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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @01:54PM (2 children)
Obviously thinks the Star Wars "special editions" are better than the originals
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday February 05 2020, @02:37PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGrXO2RDzLg [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 06 2020, @01:57AM
There's a person in a classic video game forum who points out the same analog except with audio using StarFox games as an example. In Starfox64 all the voice acting has been put through a filter that gives that scratchy low-fi sound like you'd hear from people talking in handheld radios.
In the later StarFox games, that effect is removed, so all the voices sound super hi-fi. The effect is confusing because it gives that face-to-face vibe over distance communication. I guess the latter works well in Star Trek while they're actually hailing and talking face-to-face, but there is nothing better for the combat communication experience than 20th century Earth handheld radio style.