[rixrax]

I recently had some old super8 films shot by my parents scanned into 1080p resolution in ProresHQ. Because of the poor optics of the original camera, imperfect focus when shooting, poor lightning conditions, and general deterioration of the film stock, most of the footage won't get anywhere near what 1080p could deliver.

What I'd like to try at some point is to let some AI/ML model process the frames, and instead of necessarily scaling it up to 4k etc., 'just' add (aka magic) missing detail into 1080p version and generally unblur it.

Is there anything out there, even in research phase that can take existing video stock, and then hallucinate into it detail that never was there to begin with? What NVidia is demoing here seem like steps to that direction...

I did test out Topaz Video and DaVinci's built-in super resolution feature, both of which gave me a 4k video with some changes to the original. But not the magic I am after.

[anjc]

I also restored some Super 8 footage recently and had great success. The biggest win I had wasn't resolution, but slowing down the speed to be correct in DaVinci, and interpolating frames to make it 60fps using the RIFE algorithm in FlowFrames. I then used Film9 to remove shake, colour-correct, sharpen and so on.

Correcting the speed and interpolating frames added an amazing amount of detail that wasn't perceptible to me in the originals (albeit it was there).

All of this processing does remove some of the charm of the medium, so I'll be keeping the original scans in any case.

[dreamcompiler]

How did you do the original scanning? I have a ton of Super 8 that needs to be scanned.

[anjc]

I bought one of the cheapish (€300) Super 8/8mm scanners on Amazon. It scans quite quickly while displaying the results on a small screen.

It's a nice convenient device, but I can't now unsee the artifacting and compression arising from it. If I were to do it again I'd just pay a service to scan properly, or build a rig to photograph the frames.

On the other hand, I'm very pleased to have scanned and archived the films given that they've been unseen for so long and can now be shared easily.

[actionfromafar]

An interesting thing about Super8: the resolution is generally very poor, but it can have quite the dynamic range. Also, with film in general (and video, but it's easier with film because you have global shutter) you can compensate motion blur and get more detail out which isn't visible when you look at the film frame by frame. And none of this needs AI.

Regarding hallucination, I agree with the sibling comment, the problem is that faces change. And with video, I'm not even sure the same person would have the same face in various parts of the video...

[baq]

there is AI tech to do this already. it has a slight problem, though: it adds detail to faces (this is marketing speak for completely changes how people look).

[UberFly]

Something like this will always change the original as it's guessing what should be there as it up scales. Only time will improve the guessing.

[poglet]

You could look into RTX Video Super Resolution