
Using neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality - eyegor
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/someone-used-neural-networks-to-upscale-a-famous-1896-video-to-4k-quality/
======
jtbayly
Am I the only one that finds the "improved" version much worse?

There are digital artifacts all over the place, like the steam at the
beginning, the people's faces, any place there is movement.

I see that some things don't move as "jerky" but I think the original is far
superior to watch.

Edited to add: Here's a link to a quick comparison image. These aren't exactly
the same frame or size, but close enough to see what I'm talking about.
[https://imgur.com/a/A3roH54](https://imgur.com/a/A3roH54)

~~~
tachyonbeam
Someone posted a colorized[0] version and it had somewhat "jumpy" colors that
change over time. I think one problem is you need temporal consistency for
this to really work properly. If you pick a color for an object, or you
upscale an object a certain way, it has to stay that way over a potentially
unlimited number of frames. That's already hard to achieve because neural
networks are typically bad at long-term dependency, but it's even more
difficult if the object moves, because it implies that the neural network has
to understand object identity and movement, which requires understanding
physics, and what a train or a person is to begin with. At the moment, neural
networks don't have sophisticated models of the world.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E)

~~~
sangnoir
>...because it implies that the neural network has to understand object
identity and movement, which requires understanding physics, and what a train
or a person is to begin with.

I agree with most of what you said, but disagree with the need to know
underlying fundamentals: most 5 year olds can throw and catch a ball without
needing to understand calculus or Newton's laws of gravity.

~~~
mnowicki
they don't need to know the formulas or mathematical logic behind physics, but
5 year olds do have a working model of physics in their head. And AI wouldn't
need to know the actual formulas either, but it would need some working model
that owuld allow it to differentiate between those

~~~
tachyonbeam
That's right. It has to understand how objects move, and the boundaries
between objects, what's part of a given object and what isn't, as well as how
a given object will be affected by light when moving, shadows, etc. This is
difficult to learn from data, even if you have a lot of it.

~~~
sangnoir
> It has to understand how objects move[1], and the boundaries between
> objects[2], what's part of a given object and what isn't[3], as well as how
> a given object will be affected by light[4] when moving, shadows, etc. This
> is difficult to learn from data, even if you have a lot of it.

Each one of the items you've listed has been severally accomplished by ML to
varying levels of success (baseline being "workable", and more progress is
being made.) I probably would have found better references had I spent longer
than 5 minutes searching

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGm3hF_BlYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGm3hF_BlYM)

2\. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/20999646/google-arcore-
au...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/20999646/google-arcore-augmented-
reality-updates-occlusion-physics-depth)

3\. Same as 2 :-). AR Occlusion requires both. Additionally many recent phones
use ML models to fake depth-of-field; boundary between foreground objects has
to be detected

4\. Also see 2; Augmented Reality is _hard._ bonus:
[https://www.awn.com/animationworld/how-klaus-uniquely-
combin...](https://www.awn.com/animationworld/how-klaus-uniquely-combines-cg-
lighting-techniques-traditional-2d-animation)

~~~
tachyonbeam
I work in deep learning research. In my opinion, pose estimation with one
human centered in a frame is nowhere near the level of difficulty of
constructing an accurate model of a complex a scene with multiple people and
moving objects of various sizes. For instance, it wouldn't be so hard to
detect that there is a train in this video, but to do upscaling correctly, you
need a 3D model of this specific train. Yes, there exist deep learning models
that try to do 3D reconstruction, and so far, I haven't seen anything that
works robustly. Combining this information with an upscaling model is another
challenge. It's not as easy as just plugging components together.

------
chriskanan
The same approach is being used to enhance the textures of older games,
ranging from Doom, Witcher 2, Final fantasy 7, and others. People have turned
them into mods [0,1].

I actually showed a few examples on day one of the deep learning course I'm
teaching this semester as an emergent application of the technology.

