20 minutes – A historic film from 1896 as we have never seen

One of the very first films in the history of cinema was offered an indie version thanks to artificial intelligence. The famous short film The arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, produced by the Lumire brothers in 1895 and released in January 1896, is now visible on YouTube in a special version which seems to have been shot on the smartphone at our time. It is indeed available in high resolution 4K 60 frames / second. As a reminder, composed of a single shot lasting 50 seconds, the film shows, as its title indicates, a train arriving at the station in the town of La Ciotat, near Marseille, and the descent and climb. of passengers.

This rejuvenated version is the work of Denis Shiryaev. This Russian video maker has upscal (that is, converted the video to a larger resolution than the original) an already restored version of the short film using the Gigapixel AI artificial neural network from Topaz Labs. He then passed the result to the reel of the Dain software which allows to create and insert missing images of a sequence. He thus increased the number of images per second.

Not content with the first result, which did not go unnoticed on the internet, he created a new colorized version (see below) thanks to the DeOldify neural network.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E

According to urban legend, at the time, the film had frightened the spectators, allegedly persuaded that a real train was rushing at them.

Below the original version of the Lumire brothers’ film:

(Man)

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