How AI helped upscale an antique 1896 film to 4K

When the 50-second silent short film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat premiered in 1896, some theatergoers reportedly ran for safety at the sight of a projected approaching train, thinking that a real one would burst through the screen at any moment, Looney Tunes-style. A wild thought, given the blurry, low-resolution quality of the original film. Thankfully those panicky cinephile pioneers never saw the AI-enhanced upscaled version released by Denis Shiryaev, or they would have absolutely flipped their lids. Shiryaev leveraged a pair of publically available enhancement programs, DAIN and Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI, to transform the original footage into a 4K 60FPS clip. Gigapixel AI uses a proprietary interpolation algorithm which "analyzes the image and recognizes details and structures and'completes' the image" according to Topaz Labs' website.