Upscaling the first 1896 Lumière Brothers film recordings to full colour 4K/60p with neural network engine

Shot by the Lumière Brothers in 1896 this is some of the first footage committed to film. There is now a technique to upsample this footage to high resolution 4K/60p using neural networks. Here it is in action on the piece “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”.

Imagine being the first to hold a movie camera and whatever you film goes down in history, even a train arriving at a platform.

Here’s the quality of the original (albeit quite compressed due to being on YouTube and not a high quality master).

The difference is amazing but I think the end-result could do with some improvement…

  1. Quit with the 60fps. Put it to 24p
  2. Stop with the crop. We can do without the Warp Stabilisation
  3. Find a higher quality original with less compression
  4. Make a higher bitrate version available for download.

So that dear EOSHD readers is the challenge I set for you!

The software is freely available on the internet to process old footage.

Gigapixel AI – Topaz Labs https://topazlabs.com/downloads

To set FPS to 24p with video frame interpolation: Dain https://sites.google.com/view/wenbobao/dain

And here’s more from The Lumière Brothers, and their humble camera with limited dynamic range!