A YouTuber has undertaken the task of upscaling video clips taken in New York City back in 1911. Despite the footage being 109 years old, he managed to upscale the footage to 4K, while also colorizing it and increasing its frame rate to 60fps.
It’s not the first time Denis Shiryaev has managed to alter and improve visuals from history. He has now released his latest effort via his YouTube channel. He’s surprisingly coy about the methods he used to perform the upgrade, but if previous efforts are anything to go by, it’s likely he may have used Google’s DAIN and Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI in order to pull it off. The increase in frames-per-second also means that movement in the video is shown at a "normal" speed. “I'm so used to seeing these old-timey movies where everyone looked like they were always in a hurry from the speed of the camera playback,” said one commenter on Reddit.
In order to convert the video into color, he used the "DeOldify" Neural Network, which can colorize automatically. The result tends to differ dependent on the clip; some are definitely more saturated than others. Still, it’s impressive given that it was automated, and demonstrates the continuing accuracy of many AI technologies.
Here’s the original footage for comparison:
What did you think?