“A photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and images,” reports Universe Today:
Take a look at this enhanced footage from an Apollo 16 lunar rover traverse with Charlie Duke and John Young, where the footage that was originally shot with 12 frames per second (FPS) has been increased to 60 FPS… And I was blown away by the crisp view of the Moon’s surface in this enhanced view of Apollo 15’s landing site at Hadley Rille… Or take a look at how clearly Neil Armstrong is visible in this enhanced version of the often-seen “first step” video from Apollo 11 taken by a 16mm video camera inside the Lunar Module…

The AI that DutchSteamMachine uses is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation, or DAIN for short. This AI is open source, free and constantly being developed and improved upon… “People have used the same AI programs to bring old film recordings from the 1900s back to life, in high definition and colour,” he said. “This technique seemed like a great thing to apply to much newer footage….”

DutchSteamMachine does this work in his spare time, and posts it for free on his YouTube page. His tagline is “Preserving the past for the future…” And he’s planning to keep it all coming. “I plan to improve tons of Apollo footage like this,” he said. “A lot more space and history-related footage is going to be published on my YT channel continuously.” He also has a Flickr page with more enhanced imagery. [And a Patreon page…]

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 calls it “similar to what Peter Jackson did with old World War I footage for They Shall Not Grow Old .”

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Source:: Slashdot