Academy Test Highlights Deep Learning/AI Potential
ODVS has something new and a little different on the video enhancement front. He's put together a quick test cut of the Academy intro transformed into 1080p. He stresses that this isn't a carefully curated version to maximize quality, but even the quick and dirty experiment is pretty slick. He won't be able to actually remaster the show due to copyright considerations, so it's not worth the effort to painstakingly clean this up much further. Nonetheless, it's very cool! Note the embedded view below is sharpened, but still low resolution. Grab the actual 1080p file here (16 meg mp4). You can right click to download, but many browsers will play it natively as well. You can buy the show on Amazon for $8 or watch it streaming on Peacock. Maybe someday one of the official NBC Universal-authorized sources will go HD!
I've actually got several Wing Commander projects on the go at the moment, but I got side-tracked by an idea I had last night that I thought I'd tinker with this evening.This is a very rough first experiment using DAIN AI (Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation) to smooth out the animation of the intro sequence for Wing Commander Academy. As well as doing my usual Deep Learning/AI upscale on the footage, I've used DAIN to attempt to smooth out the duplicate frames that were so common in budget-conscious 80s/90s Saturday Morning cartoons, which make the animation look choppy.
I'd call it a partial success - several sequences are considerably smoother, but since this was really a quick first experiment, there are many interpolation artefacts and other glitches that would need to be ironed out. There isn't much depth for the AI to latch on to - also, this was a really quick test run. I didn't optimise the settings or test multiple methods - I literally chucked it through on the defaults to see what would happen. This is really just a proof of concept.
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