In the modern digital world where people are already familiar with technologies, even new technologies can still awe us.
Things are similar back centuries ago, when digitized data weren't even dreamed of. In 1896 for example, the L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (French for 'The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station') was seen as a scary thing. The 50-second French black-and-white silent documentary film had terrified people.
Directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the film was made in a 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, considered ancient in the modern days of tech.
But because the film is associated with an urban legend well known in the world of cinema, a developer that is also a YouTuber, managed to recreate the film, and made it to appear as though it were shot on a modern smartphone.
In a Reddit post, Denis Shiryaev upgraded the classic masterpiece using "several neural networks", upscaling it to 4K resolution at 60fps.
Below is the original L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat used by Shiryaev:
And here is Shiryaev's upscaled version:
According to Shiryaev, he used Gigapixel AI from Topaz Labs to upscale the video to 4K, and DAIN to add its frame rate.
Shiryaev has not only improved the quality, but also added sound, "just for an atmosphere," he said.
While the result lacks the antique appeal of the blurry and silent classic predecessor, but aside from some visible artifacts generated by the AI, Shiryaev has proven that AI can do many things that include manipulating videos.
Many experts warn that video manipulation using AI, most notably known by using deepfake AI, can be used for nefarious purposes. But here, Shiryaev is showing how AI can also be put into a good use to awe even the most modern people of tech.
L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat has had its glory back in its days.
This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into the gare de La Ciotat, the train station of the French coastal town of La Ciotat. The film consists of a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect of everyday life.
There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film only consists one continuous real-time shot.
Auguste and Louis Lumière placed the camera on the train platform to produce a dramatic increase in the size of the arriving train.
By visualizing the train moving directly towards the camera, the film had the audience so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly towards them that they screamed and ran, thinking that the train would burst through the screen and crash into them.
While this story is largely dismissed as little more than legend, it’s easy to imagine the impact of such visual would have had on someone centuries ago and had never seen a motion picture before.
A few days later, DeOldify Neural Network on its YouTube channel colorized Shiryaev's upscaled video using Deoldify, an open-source AI. And here is the result: