the upscaled/colorized/etc. version, but to me it just looks so artificial that a lot of the feeling of "oh this is how it really looked!" is lost, and you're just left with a kind of smeary mess. You might as well be watching a CGI recreation. Not to mention the ambient sound, which as far as I can tell is a complete fake (and is a part of the "original" video as well).
posted by chrominance at 2:22 PM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

The person (street performer?) at 3:30 is really good at metal plate hackeysack. Is that still a game people play in Japan?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:27 PM on July 20, 2020

That semicircular bridge is so beautiful.

Looking at their footwear, basically wooden flip-flops, I wonder how most people could stay on their feet crossing that bridge.
posted by cooper green at 2:28 PM on July 20, 2020

Looking at their footwear, basically wooden flip-flops, I wonder how most people could stay on their feet crossing that bridge.

With lots of care, or tumbling down it. (As I said before, that bridge is in a lot of prints)

But yes, the color is very underwhelming. Theather districts like the ones at the beginning were very colorful, and many parts of temples and shrines like Senso-ji were (and are) painted vivid vermilion.
posted by sukeban at 2:45 PM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

I wish people would just let old films be old films and stop trying to "fix" them.

I'm not into the colorization but I think speeding them up to normal speed looks fascinating. I like seeing old footage in a realistic way.
posted by Liquidwolf at 2:57 PM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Maybe the colorization algorithm is struggling with the low resolution of the source material. I suspect it was trained on much clearer sources.

Colorizing / "upscaling" this kind of footage is sort of pointless, because (1) the nitrate originals are already "high resolution" (what they're really upscaling here is a compressed 720p YouTube clip) and (2) the emulsions used in motion picture stocks of the era were orthochromatic.

In layman's terms, this means that they were only sensitized to blue and green light and significantly underexposed colors like red and orange. So the light and dark values would not be accurate at all. Vibrant reds would look very dark in the footage, for instance, whereas blues might look white. Attempts to apply color yield drab-looking results, which is the case here.
posted by alexoscar at 3:05 PM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah I like the increased framerate and interpolation, but the colorization is just sort of blah. The audio is kind of strange, but kind of works.
posted by zardoz at 3:35 PM on July 20, 2020

i really liked watching the people who couldn't take their eyes off the camera (some completely mesmerized). i wish they had included a pic or some indication of the camera setup.
posted by rude.boy at 3:45 PM on July 20, 2020

Why wouldn’t the colorization be done on the clean, up-sampled version, and not the original small, grainy version? The result of the colorization in the video is, imho, worse than just leaving it b/w.

The upsampled version is still smeary and not really very much like a clean high-res image, so while I'm sure they upsampled first, I could imagine it interfering.

The AI coloring added to this footage of Beijing from the same period looks a little bit better. It's really only three colors though: blue-ish for clothes, skin-tones, and some faint green for the ground.

Colorizing / "upscaling" this kind of footage is sort of pointless, because (1) the nitrate originals are already "high resolution" (what they're really upscaling here is a compressed 720p YouTube clip) and (2) the emulsions used in motion picture stocks of the era were orthochromatic.

I don't know about pointless. Handcoloring was not that uncommon in early photography, this is just applying AI to the problem. Handpainted photos are a weird combination of photography and portraiture. Color adds visual contrast that isn't there in the original, even if it's totally hallucinatory. I bet the algorithm wasn't trained on orthochromatic examples though, so that can't help. And if you could get your hands on a nice 4K transfer then of course upscaling isn't going to be very useful at all.

Nothing about the colorized Helzapoppin' clip I linked to before looks really natural, but (as someone who's watched the original clip more than a few times...) to my eye the AI colored version adds a real vibrance. It's easier to pick the dancers' faces out, and their costumes stand out from the background, too. Of course that was done on panchromatic film of a later era, so it has a fighting chance to look good. AI colorization is (mostly) a bit crap, mind you.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:54 PM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Umm-- why didn't the orbital swing around a pole thing endure?! Never seen that before-- seems like a great little playground feature.
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:39 PM on July 20, 2020

At 1:32 I didn't realize those were children for a minute and I thought that was the tallest guy I'd ever seen.
posted by deadbilly at 9:32 PM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Static Vagabond, we had one of those pole swings (we called it a maypole) at my elementary school and I believe it’s still there!
I wonder if it’s actually that old? The school building was built in 1905.
posted by exceptinsects at 10:26 PM on July 20, 2020

Anyway, having zero knowledge about the technical aspects, I thought this was pretty magical. I spent a few years in Tokyo and I’d say the feeling of it hasn’t changed much! Still full of people and so many signs!
posted by exceptinsects at 10:46 PM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I really like these faux-restoration efforts. Yes, the final result after the post-processing is not historically accurate, the sound is completely fake and the colorization algorithm is flawed, but that's not the point. The point is that the psychological effect of watching the footage in this state is completely different.

