This is where the interpolation process comes in. You need to fill in an additional 6 million pixels to enlarge an HD image to fit on a 4K screen, so the upscaler has to figure out what to have those extra pixels display.

High definition televisions display at 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 total pixels - six times the resolution of SD - while 4K sets, with their 3840x2160 resolution need 8,294,400 pixels. Old school standard definition televisions displayed at 720x480 resolution, a total of 345,600 pixels worth of content that can be shown at one time. These are both examples of upscaling technology, which has been an essential part of broadcast entertainment since 1998 when the first high definition televisions hit the market. In this case, however, it added enough frames to increase the rate to 60 FPS.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy. It's the same concept as the motion smoothing feature on 4K TVs that nobody but your parents use. DAIN, on the other hand, imagines and inserts frames between the keyframes of an existing video clip. Effectively, Topaz taught an AI to accurately sharpen and clarify images even after they've been enlarged by as much as 600 percent. Gigapixel AI uses a proprietary interpolation algorithm which 'analyzes the image and recognizes details and structures and 'completes' the image' according to Topaz Labs' website.

Shiryaev leveraged a pair of publically available enhancement programs, DAIN and Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI, to transform the original footage into a 4K 60FPS clip. Thankfully those panicky cinephile pioneers never saw the AI-enhanced upscaled version released by Denis Shiryaev, or they would have absolutely flipped their lids.

A wild thought, given the blurry, low-resolution quality of the original film. When the 50-second silent short film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat premiered in 1896, some theatergoers reportedly ran for safety at the sight of a projected approaching train, thinking that a real one would burst through the screen at any moment, Looney Tunes-style.

Gigapixel video upscaling