I remember a few people on here having an interest in old pics and movie clips. I love sites like Shorpy.com and looking at old photographs. I also love looking at really old video clips from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So I was reading this article the other day and came across this YouTube channel and fell in love with this guy's work, and thought I'd share. I can understand why historians aren't necessarily fans of it, but it's still cool. Keep in mind these videos were from the 1800's and early 1900's and upscaled using AI/neural networks. The faces of people long long-gone are mesmerizing, especially when you think they'd never think people 110-140 years and much later would be watching them. A ride through New York in 1911 : This is a video I shared a few years ago, I think, but he upscaled it. This is the one of a trolley ride through San Francisco a few days before the great 1906 earthquake. There's an unrealistic, but cool quality about this video. Almost like a video game : One of the possibly 2 oldest videos ever recorded ... upscaled :
Amazing stuff. I always wondered how they colorized b&w and imagined there was some Blade Runner tech on the horizon guessing what each thing's color is by the shading. It's more like this:
Haven't had a chance to watch them all yet, but isn't this the same technology/techniques that Peter Jackson used on his WWII bomber film restoration? "They Shall Not Grow Old" I believe it was.
Looks like some steampunk fantasy world, amazing! Maybe it's cos of youtube, i'm not noticing the upscaling as much when compared to the original, but the 60fps on the new vid looks so smooth.
I don't know if the technology is the same, but the process may be similar. I'm not much of a movie person, so I hadn't even heard about Peter Jackson's movie you mentioned. From googling, it looks to be similar effects, but Jackson went ape with it in the sense he even tried to mimic/duplicate the sound effects. The coolness for me in both efforts is that the herky/jerky nature of the old school films was removed, upscaling makes it seem a bit more lifelike, and colorization made it more humanizing. In photography, I love black and white photography, but for some reason, in the case of the old black and white movies, something is taken away from them. From seeing some scenes from Jackson's movie on YouTube and what this guy did on his channel, there's something that makes you feel like you're there. The best parts for me are when people look dead into the camera or when kids or others run around in front of the camera because it was still relatively new technology at the time. I didn't post all of the videos on the guy's channel, but there is one from Paris and/or Amsterdam that is just haunting as you watch people stare back at the camera and laugh. It's not just that you're jumping back into time, but you're almost jumping into the timeline, and I don't really get that feeling when it's the original black and white. The efforts Jackson went through to colorize and alter the film was pretty wild from what I'm seeing. I'm just glad we're saving some of this stuff. They need to fix one of those Babe Ruth videos down so people will stop making fun of his swing and trot around the bases. lol.
That's exactly what I thought. lol. Someone in another video on YouTube took this video and did a side-by-side of that train as it travels the same tracks today so you can see how the streets/scenery around it has changed. Both trains travel together and they try to sync up the locations as they go since they obviously traveled at different speeds.
You absolutely have to watch Jackson's WWII movie. Sorry, I messed up. He did the WWI trench restoration...I got it confused with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Blue which is equally amazing but is original film pieced together.
I saw this a while back and it is easily the best restoration of truly antique video I’ve ever seen, with the audio added simply superb. I’ve mentioned before (maybe some of you have seen it), that while I’m a pacifist, I’ve had a lifelong interest in WWI, WWII and Korea, along with the tactics and weapons used. Call it a hobby. My great uncle was in WWI, I have his photo in his Army uniform on a bookshelf in my study, my father enlisted in the Navy in early 1942 and ended up in combat, not that he was supposed to, and my uncle was a young Army officer in WWII, switched to the Marines between that war and Korea, and ended up in the hell of the Chosin Reservoir. Both bought homes on the GI Bill in Southeast Houston, my uncle after he put in 20 years. So I was surrounded by vets, and conversations about what happened then. Heck, my cousin and I used to build model warships (one of mine was the Hood), put them in a slow moving drainage ditch in the neighborhood and toss cherry bombs at them to mimic shelling. In other words, I love this stuff and how I wish Jackson would do more of it. There is so much material out there, some in dire need of restoration. Maybe he could start a non-profit company supported by donations. There are quite a few wealthy people fascinated by history. Just a thought. Not that far back, @Jontro! ;-)
Yup. That's the video I mentioned above. So cool. There are other videos like this with a before/after shot side-by-side of various places around the globe.
Wow! What a trip. Literally hundreds of thousands of Legos! Don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but there’s a really large World War One era model of the Battleship Texas in the Sam Houston State Office Building in Austin, maybe two blocks from the capital grounds. At one time, it was in the lobby as you entered the building, but the last couple of times I saw it, and it’s been more than a few years, it was on the second floor. There’s a bank of windows at the front of the building, with a large area between them and the row of elevators for each floor, and by the windows is this very impressive, highly detailed model of the Texas as she looked back a hundred years in her youth. It’s in a glass case and the model is perhaps 8 feet long. My S.O. told me about it one day probably 20 years ago and we walked over from her building for a look. It blew me away. I saw an article from 2019 recently that said the Texas is going to be towed from it’s place at the Monument, supported by some enormous floats so it won’t sink, by a company with a huge dry dock in Alabama (somewhere around Mobile, I guess) that’s going to restore it for $35 million dollars. The legislature, neglecting the Texas for so long, finally did the right thing (a rarity, but sometimes they do) and gave control of the Texas to the Battleship Texas Foundation. The foundation had been trying to gain control for many years so they could take care of the Texas properly, instead of watching the great ship, the only surviving dreadnought and over 100 years old, rust away until it settled in the mud, a wreck. Instead, the Texas will return and quite possibly find a new home in Galveston. The foundation has permission to move the Texas to a place where far more people can tour the battleship. The ticket sales will raise the money to keep the great dreadnought in the condition it deserves. It will allow generations of Texans and tourists from around the world to stare in awe at the only surviving capital ship to serve in two world wars, firing her ten 14 inch great guns in anger the morning of D-Day.
If you're into old footage and WWI stuff, you have to visit the WWI museum in Kansas City. I went up there for the bbq and to visit the Steamboat Arabia Museum when I noticed the WWI museum was up there, too, so I decided to tour that. It was incredible. If you're really into reading the info/placards at all the stations there and watching videos and whatnot, expect to spend a few hours there -- it's massive. I was there for at least 2-3 hours. It's massive and has a ton of gear from that era. I'm not a big war buff or anything, but that place was moving and impressive.
I rode my bike to the battleship in the summers when I was 13-15ish......I have taken both my boys, to see it deteriorate has been a horrible thing...I am so happy the old girl is getting a well deserved make over...I want them to see those giant engines which have been underwater now for a few years. One UNDERATED WW2 museum is in Fredricksburgh, they have done a great job displaying it, and it has the only 2 man Japanese sub still in existence. DD
The Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg is terrific. Certainly agree. A PT boat and a B-25 bomber are there, or were the last time I visited, which was back in the 1990's. The museum had stuff to see a block or two from the main building and it likely still does. Anyone ever eat at the San Jacinto Inn by the Texas? You can see the restaurant in the image below (it closed in 1987). The family run restaurant originally opened in 1916 by the Lynchburg Ferry, then it moved into what used to be a dance hall in 1917, near where the Texas was placed in 1948. Their all-you-can-eat feasts were famous and the seafood was great, at least back in the late '50's and into the 1960's when my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins used to go to the San Jacinto Inn for a family get together a couple of times a year. My cousin and I always saw the Texas during those times, and back then it wasn't hard to sneak off into areas you weren't supposed to see. We had a lot of fun exploring the great ship. We were lucky not to get lost!
