Michael Moynihan: Unlocking the gold in black and white

What would moments like England's controversial third goal scored by Geoff Hurst in the 1966 World Cup final look like with the help of modern technology?

What would moments like England's controversial third goal scored by Geoff Hurst in the 1966 World Cup final look like with the help of modern technology?

One of the big cultural events of the last few months has to be the Beatles documentary series, Get Back, which has been (rightly) lauded for what it revealed about the music group — their relationships, their creative process, their appetite for well-buttered toast.

What’s struck many observers is the contrast between the original footage, some of it so murky you’re reduced to guessing just who’s actually in shot, and the new, crisp film, with its vivid colours and sharply defined outlines. It’s like a whole new film, with director Peter Jackson crediting AI-based machine learning for the transformation.

“You can’t actually just do it with off-the-shelf software,” Jackson explained a couple of years back about a similar project, adding that “a department of code writers who write computer code in software” were responsible.

The implications for sports footage need hardly be spelt out, but I insist on doing so anyway.

If Jackson’s troop of merry coders and software wizards were unleashed on old sports tapes and films the revelations could be amazing — and not just in terms of resolving old puzzles, though that would be an excellent starting point.

For instance, Geoff Hurst is much in the news recently, giving interviews in which he gamely fields yet more questions about the 1966 World Cup final — but the Jackson Treatment would soon resolve whether or not Hurst’s crucial shot crossed the West German goal line.

However, the true value of the footage-cleaning would surely be seen in the revival of less sensational events. Consider the British Pathe footage of old games you’ve stumbled across, and how it resembles nothing as much as watching busy ants argue the toss in a distant corner of a car park.

In that original footage those distant stick-insect figures might be anybody doing anything, but in the restored format? The technical skill and personal charisma of some of the greatest players in every sport ever filmed would be finally revealed.

Consider the implications — personalities only known through legend and rumour finally brought to life in all their glory — and finally answering questions about their greatness definitively.

No matter your favoured code, once Jackson’s crack team got to grips with even a few slivers of yellowing film the best performers in history would come vividly to life.

And not just in pictures, by the way.

Jackson’s resurrection of the Beatles footage works not just with the pictures but with the sound. He pointed out that when the filming was done originally, back in 1969, the band could keep their chats private: “If they (the Beatles) were in a conversation, they would turn their amps up loud and they’d strum the guitar.”

This meant the original filmmakers couldn’t record those conversations properly. However Jackson and his team devised a technology called demixing: “You teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like.”

If the system has enough data then it learns to distinguish what those instruments sound like — and what a voice sounds like, which can then be cleaned up and resurrected.

The result? Conversations lost for half a century suddenly brought back to life, clear and distinct as the day they occurred.

Could the same be done for the conversations on old newsreels of sports events, of All-Ireland finals and world title bouts, of refereeing decisions and in-game sledging?

The protests in favour of maintaining some level of mystery are almost audible already but this kind of reformatting and reworking is inevitable, as far as I can see. Even if you’d prefer to just let it be.

Decline of darts TV coverage

I’m not a darts man myself, which will come as a shock to absolutely nobody who knows me, and in particular my awesome lack of co-ordination. Because of same, I’d feature on no one’s shortlist of people to be given spiky-tipped throwing implements in any context, particularly one likely to involve alcoholic drink in the vicinity.

I don’t subscribe to Sky Sports either, all of which means I haven’t been following the PDC World Championships too closely, but I’m aware that they’re underway. At the time of writing, James Wade is to face Michael Smith in one semi-final, while Gary Anderson is up against Peter Wright in the other.

The glory days of Jocky Wilson and Eric Bristow are long behind us, which may account for the relative lack of coverage now compared to that era (apropos, take half an hour to watch the documentary Eric Bristow, Arrows on YouTube, which might as well have been scripted by Martin Amis and is all quality).

Is it too obvious to say that class is a driving force in this sidelining of darts? If so, how does that feed into the greater popularity — or higher visibility, at least — a generation ago? Does the move to subscription television help to explain the decline, at least in part?

There’s no end of angles here: something to revisit in due course.

Controversy needs more work

I’m well aware of the time of year, and the general lack of activity, but everyone is going to have to step up their controversy game if last week’s non-starter is anything to go by.

A quick recap: Austin Stacks wanted to toss a coin to decide the venue for their upcoming Munster club football final against St Finbarr’s.

St Finbarr’s decided not to, opting for a neutral venue when offered that option by the Munster Council - the organisation which is responsible for scheduling fixtures, after all.

And, ah, that’s it.

Call that a controversy? Amateur hour all round. Where was the emotional blackmail, the thinly-veiled threats, the seething enmity? Where was the brinkmanship and the tortured negotiations, the late-night phone calls, the missed deadlines?

For controversy we need a good deal more than this, folks.

We need opposition jerseys burnt in a fireplace or the parentage and pedigree of one side’s star players called into question.

Disappointed scribes everywhere throw up their hands feeling cheated of a good week’s worth of escalating tension, with this ‘season of goodwill to all’ lark taken far too much to heart.

Must do better.

Something for everyone

No matter how esoteric your tastes, there seems to be books on the way that will appease your savage lusts, or at least your wish to read something different.

For instance, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame has a biography, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, which is out in a couple of weeks.

If you fancy something a little different hang on in there for a new book from Amy Liptrot, The Instant, which details her move to live in Berlin.

It’s probably the exact opposite to Bernstein’s book, which means I can’t do any more to cater for people’s vagaries here.

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