[0] [https://www.pcgamer.com/heretic-looks-stunning-with-
neural-n...](https://www.pcgamer.com/heretic-looks-stunning-with-neural-
network-texture-improvements/)

[1] [https://www.pcgamer.com/AI-upscale-mod-list/](https://www.pcgamer.com/AI-
upscale-mod-list/)

~~~
stared
See "AI Neural Networks being used to generate HQ textures for older games
(You can do it yourself!)" [https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-
networks-being-us...](https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks-
being-used-to-generate-hq-textures-for-older-games-you-can-do-it-
yourself.88272/) (Dec 2018) - people create it for old games, it is easy to
set in on one's own computer, or on Colab.

Also, super-resolution is being used not only to statically enhance textures,
but also - work on the flight. See Atomic Heart RTX Tech Demo, with ray-
tracing and deep learning super-sampling (DLSS)
[https://mundfish.com/en/rtxtechdemo/](https://mundfish.com/en/rtxtechdemo/).

------
valiant-comma
There are a number of speed-corrected vintage film clips on Youtube. Here’s an
example from late-1890s France:

[https://youtu.be/NjDclfAFRB4](https://youtu.be/NjDclfAFRB4)

While not upscaled, they are still pretty impressive, and interesting to
watch.

~~~
bangboombang
Somewhat OT: Can someone enlighten me why exactly we need to "speed correct"
them in the first place?

It always struck me as odd that those old b/w clips were often shown playing
too fast on TV. Isn't it more like they were simply recorded at lower fps
rates? Then how can you call this speed correcting, when you merely just
played them at the wrong frame rate before, just because TV is
25/30/50/60/59.4i² frames/fields per second and you didn't want to convert it
in any way. And then suddenly a few years ago these speed corrected versions
started to pop up on the internet, like "hey we just fixed the past, people
didn't actually move twice as fast back then!"

I guess I just don't like the term, but maybe there is more to it.

~~~
s1mon
“ While the illusion of motion works at 16 fps, it works better at higher
frame rates. Thomas Edison, to whom we owe a lot of debt to for this whole
operation (light bulbs, motion picture film, Direct Current, etc.) believed
that the optimal frame rate was 46 frames per second. Anything lower than that
resulted in discomfort and eventual exhaustion in audience. So Edison built a
camera and film projection system that operated at at a high frame rate.

But with the slowness of film stocks and high cost of film, this was a non-
starter. Economics dictated shooting closer to the threshold of the illusion,
and most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then
projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is
so comical, the film is sped up.”

[https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking-
film-24-frames-...](https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking-
film-24-frames-per-second/)

Another take on film speeds says that films were projected at a variety of
speeds, depending on the original filming as well as the economics of fitting
multiple showings into a schedule.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinema...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm)

------
01100011
Totally unrelated but I'm curious if anyone else experienced this phenomenon.

When I was a kid, people in old pictures and movies(say, pre 1920s) looked
genuinely strange. The structure of their faces, the shape of their bodies...
it just looked really weird to me. Now that I'm older, I find people in old
media very familiar, like I know people who look enough like them and I can
suddenly relate to them on a new level.

I'm guessing my younger brain just hadn't seen enough faces yet. In any case
it always struck me as odd.

~~~
adrianmonk
"Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet
reminds you of someone else."

\- Ogden Nash

~~~
MaxBarraclough
How does he define old age?

~~~
adrianmonk
The vast majority of his work was humorous poetry, but on rare occasions he
got serious. Since I like this one and it's sort of appropriate to the
subject, I'll share it:

    
    
        Old Men
        by Ogden Nash
    
        People expect old men to die,
        They do not really mourn old men.
        Old men are different. People look
        At them with eyes that wonder when...
        People watch with unshocked eyes;
        But the old men know when an old man dies.
    

(Copy/pasted from [https://westegg.com/nash/](https://westegg.com/nash/),
which has several other good ones.)

