Filmed more than a century ago footage showing how the famous William Cody nicknamed “Buffalo bill” talks with the leader of the Oglala Lakota tribe “Iron tail”, look as if the shooting took place yesterday. This was possible because this movie was restored with the help of artificial intelligence.
Restored black and white footage is no longer “sin” nervous twitching and rapid movement that we are used to seeing in silent films. The cause of these effects – in cameras of the time, which was driven by manual rotation with much less than now, speed.
The technology of recovery has developed digital artist Matt Lafree. For the first time restored with its help, historical photos, he presented the exhibition “My Colorful Past” – “My colourful past”. The next step was the restoration of the film extracts used in the late XIX – early XX century.
The project involves an AI that recreates the missing visual information between frames. Thanks to her, the move is going as smoothly as in modern film and video.
The algorithm has processed about a minute of footage with Buffalo bill for 40 hours, creating thousands of new personnel. In the final, where the frames are played back at a speed of about 60 pieces per second, the people in the film are moving in real time in contrast to the accelerated, rapid movement in the original clip.
Source — LiveScience