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Moon AI Movies

Historic Moon Landing Footage Enhanced By AI, and the Results Are Incredible (universetoday.com) 66

Posted by EditorDavid from the giant-leaps dept.
"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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Historic Moon Landing Footage Enhanced By AI, and the Results Are Incredible More

Historic Moon Landing Footage Enhanced By AI, and the Results Are Incredible

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  • Watched that yesterday. It's pretty cool. Now put that AI to work against the crappy Voyager DVDs :(

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Someone already did a demo of that: https://youtu.be/XWBiHDchSLA [youtu.be]

      Sod voyager though, we need DS9 in HD.

      • I liked Voyager better than DS9 personally. It was more like TOS. Babylon 5 was a much better series that aired at the same time as DS9. Granted, the budget and acting were better in DS9. But B5 was a better concept. It's too bad that the property owners of B5 have no plans to do anything with it. Or maybe it's a good thing when looking at current Star Trek.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jiriw ( 444695 )

        He's working on that too :P Read the description of your own link:

        I have a few DS9 clips as well. Including battle scenes - https://youtu.be/kt-pczNKjFE

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Yeah, there are a few demos on YouTube already. I don't know if it's a viable way to restore the entire series.

          I was hoping they would do it after TNG. It was shot on film the same way but there are a lot more CG effects in DS9 that would all need to be recreated from scratch for HD. Apparently there is a documentary "What We Left Behind" that has some re-scanned film footage from one of the season 7 episodes but I haven't seen it yet.

      • But we already have TNG, why would you need DS9? :)

  • Better to just recreate the movie (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Saturday July 25, 2020 @05:57PM (#60331605)

    One we get in the habit of "AI enhanced" videos of historical events, things can go bad pretty quickly when the AI starts being used to eliminate "objectionable" content

    • "One we get in the habit of "AI enhanced" videos of historical events, things can go bad pretty quickly when the AI starts being used to eliminate "objectionable" content"

      That's what 'history' is, the winner says how it was.

    • Re:Better to just recreate the movie (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Sunday July 26, 2020 @01:45AM (#60332327)

      The original video had a low framerate. It was shot on a film camera with selectable framerates. To save weight they'd switch the framerate depending on what they were doing. Some sections were shot at 1 fps.

      These low framerates were acceptable for the original purpose of the film (to serve as a scientific record). The drawback is that the human brain doesn't do so well when viewing motion at low framerates.

      Image stabilization and interpolation help make the content more enjoyable to watch, and more immersive. For e.g. the rover traverse videos, smoothing out the motion gives you a better idea of how the rover moved over the bumpy terrain (and how weird that motion is due to the 1/6G).

      For things like the Moon landings, there's no way to recreate the footage with a fidelity as good as the original.

      If you recreate historic footage, you have more scope than with the current AI to insert inaccuracies or downright lies. This becomes a problem only when the original footage is subsequently made unavailable.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's such a shame that the original tapes have been wiped or lost. Kind of amazing that no-one thought to preserve such an important moment in our history.

        The moment Armstrong stepped off the ladder is now only preserved as a low quality copy from the broadcast.

      • The original video had a low framerate. It was shot on a film camera with selectable framerates.

        Is the original source video no longer available?
        Couldn't they post a before and after split screen?

        • The originals are obviously available (well, video transfers of the original film magazines), as they were the source for this increased-framerate version. They can be found in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal [nasa.gov], a complete record of all media created during the lunar missions. NASA also has its own Youtube channel with lots of lunar mission video.

          DutchSteamMachine has done several side-by-side videos of the original and his version. They can be found on his YT channel.

    • You don't need "AI" to eliminate objectionable content from historical events. We've been able to do that for years. AI is only automating things we've been doing for a long time.

  • Like reliving my childhood (Score:5, Interesting)

    by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Saturday July 25, 2020 @06:05PM (#60331619)
    That hot July evening, watching those astronauts land & walk on the moon. Not many had home AC back then, but watching and listening to Uncle Walter & Wally Schirra was something that I remember just like yesterday.

    • You too... I never forgot it. people were partying all up and down the street, it was all you heard about for weeks... it filled me with a feeling of wonder and awe that is still there today

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Strider- ( 39683 )

      I just hope in my lifetime to witness the next walk on a celestial body, moon or mars... I'll be glued to my screen(s).

    • The sad fact of our moribund manned space program,, remembering that personally puts you at/near/over 60.

  • It looks nice, but not real (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Balthisar ( 649688 ) on Saturday July 25, 2020 @06:27PM (#60331657) Homepage

    It looks nice, but it's not real. I enjoy watching it, and hope others do, too, but I especially hope that people in the future won't forget to look at the original foots for the real details, should they wish to comb over things. We don't want the fake stuff to become authoritative.

