'Time travel' to the 1890s in AI-remastered silent movies that look like HD video
Artificial intelligence lends new life to old films
Shot more than a century ago, a scene showing "Buffalo Bill" as he conducts an interview with an Oglala Lakota leader looks as if it were filmed yesterday.
This old film clip was recently remastered using artificial intelligence (AI), and the result lookslike high-definition video. The artist behind this transformation is giving Live Science readers a first look at the astonishing result.
Though still black and white, the remastered footage no longer appears jittery and sped-up, as silent films usually do. Motion in very old movies looks unnaturally fast because the hand-cranked film cameras of the day captured fewer frames per second (fps) than cameras do now.
Digital artist Matt Loughrey, who restores historic photographs at My Colorful Past, developed a process that brings film clips from the late 19th century and early 20th century into the present. Loughrey uses AI to recreate the missing visual information between the original frames in these films. By enabling motion to advance as smoothly as it does in contemporary film and video, Loughrey's remastered footage looks eerily modern, even when it was shot more than 100 years ago.
Related: Photos: The reconstruction of teen who lived 9,000 years ago
In 1914, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the American showman, Pony Express rider and creator of popular "Wild West" shows, conversed with Oglala Lakota leader Siŋté Máza, also known as "Chief Iron Tail," in Plains Indian Sign Language. The original footage of their conversation was shot at about 19 fps, as was common for film during that time; to put that into perspective, the frame rate for modern film is 24 fps, and high-definition (HD) video is 60 fps.
A higher fps rate is one reason why details in HD video look so sharp, particularly when compared with films from the silent era, Loughrey told Live Science. To create that "modern" effect in the "Buffalo Bill" clip and other films that are even older, Loughrey designed an algorithm that generates new frames between the film's original frames. However, this differs from motion interpolation, another video processing technique, which merely duplicates and merges existing frames, he said.
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
"What you get at the end is, in one sense, an optical illusion, because a lot of those frames never existed," Loughrey explained. "This is filling in the gaps with best guesses."
The algorithm processed about a minute of the Buffalo Bill footage in about 40 hours, generating thousands of new frames. In the final playback, with footage playing at about 60 fps, the people in the film move in what appears to be real time — unlike the accelerated, jerky motion in the original film clip.
"You can see Cody's pocket watch moving. You can see his hair moving," Loughrey said. "Even though you know physics was the same then as it is now, when you see that physics is the same, it's like visual vertigo."
Loughrey created that same disorienting effect in a remastered clip of Broadway in New York City that was filmed in 1896 at 16 fps. In the remastered clip, which plays at 71 fps, people cross the street, clamber on a construction site and stroll down the sidewalk; despite the 19-century architecture, vehicles and clothing, the way that the people are moving highlights tiny details that make the scene look as immediate as if it were shot in the present day.
"It's like some version of time travel," Loughrey said. "There's all these little stories going on, you just wouldn't catch that at 16 frames a second."
You can see more of Loughrey's film and photo restoration work on Instagram.
- Photos: See the ancient faces of a man-bun wearing bloke and a neanderthal woman
- Amazing astronomy: Victorian-era illustrations of the heavens
- Doomsday films: Footage of nuclear-weapons tests declassified
Originally published on Live Science.
OFFER: Save 45% on 'How It Works' 'All About Space' and 'All About History'!
For a limited time, you can take out a digital subscription to any of our best-selling science magazines for just $2.38 per month, or 45% off the standard price for the first three months.
Mindy Weisberger is a science journalist and author of "Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control" (Hopkins Press). She formerly edited for Scholastic and was a channel editor and senior writer for Live Science. She has reported on general science, covering climate change, paleontology, biology and space. Mindy studied film at Columbia University; prior to LS, she produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Her videos about dinosaurs, astrophysics, biodiversity and evolution appear in museums and science centers worldwide, earning awards such as the CINE Golden Eagle and the Communicator Award of Excellence. Her writing has also appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post, How It Works Magazine and CNN.