AI technology is making it possible to upgrade old movies to make them look remarkably good, much sharper and smoother than the originals. It even makes it possible to colorize black-and-white films, although the results here are somewhat less convincing.
If you're interested in how this technology works, Wired has an overview of the most common techniques. Several examples are linked in the article.
ON APRIL 14, 1906, the Miles brothers left their studio on San Francisco’s Market Street, boarded a cable car, and began filming what would become an iconic short movie. Called A Trip Down Market Street, it’s a fascinating documentation of life at the time: As the cable car rolls slowly along, the brothers aim their camera straight ahead, capturing women in outrageous frilly Victorian hats as they hurry across the tracks. A policeman strolls by wielding a billy club. Newsboys peddle their wares. Early automobiles swerve in front of the cable car, some of them convertibles, so we can see their drivers bouncing inside. After nearly a dozen minutes, the filmmakers arrive at the turntable in front of the Ferry Building, whose towering clock stopped at 5:12 am just four days later when a massive earthquake and consequent fire virtually obliterated San Francisco.
Well over a century later, an artificial intelligence geek named Denis Shiryaev has transformed A Trip Down Market Street into something even more magical. Using a variety of publicly available algorithms, Shiryaev colorized and sharpened the film to 4K resolution (that’s 3,840 horizontal pixels by 2,160 vertical pixels) and bumped the choppy frame rate up to 60 frames per second, a process known as frame interpolation. The resulting movie is mesmerizing. We can finally see vibrant colors on those flamboyant Victorian hats. We can see the puckish looks on those newsboys’ faces. And perhaps most importantly, we can see in unprecedented detail the … byproducts that horses had left on the ground along the cable car’s tracks.
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