In 1895, when Louis Lumière filmed “ Arrival of a train at La Ciotat station", he is far from suspecting that 125 years later, his film would still be talked about!
And yet, this famous short film is still in the news thanks to the work done by developer Denis SHIRYAEV who used "several neural networks" to modernize it and give it the appearance of a video that would have been shot with a smartphone.
This 50-second documentary short is most famous for allegedly causing viewers at the time to panic, fearing that the train would burst on screen and crash into them. While this tale is widely considered to be a legend, it is easy to imagine the impact such a visual would have had on someone who had never seen a film before. But historians now agree that this is all nonsense and that our ancestors were not so naive!
In any case, Shiryaev set himself the challenge of Modernizing this great classic using artificial intelligence to improve the resolution of the film to 4K at 60 frames per second. And the result is simply impressive. This film from another age with coarse images suddenly takes on a whole new dimension. It's as if the scene had been filmed yesterday. In black and white, yes, but the quality of the image makes it much more concrete, much more alive!
The video has also been given sound (and then color) which helps to reinforce this feeling!
Shiryave didn't give much information about his work, but it appears that he used two publicly available programs, DAIN and Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI, to transform the original footage into a 4K 60FPS clip.
Gigapixel AI uses a proprietary interpolation algorithm that “ analyzes the image, recognizes details and structures and completes the image " according to the Topaz Labs website. Basically, Topaz taught an AI to make images sharper and clearer, even after they were enlarged by 600%. DAIN, on the other hand, imagines and inserts images between key frames of an existing video clip. It's the same concept as the motion smoothing feature on 4K TVs.
Of course, the image rendering is not perfect, but the technique used by the developer is really interesting and could allow to bring back into fashion the great classics of silent cinema!
Finally, a YouTuber even had fun colorizing this 4K version, but the result is less impressive in my opinion...
