YouTuber Enhances Historic 1911 New York Trip Footage to Clear 4K/60p Video
Incorporating digital neural network AI like DeOldify.
To see what industrial New York City was like back in 1911, one can turn to an old film one Swedish company, called Svenska Biografteatern, captured of a trip to the city. The video runs over eight minutes long, in black-and-white with quite a low-res frame rate, and it doesn’t really offer the same level of real-life accuracy to the videos being shot today. One YouTuber, however, has enhanced the video with a number of software tricks, breathing new life into the historic footage.
Throughout the years, numerous attempts have been made to improve the original footage’s quality, but no ne has really come quite as far as YouTuber Denis Shiryaev, who first took to Reddit to share the video. After a series of AI enhancements, which employ the use of four digital neural networks, the video has been given a clear, colorized 4K/60p quality. According to the video’s description, the edits include motion stabilization, frame interpolation from 18 to 25 fps, speed correction (20% slower than original), sharpening, contrast and brightness correction and pixel-upscaling. This video is one among a slew of videos Shiryaev has improved, joining other edits like the Apollo mission or the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat from 1896.
Scroll above for a look at the enhanced 1911 New York footage that’s been made 4K/60p.
In case you missed it, check out de Young Museum’s “Uncanny Valley” exhibition about artificial intelligence.
