https://gizmodo.com/neural-networks-ups ... 1841449875

1896 video of train arriving at station enhanced to an incredible degree, eliminating shaking, grain, and artifacts. Imagine this technology being used to enhance preserved 8mm/16mm RR footage out there today.

I can think of a few 8mm movies I've seen of K4s leaving South Amboy that I'd love to see get this treatment!

This is one which I must make a comment about.
I keep seeing this and hearing this more and more all
the time.

It seems that today the subtle difference between
movie films and video material stored digitally is getting
blurred and ran together.

The case in point here is that there was no "video" in 1896!

At that time all that was available was the then brand new
technology of moving pictures.

I fully understand that this is a relatively fine point
and possibly not even worth commenting on.
But at the same time, it's important to put it out there
that saying "1896 video" is about like saying
"automobile traffic of 1785".

What you have there is apparently an old movie film
which has been transcribed to video.

What he has there is an old movie film that has been reconstituted frame-by-frame to have what appear to be modern standards of resolution and frame-rate motion. Enormous amounts of processing power was needed to produce this. It is not just a fancy computer-enhanced restoration.

It is an approach that is certainly worth using for many railroad subjects.

I believe that is Lumiere's first motion picture, and is the first one ever made by anyone. Lumiere's invention was the subject of a scandal involving Thomas Edison, patents, etc.
Truly a grand restoration for what may be one of the most significant motion pictures ever made.

Oh thank God, I'm so glad more of you saw the positive in this. I don't understand how anyone could see what they accomplished with that clip, then choose to react negatively, and over such a trivial point.

Ah well, such is RYPN.

Anyways, I wonder what the cost of using this technology is?

I was merely pointing out the non-trivial subtle difference
between video and motion pictures.

Sorry if it came off as a negative response.
That was not my intention.

We as railroad preservationalists do get exposed
to this kind of stuff frequently.

At first I was not going to bother posting.
I should have kept my mouth shut.
I will be sure to do that next time!

It's amazing the restoration of older film that has happened recently.
I've seen this film, and knowing how this footage always looked before, I was utterly amazed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaynFMDdNsk
The "Apollo 11" documentary put out by CNN films is jaw-dropping as well:
https://youtu.be/3Co8Z8BQgWc

Is that restored clip the one used in the film, "Hugo" thta terrified people when first watched in a cinema?
It is. Here's the original. What a difference.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk

In today's comics:

https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2020-02-09

(Yes, it's directly related.)

Looks good except it's still a little tough to try to match paint colors with it. {wink, wink}

It's easy, just match to the screen. That film dates to the time before color was invented.

Not so. My dogs say it's in color. Which gray do you them to match for you?

Seriously, seems Topaz Labs makes some interesting tools. I haven’t tried them but it appears to give better results than the old standby, Photoshop. I don’t do enough image restorations to justify the cost but I might try the free trial. Out of curiosity, I’d like to know the process used to “restore” the movie/video.

It's amazing what can be done with todays computer technology. A recent excellent example of this is last-years Peter Jackson's "They shall not grow old". Not only has the jerkiness been smoothed out but the portion showing the war in France has been colorized and reworked into wide-screen mode. There are scenes of war trench locos taking troops and supplies to the front lines. Besides all that, the narration made by actual WWI veterans in the 60s tells a compelling story. It's a DVD well worth a viewing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds

A description of the making of the documentary.

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018 ... s-it-made/

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD is simply stunning, no hype.................the making of the film was just as fascinating!

Today's "cloud computing" where you rent compute resources from a cloud service provider like Amazon's AWS service or Microsoft's Azure, means that anyone with the bucks and the programming skill can do this sort of work without having to invest in a data center and six figure's worth of hardware. In the cloud, you only pay for what you use.

In some cases, the base computer code to do this sort of thing is made available. Here the source academic paper that triggered the "deep fake" videos that are in the news:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07371

along with a youtube video showing their results:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCBTZh4 ... e=youtu.be

These are from August 2018, so the technology has improved over time. The youtube page has a link to the software on Github.

Bob