We instantly parse the original grainy monochrome silent footage as "dead people from olden times". The modified footage, despite being technically less true to life than the original in various ways, feels much more immersive and "alive" to me, in an uncanny and engrossing way. I think that this is what motivates the people who produce it, and I appreciate their efforts.

Of course there is a lot of room for improvement, and I look forward to (for example) a more accurate colour reconstruction being made available in the future, which takes into account what we know about the chemical properties of the original film.
posted by confluency at 2:06 AM on July 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

one of the things i like best (among many great things ;) about ozu is his films spanned the silent era through talkies to color, getting a good glimpse of what life was like in japan through those eras. these early footage -- of moscow, paris (arrivée d’un train à la ciota), san francisco, new york[1] (cf. von sternberg's underworld or the docks of new york), amsterdam or berlin (viz. the last laugh, symphony of a metropolis, menschen am sonntag and beauty and berlin) -- are some of the best time capsules! like color photos from tsarist russia[2] or WWI... speaking of which, probably the most prominent example of upscaling lately: they shall not grow old[3]
posted by kliuless at 3:56 AM on July 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

A few face masks here and there! Almost like their efficacy at curtailing the transmission of respiratory aerosol and droplet-borne disease were something that's been established for over a century.

you can see some in arrival of a train at la ciotat (1896) too :P
posted by kliuless at 4:04 AM on July 21, 2020

A few face masks here and there! Almost like their efficacy at curtailing the transmission of respiratory aerosol and droplet-borne disease were something that's been established for over a century.

Interestingly- in 1913 the Manchurian Plague was two years prior. It was a pneumonic plague with ~100% fatality, and was probably the first time anyone had tried to contain a plague by widespread mask usage and set a precedent for international disease response.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:39 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Given when this was filmed, there's definitely not enough color -- this was right when industrial silk spinning and chemical dyes were being introduced, and the resulting kimono were very, very bright.
posted by nonasuch at 7:47 AM on July 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Maybe the colorization algorithm is struggling with the low resolution of the source material. I suspect it was trained on much clearer sources.

I like the upscaling but the colour grading on this seems based more on faded cololur photos than any attempt to resort actual colours. Everything is so needlessly brown. The uploader's other videos of places like Amsterdam or New York show a similar palette - khaki faces, emphasis on blacks, dark blues, and browns for clothing, and an absolute lack of anything red, green, or bright colours in general.

Look at this shot. The green leaves are darkened to almost black. The green patina of the statue is washed out to nearly blend into the sky. Compare to this still from They Shall Not Grow Old. Yes the uniforms' colour is a little too uniform and the faces a little too grey, but look at the green of the leaves and the bright blues and reds on their insignia.
posted by thecjm at 8:53 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Just for fun I converted that still to monochrome and ran it through a similar filter to the one that's popular for these videos. It's definitely trying, but it has no hope of getting the insignia, which must have been done by reference to the actual uniforms.

It's pretty bad at small things that occlude big things, like leaves that are in front of a person. They end up just taking the color of the big thing behind, so there's not as much visual contrast as there should be, and all of the gear they're carrying is the same undifferentiated brown as their uniform. The hand-coloring does a really good job of separating those out.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:49 PM on July 21, 2020

For those interested in colorization....

I wonder if Marina Amaral will ever get into video. I found her via twitter and eventually got her book, Color of Time. She does an amazing amount of research to ensure colors are accurate. Her twitter feed often explains the research and also crowdsources things in case someone has actual knowledge based on family items or museum artifacts or references in literature etc.

https://marinamaral.com/
posted by affectionateborg at 12:58 PM on July 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

Thanks for the link, affectionateborg. Amaral's work is amazing!!
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 3:20 PM on July 21, 2020

affectionateborg, that is a fascinating link. Her site, the book and the twitter threads you mentioned would make a great fpp!
posted by Nea Imagista at 2:31 AM on July 22, 2020

I'm with the people who want a corrected frame rate, but none of the other stuff. I'm always appalled that we spent so many decades watching comically accelerated silent film footage because people couldn't be bothered to use equipment properly set up to view or transcribe it.

Of course, the contemporary version of this is people who can't be bothered to set aspect ratios properly on their giant screens, so they get used to everything being stretched horizontally instead of, you know, pressing the aspect ratio button on the remote.
posted by sonascope at 6:16 AM on July 22, 2020

That reminds me, I had an AskMe years ago asking about silent film era clips always being presented too fast.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:11 PM on July 22, 2020

out of this world...
The Flying Train, Germany, 1902
posted by kliuless at 1:32 AM on August 19, 2020