122-year-old footage of China street scenes enhanced by AI

What’s the native resolution of old analog film :confused:

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Someone watched the old Turner classic colorizations and said, “Hold my beer.”

ETA: If you are going to do this it’s probably best not to do a side-by-side with the upscaled, non-colorized version for comparison.

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Good question. 35mm is equal to 4K, 70mm to 8K. I doubt the film stock for this vintage footage was anything close to 35mm – more like 8mm or 16mm.

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Ultra HiDef is composed of several technologies-- 4K resolution, Dolby Atmos and HDR. The most impressive of those is HDR-- small screens and less than perfect eyesight blunt 4K’s impact. Imagine what this upscaling tech could do if only the creators had bothered to check the HDR box as well. We could be seeing the neon lights of turn of the century china, just two years after the gas was scientifically isolated.

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Yep this is a very interesting question. My understanding is that analogue film has infinite resolution but produces less detail the smaller the frame size. The larger the frame size the more grains but I guess the question is how many pixels do you need on the video or digital capture side before ‘more’ becomes redundant.

What is the grain resolution of a given celluloid format and is one pixel per grain enough or sampling 4x4 per grain better?

On the digital capture side there are the questions around appropriate resolutions that will effect post production processing and delivery medium. In the digital realm up or down scaling has it’s issues around loss of visual data.

As with digital sound where sample rate and bit depth equal frequency range (pitch fidelity) and dynamic response (loudness fidelity) digital video has pixel resolution and pixel bit depth. The pixel bit depth is the other part of this, the number of steps between dark and bright. HDRI is a bit depth technology.

Sorry, I understand the process but don’t know the answer to your question!

Fun fact… pixels, picture elements, are not square. The square pixel is just for monitor/TV screen tech… think of LED arrays as an alternative.

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