Artificial intelligence lets old videos shine in new splendor. A YouTube channel applies the process to intros and cutscenes from old games.
Whether it’s a hundred-year-old film recordings, concert videos in DVD quality or TV series from the 90s: the so-called AI upscaling upgrades grayed-out film material so that it appears in contemporary 4K resolution and a pleasantly fluid frame rate.
This is made possible by algorithms that, through a lot of AI training, are able to add new pixels instead of just multiplying and thus inventing new details – which in turn raises questions about the authenticity of the restored material.
Old game trailers fudged with AI
The Youtube channel Upscale has specialized in the AI beautification of a very special category of old videos: intros and cutscenes from cult games.
Because computing power and thus graphics have developed so rapidly in the last ten years, most of the cut scenes are now in game graphics. Twenty years ago it was different: Elaborately produced render films showed what cinema-quality games could look like and thus spurred the imagination of the players.
Among other things, Blizzard made a name for itself in titles such as Diablo and Warcraft 3 with high-quality animated films for the time. The following video demonstrates this Intro from World of Warcaft upscaled to 8K resolution from 2004.
From old to new: Many game videos have been embellished
In the meantime, these and other videos are getting on in years and are no longer available in a resolution and frame rate that is no longer up-to-date.
This is exactly the problem addressed by the YouTube channel Upscale, which has been upscaling render films from games since the beginning of 2019. The result is an impressive amount of AI-restored material spanning many titles and brands: von Final Fantasy to Resident Evil and Zelda to various Star Wars games.
The technical basis of the AI treatment is the commercial software Topaz Video Enhance AI, which is also used by many other AI video tinkerers. With this standard solution, users without AI expertise can artificially beautify videos in a few hours – provided they have a fast computer.
You can find these and many more videos in Upscales video section on Youtube.
