It occurred to me lately that with the prolific rise in AI photo/video generation surely it should be able to enhance older low quality video footage in some wayI’d never anticipated.
Have just looked at a few reviews of AI enhanced Dr Who (Tom Baker season) and it doesn’t sound good at all. One mentions similar experiences with Nosferatu The Vampyre.
Any actual experiences with AI enhanced video footage hitherto only available in low quality?
I think regeneration of classic titles is just milking the AI cow.
Using good algorithms and processes to restore rather than regenerate old classics yield much better results. I have a few restored classics (non generative AI involved) like Wizard of Oz and they look like they were shot yesterday.
Even given a task of aging forward or back a single actor, AI produces results that fall into the uncanny valley.
Good ol’ digitally remastered by far gives the best results. If the nature of the old grainy film really bothers you, I’d suggest just not watching it.
The only thing where it really helps is upscaling of an already good print. nVidia AI upscaling on the (now ancient) Tegra platform is truly good within reason. 720p to 4K is incredible. 480p to 4K causes some odd effects where the algorithm guesses wrong. So even for those, non AI upscaling works much better.
Source first??……
Nosferatu dir F. W. Murnau (1922) is an Expressionist classic. I have fond memories of seeing it for the first time in an arthouse cinema accompanied by a pianist who reacted to the film. I also taught it later in a blacked out classroom with an audience of Modernist students who had never seen anything like it before. It worked its magic.
At home in the UK, there’s the BFI version or the Eureka version, both modern digital transfers. The Kino version I’d discount. On YouTube there are some frankly horrible AI and machine colourised efforts.
I used to think this was a black and white film, but in fact a colour tint was applied to the film stock, a blue wash in the ‘night for day’ scenes. The BFI version gives lots of options and the Eureka version is also impressive. The original nitrate film stock is highly combustible and we are lucky to have decent modern versions. I don’t think AI will do any better soon, but time will tell. I don’t want to see Nosferatu in full colour as if it had just been produced. Its otherness is part of its Expressionist charm.
Most of the original prints were destroyed as naughty Murnau shamelessly ripped off the Dracula story without paying any fees to Stoker’s widow. So there have been lots of versions about over the years.
I also enjoy the more shocking interpretations of the film, by Werner Herzog in 1979 and last year’s Robert Eggers. Horror film as a genre has developed in different directions since Expressionism. I doubt that AI can improve on the BFI or Eureka versions at the moment.
That’s sort of the point - many items were not captured in good quality, however in the case of some of the BBC offerings there was footage on video and other components recorded on film, plus I’d imagine many stock photos of decent quality.
If you took the original footage as a template AI could potentially replace with higher resolution generative footage through analysis of higher quality film/stills if that makes sense - I don’t mean I tarting up poor quality video but replacing that using it as some kind of a template.
Probably not explaining that well.