A Russian YouTuber has released upscaled and colourised versions of the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train (1896), one of the earliest films made. The Arrival of a Train is a black-and-white documentation of a steam train entering a train station in France. Shot on a camera called the Cinematographe, which also served as printer and projector, the film has no cuts. Here’s its original version.
Using a source video with a 720p resolution, Denis Shiryaev used artificial intelligence-based image upscaling software and video frame interpolation code to release two versions; one with 4K resolution, moving at 60-frames-per-second, and its colourised counterpart.
Legend has it that when the Lumiere brothers screened The Arrival of a Train for the first time in a theatre, the audience ran to the back of the room in terror since they thought they were going to be run over. The film was referenced in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and, in 2017, was encoded into DNA, along with a computer operating system and an Amazon gift card.