------
shirman
I am an author of this video, you can feel free to ask anything – I covered
algos that I have used in video description, you can find them there

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Why did you crop it? 25% of the picture is gone.

~~~
dylan604
This is an age old question when converting 4:3 footage to 16:9. Do you keep
the original aspect ratio (OAR) in the converted footage to keep the purists
happy (small percentage of audience), or do you fill the frame with as much
picture as possible to avoid mattes to keep the average content consumer happy
(much larger % of audience)? At the end of the day, the producers will make
the decision that they feel will please the largest group of viewers.

I have personally been involved with these types of projects. The purists are
the smaller section, but they are much more vocal on the internet. While
reading forums and tweets and other soapboxes, these purists will eviscerate
you publicly. However, using other metrics (sales figures, independent
surveys, etc), the numbers show that the overall product is well received.
There are so many people online that believe they know everything, but know
nothing; yet these people are the most vocal. I was once accused of uprezing
existing video tapes rather than re-scanning the film like the company
claimed. Never mind that I was personally carrying the film to the transfer
house. We took pictures of the employees with the film, took shots of the film
on the shelves in the vaults, and wound up making "making of" type
documentaries showing the process of the film on the telecine, interviewing
the colorist transferring the film, showing the artists doing the restoration,
and the sound department working with the audio from the original optical
track, etc. Still, the know-it-alls kept on yelling.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Are there any merits to removing 25% of a film, other than higher sales?

~~~
dylan604
Your choices are to keep the OAR as 4:3 so that you have ~240 pixels of pillar
bars on the left and right of the image (for HD), or crop into the image to
make it full frame. The average viewer tends to not like mattes of any type.
They tend to prefer a full frame image to fill up the pixels on their screen.
Because of this, producers will make the decision to crop into the picture to
get a full image.

The same decision happens when making a 16:9 (1.78) image from content that
was shot in the common 2.35/2.40 aspect for feature films. To get those images
to 16:9 so the image is full screen requires cutting of pixels from the sides
of the original. Content shot at 1.85 requires even less cropping. Even true
4K content is cropped slightly to fit the 16:9 aspect of UHD. It was even
worse when television was only 4:3. Content in 2.35/2.40 would crop so much of
the content, a shot of 2 people could remove one of the people from the frame
entirely. They would use the Pan&Scan technique to slide the image around in
the frame to reveal the 2nd person. This was one of the reasons for the slate
at the beginning of a movie saying that the video had been reformatted to fit
the screen.

~~~
basch
Video containers (or the stream itself) should really have a "center of frame"
coordinate for each frame, and let playback devices crop based on that center.
Maybe this already exists in some standards and im unaware.

~~~
dylan604
For digital files, ideally, the file only contains active pixels so that the
file is the frame size of the image. However, for video formats with a clearly
defined standard (TV/Broadcast/DVD/Blu-ray/etc), the video frame size must be
what is defined in the spec. This is why the mattes exist to fill in the space
to make the content fit the space required.

~~~
basch
If some people want to crop video to fit different screen aspect ratios, it
would be nice for the frame to advertise its "center" so the playback device
can apply the appropriate cropping and matting.

Maybe I have my player set to "3:2 full screen, up to 30% crop.". It's not
something I would do personally, but it would be better than pan and scan
being something implemented in the encode itself.

------
jcims
There's a sort of swimming/breathing effect in the video that's nauseating to
me in the same way that TV motion smoothing is. It looks like artifacts from
trying to perfectly crop the video when the source film likely has become
distorted over time, but it's hard to watch.

~~~
Bnshsysjab
Could be the frame rate, I feel a similar way when I first started watching
60fps. Now I feel like it’s a more substantial jump than 4K->8k

~~~
bitL
Rolling shutter is one possible explanation of "wavy" effects if they
digitized cinematic footage improperly. However, in this case I think we see
aliasing effects of static Gigapixel AI.

------
miles
Here is a colorized version:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E)

~~~
ekianjo
Not as convincing when clothes change colors between frames

~~~
sk0g
Makes it feel like a psychedelic trip without having to take anything though,
so that's a positive. Maybe.

------
agentbellnorm
I think the framereate is what makes it feel more vivid. I didn’t experience
that big of a difference with regards to resolution.

~~~
l33tman
Yeah, it seems the NN in this particular implementation just does edge
sharpening (almost like a "dumb" algorithm), the interior of textures and
faces etc. still seem to lack detail.

------
anjc
Can people in this thread genuinely not see a difference between the before
and after or are you just being contrary? The change in resolution should be
clear enough, but the FPS change is amazing and gives a great sense of
presence to me when watching.

