Skip to main content

Iconic Film from 1896 Restored with Artificial Intelligence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Version of the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station

Machine learning keeps, well, learning in leaps and bounds, and at Open Culture we have watched developments with a fascinated, sometime wary eye. This latest advance checks off a lot of Open Culture boxes: traveling back in time through the power of film; homegrown ingenuity; and film history.

YouTuber Denis Shiryaev took the latest advances in AI tech and turned them onto one of the earliest works of film: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, shot by the Lumière Brothers in 1896. There are plenty of urban legends around this 50 second short: that it was the first ever Lumière film (it wasn’t, they had a selection of previous shorts); and that audiences were terrified, thinking the train would hit them (they were amazed, no doubt, but they weren't that naive).

You might want to watch the original below before watching Shiryaev’s 4K upscaling and AI “smoothed” version to get a sense of the marvel at the top of the post.

What we are seeing is not a traditional “restoration,” however. Instead, Shiryaev is using a commercial image-editing software called Gigapixel AI. (If you have the processing power, you can try it out). The original film was not shot at 60-frames-per-second. Instead, neural networks are looking at the original frames and “filling in” the data in between, creating what you can see is a more naturalistic effect. People on and off the train move like they do in real life. It looks like it was shot yesterday.

Now, this isn’t perfect. There are a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments where the neural network can’t figure things out. But hey, this is just one guy on his computer. It’s an experiment. The computer code will get better.

The Gigapixel AI was developed by Topaz Labs originally to help photographers upscale their pics by 600 percent without losing detail. It didn’t take long to apply this to video, but be warned, it can take hours of processing power to render a couple of seconds. Still it hasn’t stopped people from experimenting, even with similar neural network programs:

Here’s a clip from Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” video upscaled to 4K with Gigapixel AI:

User AkN upscaled A-Bomb footage from the 1950s:

Some clips from Home Alone:

You get the idea. As with any technology, there are also some horrific examples out there too where it just does not work. But I have a feeling that Shiryaev’s first dive into film history is not going to his, or the internet’s, last.

Related Content:

Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Iconic Film from 1896 Restored with Artificial Intelligence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Version of the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Sn43Yu
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Glenn Gould Explains Why Mozart Was a Bad Composer in a Controversial Public TV Show (1968)

No matter how eccentric Glenn Gould’s interpretations of major composers might have been, his friend and promoter Leonard Bernstein found them worthy of performance, even if he didn’t quite agree. In “ The Truth About a Legend ,” his tribute essay to Gould after the pianist’s death, Bernstein wrote, “Any discovery of Glenn’s was welcomed by me because I worshipped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his ‘guts’ approach.” Are these contradictions? Glenn Gould was a complicated man, a brilliantly abstract thinker who threw his full physical being into his playing. When Gould slowed a Brahms concerto to a crawl, so slow that “it  was  very tiring” for the orchestra to play, he was convinced he had discovered a secret key to the tempo within the piece itself. Bernstein had profound doubts, tried several times to dissuade Gould, and warned the orchestra, “Now don’t give up, because this is a great man, whom we have to take very seriously.” Not all of G...
Post a Comment
Read more