AI Upscales Apollo Lunar Footage to 60 FPS

Today is the 51st anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, so it seems appropriate to write about the amazing update to some of the Apollo video footage. You've probably seen the original Apollo footage, grainy and jerky, whether it's the very low quality video feed or the somewhat better 16 mm. film footage. 

Now a "photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and images."

I've viewed the upgraded footage and the improvement is dramatic. This is from Apollo 15. 

The AI that DutchSteamMachine uses is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation, or DAIN for short. This AI is open source, free and constantly being developed and improved upon. Motion interpolation or motion-compensated frame interpolation is a form of video processing in which intermediate animation frames are generated between existing ones, in an attempt to make the video more fluid, to compensate for blurriness, etc.

“People have used the same AI programs to bring old film recordings from the 1900s back to life, in high definition and colour,” he said. “This technique seemed like a great thing to apply to much newer footage.”

But you may not be able to try this at home. It takes a powerful, high-end GPU (with special cooling fans!) DutchSteamMachine said that a video of just 5 minutes can take anywhere from 6 to 20 hours to complete. But the results speak for themselves.