Design
Classic cartoons upscaled to 60 fps will ruin your childhood memories
Not everything needs — nor benefits from — modern-day remastering.
Frame rates are a hot topic these days. The higher the frames per second (fps), the obviously flashier and better a film or video game must be, right? Oh, how terribly wrong that is. Don't believe us? Just check out three-minutes of classic Tom & Jerry cartoons remastered in 60 fps...
The valley of uncanny smoothness — Uploaded by YouTuber, Someguy14201, the video's source materials have been interpolated, or essentially "upgraded," to 60 fps using DAIN-APP v0.41, an app using algorithmic programming to add in new frames to existing media, including perfectly-fine-as-is vintage cartoon animations, apparently. Someguy14201 then went in and removed any duplicate frames (a painstaking-as-hell task, from the sound of it) to further smooth out the interpolated clips.
The results are what you see: Colors certainly "pop" a bit more from time to time, and things are a bit smoother, but that's at the expense of some truly uncanny cartoon movements from an anthropomorphic cat and rat, respectively. Perhaps it's because part of vintage cartoons' appeal comes from their hand-drawn aspects, and that you can feel the human touch behind the vibrant colors and animated whimsy.
Better for videogames — We humbly suggest that, in the future, we just save all these fps pissing contests for videogames, where trivial graphics-related arguments truly belong, and where the material can be made to match the fps, not the other way around. And hey, if you're still looking for HD spins on fan-favorites that one asked for, how about that ray tracing addition to Fortnite, of all titles?
Now, don't get us wrong, it's definitely an interesting experiment from Someguy, so we're not gonna rag on it too hard. If nothing else, it certainly makes a case to stick to real-life video frame-rate interpolations, like this ridiculously gorgeous remastering of a film from 1896. But even then, historians and scholars have made very valid cases against doing even that, as well. Maybe it's just time to admit that not everything deserves an HD-upgrade, and that sleek frame rates don't automatically confer grace and/or beauty.