There are some jarring artifacts, such as the ladies' hats glitching at 10sec,
but these artifacts are in the original and simply become clear in the
upscaled version. It's very impressive.

Side note, They Shall Not Grow Old is just stunning, with its restoration
pipeline. I can't wait until all media can be updated in such a fashion, and I
assume it's just a matter of time before e.g. YouTube and Spotify have filters
to offer restored VHS footage, old phonograph recordings, etc

~~~
aedron
I honestly couldn't see much difference. I did not study it in detail to find
the differences, just a casual view of both clips. I did look at the
comparison clips at the end of the 4K version but still didn't see much of a
difference.

A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to begin
with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this enhancement is
great", only turns out that was the original clip. They should have chosen
something that has more room for improvement (which would also give them a lot
more interesting material to choose from).

~~~
anjc
> A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to
> begin with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this
> enhancement is great", only turns out that was the original clip.

Funny, I did the same

------
kstenerud
One thing I've never understood is why people keep playing back old film at
too high a frame rate. It seems that the film cameras of the day recorded at a
lower-than-expected framerate, and the playback machines played at a higher
frame rate, resulting in the telltale weird effect of everyone moving too
fast. If they'd recorded audio along with it, everyone would be talking like
chipmunks.

~~~
anigbrowl
Correct. Hand-cranked cameras are obviously extra-problematic (though fun to
work with), but the first automatically cranked cameras worked at 18fps. Most
broadcast systems work at ~30, 25, or 24 fps (and there's a system for doing
24fps playback on 30fps TV). Retiming video used to be ridiculously
tedious/labor-intensive, and it's only in the last 5 years or so that it's
become sufficiently easy to pull it off and have it look good.

------
krackers
Are there techniques to ensure temporal consistency when performing this kind
of upscaling? Currently it seems like each frame was upscaled independently
leading to weird artifacts.

~~~
eyegor
> it seems like each frame was upscaled independently leading to weird
> artifacts

Yep, they used an off the shelf nn (gigapixel) to upscale each individual
frame. You could try to achieve your proposal using a guassian convolution
windowed in 3d across frames. I suspect it may make a mess of the video's
framerate, but the motion appears smooth enough that it might work.

~~~
egypturnash
It’s not as if the source material’s got a steady frame rate, there’s a lot of
places where it jumps about 2-4 frames.

Which is quite possibly due to lapses in the hand-cranking of the film through
the camera back in 1896, or maybe due to frames getting lost when the printed
reel of film got damaged and spliced in the hundred and twenty-odd years
between then and now. Possibly both, one could probably work out _some_ of the
cranking speed variations by looking at how the train’s frame-to-frame motions
change, at least until it’s come to a stop.

------
intellijdd
At 35 seconds, the woman running with the child in the direction of the
camera, her face is almost completely blurred out. If you look really hard you
can see an outline of her nose and what not but overall it is interesting to
see how the neural net works in this region of the video.

Not surprising, but still drives the point home that good ML/AI algorithms
have a bottleneck at the input data.

~~~
mwcremer
I think she is wearing a kind of veil, as are several other women.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I thought it was a veil also. This was France, so it could have been someone
from one of their colonies at the time?

~~~
andrepd
Old French (and Italian and Portuguese and etc) women commonly wear
veils/babushkas, even today.

~~~
Udik
They're wearing a veil that covers the entire face though. Eyes included- I
assume a very thin see-through veil.

~~~
azepoi
yes it's a see-through veil to protect their faces from the sun. Like this
[https://www.dhgate.com/product/wholesale-fashion-foldable-
su...](https://www.dhgate.com/product/wholesale-fashion-foldable-summer-veil-
sun/451965835.html) or [http://www.coastalchrome.ca/womens-sun-hats-
wkmovizpxj-6/abu...](http://www.coastalchrome.ca/womens-sun-hats-
wkmovizpxj-6/abusun-sunscreen-hat-veil-sun-hat-summer-hat-outdoor-sunscreen-
hat-for-women-b071gnb7hg-gmsmpjzkyy-1164.html)

