Someone used neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality (Updated)

Note (February 5): In the original version of this story I was comparing a low-quality copy of the 1896 film to the upscaled version. Shiryaev actually started with a higher-quality scan of the film, and many of the differences I observed actually reflected his better source material, not the upscaling algorithm. I've updated the first video below to the one Shiryaev used, but I left the text of the story as-is.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is one of the most famous films in cinema history. Shot by French filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumiire, it achieved an unprecedented level of quality for its time. Some people regard its commercial exhibition in 1896 as the birth of the film industry. An urban legend-likely apocryphal-says that viewers found the footage so realistic that they screamed and ran to the back of the room as the train approached. I've embedded a video of the original film above.

Of course, humanity's standards for realism have risen dramatically over the last 125 years. Today, the Lumiire brothers' masterpiece looks grainy, murky, and basically ancient. But a man named Denis Shiryaev used modern machine-learning techniques to upscale the classic film to 21st-century video standards.

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