Here's what happens when you apply machine learning to enhance the Lumières' 1896 movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat"

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/06/heres-what-happens-when-you-8.html

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That wowed the sh!t out’a me, thanks @frauenfelder!

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Reboing:

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The video at the top of the ‘new’ article is not the same one that was upscaled and restored. The article pointed out above by @GagHalfrunt contains a link to the source film.

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If anyone hasn’t seen They Shall Not Grow Old (and can stomach a documentary about WWI with a LOT of awful, ugly footage of war), I highly recommend it. Watching the footage in that film, which has been cleaned up, up-rezzed, re-timed, and colorized, so that it looks almost contemporary, is pretty astonishing.

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That isn’t the source either. The comparison at the end of the upscaled version shows that the source material was a high definition transfer of a restored print.

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Gimme a hard copy right there.

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I saw a lot more women in the enhanced film compared to the original, I think? The train looks similar, but to me, the crowd doesn’t. What am I missing?

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Uncannily real. I dropped my phone and ran before being struck by the locomotive!

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Yeah, otherwise those neural networks would have severally altered the content of the film.

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Man, how long till this will become some “predictive policing facial recognition csi image enhance mumbo jumbo snake oil software” for law enforcement.

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Counterpoint: this is essentially just auto-doctoring the image feed, which we have already learned is a Very Bad Thing to do, at least when you do it to a filmmaker who is still alive and can defend his/her original vision.

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I was sent a link to that this morning also this one

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Did that creep the hell out of anyone else? Or is it just me?

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I just ran the Zapruder film through the same algorithm and you wouldn’t believe all the hidden cat and dog assassins it exposed.

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@BoingBoing has an error here. You posted the wrong youtube link. You’re showing two different sets of footage. Here is the actual original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtXXypztyw

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Yes, but the upscaling was done from a higher quality print.

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