~~~
Udik
Of course, sunscreen will be invented only in 1936!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#History)

------
amelius
Has anyone else experienced this: when watching old movies (or just
black/white movies), it feels uncomfortable for only the first few minutes,
and then you completely forget about the bad image quality. It's like the
brain performs the upscaling/coloring for you.

~~~
GordonS
I'm colour blind, and strangely when I start watching something in black and
white, _I don 't know it's in black and white!_ \- I only realise when someone
else mentions it, and even then it takes a while for me to see it.

It's weird, like my brain is automatically filling in colours that aren't
there.

------
Izkata
Can someone point at specific things to see the upscaling at work? The two
videos look the same to me, both when taken as a whole and when zoomed in to
compare the same points in the videos...

~~~
kick
Look at the ground in the thumbnail, for example, or the hill, for that
matter, as well as the building in the background. And the fence, too.

The details are much more distinct in the upscale.

It actually surprised me, I was just expecting it to effectively be a de-
speckle with edge sharpening, but it's exceeded my expectations.

~~~
grogenaut
It's sharper, but it's the type of sharper that happens in a dream, look at
the text on the left building (quonset hut with a hole in the side). The text
flutters as the net fever dreams context from it. Like a dream it has more
detail the more you look but it also isn't real. It's like how I can read shit
even why my eyes are very dry or it's beyond the extent of my vision, it's
tossing it's guesses into a viewable object, but it's just extrapolations,
like how I can tell the score in a nfl game across the bar, I know the game
isn't 88 to 9, it's likely 28 to 7.

This doesn't make it any less cool, just putting it in context.

Zoom and enhance away.

~~~
dredmorbius
The inference resolves to a high-detail and _plausible_ result, but not
necessarily one that has any fidelity with the ground truth. Which is somewhat
like a dream, in ways.

Additional information -- say, a close-up image of the quonset structure's
signage, or even knowing what the text was, might result in additional detail.
A method that was specifically designed for extracting textual information out
of blurred images (several exist, and they're frighteningly accurate -- any
image-hiding based on _only_ pixelation or blurring without _additional_ noise
introduction is not particularly secure) might also be able to identify a text
from the original film source.

------
bitL
Using Deep Learning models trained on static images is usually not a good
idea. But one can simply extend the model to use 3D convolutions instead of
2D, use time as 3rd axis and then feed a sequence of images for training,
getting much better results out of it without the wavy effects.

~~~
londons_explore
And have the amount of training data and time scale from n^2 to n^3... That's
why nobody has achieved good results with this yet...

~~~
bitL
Oh yes, but that might be comparable to attention-based models for NLP,
complexity-wise. Using C3D is quite common since 2015 actually:

[http://vlg.cs.dartmouth.edu/c3d/](http://vlg.cs.dartmouth.edu/c3d/)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.0767.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.0767.pdf)

Training a great model is expensive these days, FB routinely pays 6 figures
per training run.

------
squarefoot
I wonder if a similar technique could be used to turn old 4/3 videos to
widescreen just by learning the surroundings of a scene through other shots,
then mapping them back and forth to build a complete widescreen scene on all
frames.

~~~
KMnO4
I've watched a few movies in what's called ScreenX[0]. It's a cinema
experience where they project the movie on the main (front) screen, and
project the surroundings on the two side walls. The result is an immersive
viewing experience. Obviously the film is not recorded in the ridiculously
wide aspect ratio, so usually the side images are computer generated. For
landscape imagery, this is fairly seamless. You can't really tell that the
images aren't real. However, during a scene with people, the side walls
projected static images that drifted around slightly (as if they were
cardboard cutouts). I guess the idea is that most things happening in your
peripheral vision are lost anyway, so no need to make them detailed.

[0]:
[https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/ScreenX](https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/ScreenX)

------
mrb
Honestly, I watched the original and the 4k and don't really notice any big
difference. The wider aspect ratio of the 4k is more pleasant, but this has
nothing to do with the enhanced resolution.

~~~
shirman
Have not you notice FPS boost?

