They used digital upsampling techniques and colorization to make World War One footage into high resolution. Jackson would later do the same process for the 2021 series Get Back, upscaling 16mm footage of the Beatles taken in 1969: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9735318/
Both of these are really impressive. They look like they were shot on high resolution film recently, instead of fifty or a hundred years ago. It appears that what Peter Jackson and his team did meticulously at great effort can now be automated.
Everyone should understand the limitations of this process. It can't magically extract details from images that aren't there. It is guessing and inventing details that don't really exist. As long as everyone understands this, it shouldn't be a problem. Like, we don't care that the cross-stitch on someone's shirt in the background doesn't match reality so long as it's not an important detail. But if you try to go Blade Runner/CSI and extract faces from reflections of background objects, you're asking for trouble.
They used digital upsampling techniques and colorization to make World War One footage into high resolution. Jackson would later do the same process for the 2021 series Get Back, upscaling 16mm footage of the Beatles taken in 1969: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9735318/
Both of these are really impressive. They look like they were shot on high resolution film recently, instead of fifty or a hundred years ago. It appears that what Peter Jackson and his team did meticulously at great effort can now be automated.
Everyone should understand the limitations of this process. It can't magically extract details from images that aren't there. It is guessing and inventing details that don't really exist. As long as everyone understands this, it shouldn't be a problem. Like, we don't care that the cross-stitch on someone's shirt in the background doesn't match reality so long as it's not an important detail. But if you try to go Blade Runner/CSI and extract faces from reflections of background objects, you're asking for trouble.