An engineer used artificial intelligence software to remaster the oldest film in existence. The Roundhay Garden scene is considered to be the oldest film in existence. The original film was shot on October 14, 1888, and showed four people walking around in the Oakwood Grange in Leeds.
The black and white video is just 1.66 seconds long and comprises only 20 frames, but a new version of the scene uploaded by YouTuber Dennis Shiryaev is now in 4K quality with around 250 frames per second.
The Victorian-era film seems like it was shot using a modern camera thanks to artificial coloring and face restoration techniques.
Roundhay Garden Scene
One hundred thirty-two years ago, in 1888, four people were filmed walking around a garden in Leeds, England. The four people were Harriet Hartley, Adolphe Le Prince, Joseph Whitley, and Sarah Whitley. They were in the house of the Whitleys, which is the in-laws of Adolphe Le Prince, the son of the French inventor Louis Le Prince the one who shot the film.
Harriet Hartley is said to be a family friend of Adolphe and his wife, Elizabeth. Ten days after the scene was shot, Sarah Whitley died at the age of 72. The four of them deliberately walked in a circle so to keep them inside the frame of the single-lens camera invented by Le Prince.
Louis Le Prince went missing in October 1890, two years after filming the Roundhay Garden scene, aboard a train between Dijon and Paris. Neither his body nor his luggage was ever found. Some say that he was assassinated by the American inventor Thomas Edison over the patent.
His son and wife appealed to the civil courts to appeal to them that Louis invented cinematography. Edison then filed a case against the American Mutoscope Company in which Adolphe became the witness for the defense.
But mysteriously, Adolphe was found shot dead on Fire Island, New York, two years after he testified in the suit in 1902. Finally, in 1908, Edison won the fight for the patent and was named the sole inventor of motion pictures in the United States.
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Remastering the oldest film in existence
Shiryaev uploaded on his YouTube account a remastered version of the Victorian-era film. He said that the original video was probably only 12 frames per second, which is extremely low. But he had to work with only the remaining 20 original surviving frames from the original negative.
To remaster it, Shiryaev downloaded the 20 frames for free from the webpage of the British Science Museum, who had the original photographic glass plate copies from the 1930s when it was restored from the original paper negatives.
Shiryaev then divided them and aligned in the software so that the actors in the film would appear in constant positions across the frames. Then, he added a stabilization algorithm and applied face restoration technology to put more details on the actors' faces in the frames.
To appear more consistent throughout the film, he adjusted the brightness and fixed the sun damage on the footage. He then used an ensemble of artificial neural networks to improve the result into the highest resolution possible and added many frames to the original film.
Shiryaev said that he was able to generate 250 frames from the 20 original frames in the end.
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