------
takk309
A thought I had while reading about this was what is the limit to upscaling
via this method? By that I mean if one where to just keep upscaling and had a
monitor capable of displaying the image, how long until the image became
unrecognizable? Surely upscaling an already upscaled image would result in
some strange artifacts.

~~~
macrolime
There's no limit when you upscale with neural nets. Make one good enough and
it can fill in the blanks properly.

~~~
rnestler
> Make one good enough and it can fill in the blanks properly.

I would say it can fill in the blanks _likely_ or _plausibly_. But one can't
guarantee that it is the proper or real content, since the neural net is
imagining / inventing the upscaled version.

~~~
macrolime
Sure. I'm not saying it will represent reality 100%, but it could be good
enough that you probably couldn't tell the difference.

Current neural nets might perhaps not be able to upscale with no limit and
still make it look good, but it's not like it can't be done. A good human
artist could take a small grainy image and given enough effort draw an
upscaled version that would be a very reasonable representation of what a
larger image would have looked like, there's no reason to believe that
artificial neural networks can't do the same.

------
pcf
Could this be used to generate "missing" frames in stop-motion animation as
well?

For example for this sequence from "The Terminator" (1984):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI)

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
There is a user-friendly mature software for this already (which technically
did not even use ML in the recent sense because it is much older): SVP
project. You can connect it to many players and play any video of your choice
in realtime. Then there are high quality tools in video editing software like
Premiere or Davinci Resolve which do this also (pixel flow framerate
adjustment)... Then there is hardware accelerated version of this in NVIDIA
graphics cards which can be used in some video players too...

This is mostly a solved problem, it has existed for many years, no real need
for ML here. (Possibly for some quality improvements?)

------
Renaud
I can't help to think that we will -one day, probably soon- have enough 3D
face models to just replace those in these movies with some that will fit the
original version.

The resulting faces won't be an exact match due to the low quality of the
original, but unless you knew these people, no-one will be able to tell.

Same with pretty much every other aspect of the scene: have good models that
fit the original scene and re-create a full 3D version of the whole movie, at
any level of definition.

Once this process can be automated, we'll be able to recreate all the
classics, shot for shot.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
For what purpose?

~~~
hammerbrostime
VR and re-editing come to mind.

------
dusted
That's a lot worse than the original.

~~~
bscphil
I agree. The upscaled version is both more smoothed and more mottled. This
matches the "look" of a lot of low bitrate HD video, but I would argue that
information has actually been lost in the upscaling process, not gained. It
would be much easier to tell with before / after screenshots, I think, but at
any rate I don't see a lot of reason to hope neural net upscaling will be
useful for many "real world" purposes.

The HFR was pretty convincing to me, however.

~~~
pastrami_panda
I agree with your points, but I'd also argue that Nvidias DLSS implementation
is a real world purpose, no?

~~~
bscphil
That's a great point. Using approaches like this as a less computationally
complex method of resampling for the purpose of anti-aliasing (and not
upscaling) seems worthwhile, definitely.

I was thinking more of attempts to create neural nets that map from e.g. the
set of 480p images to the set of 1080p images. The "best case" results seem to
be trained on low bitrate HD video, which gives results that "look good" to
many people (especially those who grew up watching Youtube) but in terms of
real detail are worse than a simple upscale (with e.g. Lanczos). I haven't yet
seen results where content aware upscaling provides a real improvement over
"dumb" algorithms for this purpose.

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anonymous_fun
Math upscale'd it, and my internet connection downscale'd it. I suppose it was
math on either end.

------
chriscatoya
I think it's great we're developing this capability, but I prefer the
original-- we're seeing the film as it was originally seen then. The captured
scene isn't made better by higher fidelity, it's the opposite for me.

As with most advancements in technology and art, we'll see a proliferation of
people using the new technique with mixed results at first. It's the shiny new
toy. Then over time, people will figure out how to use it and apply it with
intent.

The upscaling projects we've seen in gaming have generally produced
spectacular results, probably because the intent in gaming graphics has always
been for the sort of pixel density we're finally able to start achieving.
Remember the huge disparity between the box art and the game? lol.

Gaming aside, I don't think we've left the toy phase just yet.

------
skywal_l
Seeing this little girl, long born and dead, jumping and smiling got me quite
emotional...

