We have never experienced the past as we do today. Watching cities and people of the 20s in color, as happens with certain documentaries, changes us inside. It is a process destined to change our very perception of time, the past doesn't seem so distant when you can see it like this.
The developer and YouTuber by name Denis Shiryaev they took things to the next level. He used several neural networks to improve a famous French short film of 1895 to show it at a crazy resolution. Now it is as if it had been shot on a smartphone.
Short film of 1895 in 4K
The 50-second French short film called “L'arrivée d'un train engare de La Ciotat” shows the arrival of a train at the Ciotat train station.
It is a very famous short film: his fame derives from the story in which observers are presumed to be terrified by the fear that the train would break through the screen and then crashed on them
Shiryaev thought that a change would be good for the classic. He was not wrong. Ha increased the film at 4K resolution at 60 fps with different neural networks. The result is nothing short of surprising.
Here is the original film:
And here's the updated one:
Finally, the new colorized version:
The sound (added) it gives the impression that the video is not from 1895, but was shot practically this morning, only with people dressed a little eccentrically.
In order to make the impressive upscaling of a 125-year-old film possible, Shiryaev used AI Gigapixels e Topaz Labs. Set some settings before upscaling Topaz and, after some fine-tuning, it got good sharp results.
This is an amazing step and opens up a world of future possibilities for restoring old films.
Yes, there are still some elements like some noise and excessive smoothing in the video, but overall nothing that can't be fixed. It is certainly exciting to think about the progress of this technology over the next 10 years.
