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Neural Networks Upscale Film From 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 05 2020, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-up-the-zapruder-film dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

Neural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone:

When watching old film footage that's plagued with excessive amounts of grain, gate weave, soft focus, and a complete lack of color, it's hard to feel connected to the people in the clip, or what's going on. It looks like a movie, and over the years that medium has taught our brains that what they're seeing on screen might not actually be real. By comparison, the experience of watching videos of friends and family captured on your smartphone is completely different thanks to 4K resolutions and high frame-rates. Those clips feel more authentic and while watching them there's more of a connection to the moment, even if you weren't actually there while it was being shot.

[...] L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat doesn't have the same effect on modern audiences, but Denis Shiryaev wondered if it could be made more compelling by using neural network powered algorithms (including Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI and DAIN) to not only upscale the footage to 4K, but also increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second. You might yell at your parents for using the motion smoothing setting on their fancy new TV, but here the increased frame rate has a dramatic effect on drawing you into the action.

[...] The results are far from perfect; we're hoping Shiryaev applies one of the many deep learning algorithms that can colorize black and white photos to this film as well, but the obvious potential of these tools to enhance historical footage to increase its impact is just as exciting as the potential for it to be misused.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @12:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @12:42PM (#954190)

    I like the cleaning up that the neural network did, but my eye says that 4K is overkill.
    It actually has artifacts that remind me of video tape, although it's better quality than video tape.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @01:31PM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday February 05 2020, @01:31PM (#954202)
    Note that TFA's "original" version (also used on Ars' version [arstechnica.com] of the story) is already considerably cleaned up and gives the impression that the Lumière brothers were much further ahead of their time they were. Even so, given where the photographic industry was at in 1896, the quality of the *actual* original [youtube.com] footage is quite remarkable in its own right, with amazing clarity and tonal range, even by the standards of the then state of the art.

    4K might be overkill, although that the original even supports that level of upscaling without serious visual issues is a highly impressive demonstration of the AI algorithm though. I'd really love to see one of those split montages with each stage of the refinement show in a separate strip of the screen (original, cleaned up, upscaled, FPS increase, colourized) to make it clear just how much difference each enhancement pass made; a bit of a shame that Shiryaev doesn't seem to have thought of that.
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