~~~
feintruled
Watching old movies is always a very melancholy experience for me for this
reason. To think that everyone in the film you are watching is dead, when they
seem so alive before your eyes.

(Interesting thing I read once about the Hanna-Barbera cartoons with the
canned laugh track - it was using some old recording that had been knocking
around since the 20s. So if you watch them now, the whole action is ringing
with the laughter of the long dead. Now how's that for a macabre thought!)

------
72deluxe
It states that humanity's standards for video have risen in 125 years.

Viewing the film, it seems that the standard for clothing to wear whilst going
outside has done the opposite, quite drastically.

~~~
cm2187
And if there was sound, you could argue the same with the quality of the
language.

Idiocracy!

~~~
raverbashing
From a linguistic perspective this couldn't be further from the truth.

We only perceive older language as more polite, but it doesn't mean it was.

What matters is the level of rudeness perceived by the receiver at the time.
If someone was called a 'Scoundrel' they might have been shook while today
it's a laughable insult.

~~~
cm2187
I completely disagree. If you look at speeches or interviews from the 30s or
the 40s, in French or English, the quality of the spoken language is
significantly better than today. Sentences are better constructed, richer
vocabulary. And if you look at XVIII french literature, it is night and day
with anything written today.

~~~
raverbashing
> If you look at speeches or interviews from the 30s or the 40s, in French or
> English, the quality of the spoken language is significantly better than
> today... And if you look at XVIII french literature

There's probably some selection bias there. I'm not disagreeing there might
have been a reduction in vocabulary, etc, but we tend to see older (usage)
words as more erudite as well.

Compare the vocabulary/grammar on social media with current newspapers or a
book and there's a big difference as well.

------
isaacrolandson
Call me crazy but I prefer watching the original

------
ubercow13
It is common in video player software these days to use neural network based
filters to upscale and downscale, eg see
[https://artoriuz.github.io/mpv_upscaling.html](https://artoriuz.github.io/mpv_upscaling.html)

------
brownbat
If we're killing garbage in garbage out, that's going to take us some weird
places.

------
p1necone
The upscaled version looks worse to me. Seems like it's lost information, not
gained.

------
galacticaactual
Strange to think none of these people knew what was coming their way 18 years
hence...

~~~
excalibur
This was filmed at La Ciotat, on the southern coast of France. This region
actually survived WWI relatively unscathed. It did see a bit more action in
1944. But the war would have been a major event in these people's lives, even
if the location wasn't directly in the middle of it.

~~~
mytailorisrich
The town did not see any action but, as all towns in France, all fit men were
sent to the front lines, and many never came back, as illustrated by the
monuments listing the deads of WWI and WWII in all French towns and villages.

------
krtong
Oh this makes me happy. Im stoked with the 4k results. The gravel under the
tracks looks so good. I feel like it's a definite improvement and I know it's
only going to get better.

------
eyegor
Tangentially related, a real-time video upscaler:
[https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K](https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K)

~~~
marzell
IMO in the v1.0 comparisons, v0.9 is sharper in every case.

~~~
jcims
Yeah .9 has more aliasing artifacts but has much better contrast and is easier
on my eyes.

Edit: Smooth gradients are much better in v1.0 though, look at the background
differences here:
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bloc97/Anime4K/master/resu...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bloc97/Anime4K/master/results/Comparisons/0.9-1.0/0_RC.png)

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monktastic1
Anyone know of similar projects for audio? Music within a genre tends to be
similar enough that you ought to be able to upsample. I tried doing this once
myself but got nowhere.

------
melling
I’ve seen lots of old sports and news footage from the 1970’s that looks bad.
The color looks particularly bad, for example. It would be nice to
automatically fix that.

------
onhn
It may appear higher resolution but I don’t enjoy looking at the extra details
knowing that they are probably fictitious.

------
WalterBright
This is pretty awesome!

But those dresses the women wore look awfully hot an uncomfortable.

~~~
mytailorisrich
Not least if you consider than it's very sunny and 30+ degrees (C) during
summer in that area.

------
Joe-Z-L
We can finally csi pictures then!? Yeah

