In 1911, the Swedish film company Svenska Biografteatern produced a film about New York City. It shows the hustle and bustle of New Yorkers, harbor scenes as well as motorized vehicles.
The black and white material has now been polished up by Youtuber Denis Shiryaev using artificial intelligence algorithms and can be admired in modern 4K resolution, 60 frames per second and color.
How was the footage processed?
According to the video description of the YouTube channel, neural networks (artificial intelligence) were used to recalculate and colorize the original video material.
Which software or artificial intelligence was used is not completely clear. However, a beta version of "DeOldify NN" was used for the coloring.
In a previous project, Shiryaev left an AI is already turning a 125-year-old film into 4K and 60 fps. There the source material was sharpened with Gigapixel AI and freed from interference.
The DAIN, co-developed by Google, among others, was used for the interframe calculation in order to achieve 60 frames per second.
Incidentally, the tone in "A Trip Through New York City" is not original. The video material used, which also comes from Youtube, was re-set.
Paris and Moscow are also shown
Overall, the revised version is convincing. In direct comparison to the original video, the smoother movement and the subtle but appropriate colors are particularly striking.
Everything also looks a bit clearer, although it must be said that the source material used is already of considerable quality. Other videos by Shiryaev show Moscow in 1896 and Paris at a similar time.