    • Re:It looks nice, but not real (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Orgasmatron ( 8103 ) on Saturday July 25, 2020 @09:01PM (#60331957)

      The computer isn't inventing anything, or at least it shouldn't need to.

      There have been several stories here on slashdot about building up high resolution images from low resolution sources. I recall seeing some amazing pictures taken by a 25kilopixel QuickCam. Film of the lunar surface is probably about the ideal for this sort of thing.

      Basically, you use visible features to line up two sequential images and figure out the transformation between them. The alignment will never be perfect - there will be some sub-pixel jitter between them, which is actually a good thing. You basically do the inverse of anti-aliasing and build up a virtual picture with a higher resolution than any of the original pictures.

      You can also detect and reject defects, including motion blur. Missing a frame here or there isn't a big deal. Even better, you can usually still figure out motion from a blurred frame, so even if a frame is too blurry to contribute to the detailed image, you might still have authentic motion for that section.

      Of course, in reality, the system probably does something closer to a single pass. If you have more time than memory, at each output frame, you look at past and future frames to build up the output image. If you have more memory than time, you do an actual single pass with incomplete frames in memory.

      This is complete speculation on my part. I haven't looked into the technique he is actually using. I'm just saying that I'm familiar with techniques that he could be using that would make these videos almost as "real" as the original film prints.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Much of the Apollo 11 footage isn't "real" any more, in the sense that the original video has been lost and now all we have is copies of the broadcast which has the brightness and contrast messed up. That's not how it really looked or an accurate representation of what the astronauts could see. It looks way brighter than it was, for example, with even harsher shadows.

      The photos they took are much more accurate.

      • That's more to do with exposure, which on the decent from the steps of the lander, you can see them adjusting through the scene. There's no atmosphere. The sunlight and contrast would be extremely harsh in reality - but the human eye is better than film at capturing all those details at once.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It was much better on the original video, of which only a few stills remain. It got messed up when broadcast and recorded off the air.

      • Note that that applies to recordings made of the live TV coverage. The astronauts also had a 16mm film camera, those originals are still available.

    • We don't want the fake stuff to become authoritative.

      For science? No. For entertainment? Yes. People don't get excited for blurry 1fps footage.

  • ... too much effort should go into doing these kinds of enhancements to moon landing videos.

    We already have no lack of people convinced that the moon landing was a hoax and the video footage faked without giving these morons even a morsel of truth to the conjecture.

    • So because of a few nutjobs, we should deny ourselves some incredible enhanced footage of one of the most momentous achievements in human history? I think not.

      Every single issue these idiots have raised has long since been scientifically debunked. At this point, we're better off just ignoring them. The very last thing we should do is allow them to dictate any of our actions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )

        I don't deny that this is certainly interesting, and I do not discount the original event's historical significance, but in the end, the gains that are aquired from this are really only very superficial... it ultimately only changes how the footage *looks*, nothing more. Nothing new about what happened can really be learned from the enhanced footage which could not also be learned as easily from the original. This might certainly be fine for entertainment purposes, but of negligible value in any other

        • I'd certainly never argue that this has any scientific value at all. It's value is purely entertainment and cultural. There's really nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think by making the footage clearer, newer generations can better appreciate those achievements from several generations past. In the same way that I think colorized WW2 footage helps humanize that most intense of all human dramas for modern generations, this enhancement will make the moon landings perhaps feel a bit more "real" to some.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )
            My argument is less about trying to actually reason with moon landing hoaxers than it is with simply not giving them more ammunition to use on the less informed by offering even the slightest amount of credulity to their claims that available footage was faked.

    • Agreed. There are a few that we could send into space so that these so-called "nut jobs" (I prefer the term lunatic myself) could see for themselves where the word came from--nothing personal.Give them one of those portable canisters for gas, since they think they're taking a trip to Arizona or something, and they could always use some extra gas for the return trip.

      One of the documentaries finally told me how Neil Armstrong became the astronaut/commander; won't spoil it for you. I was eight years old at the

  • Too bad they threw out the original high-resolution videotapes recorded via Australia and other points many decades ago.

    *sniff*

    • High-resolution is relative [stackexchange.com].

      The SSTV system used in NASA's early Apollo missions transferred ten frames per second with a resolution of 320 frame lines using less bandwidth than a normal TV transmission.

      The lost tape did have better quality than the surviving TV recordings. Neither can hold a candle to the 16mm film recordings this story is about, but the 16mm cameras weren't running continuously.

  • NOT AI!!!!! (Score:1, Informative)

    by BlargMaster42.1 ( 6557788 )
    God damn it this is NOT AI!

  • I can't see any value in further muddying the waters of what historical footage is real and not real.

    "look at how clearly Neil Armstrong is visible"

    No. "Look at how clearly the CGI Neil Armstrong is visible in this DeepFake footage of the moon landing" is what you mean.

  • It;s producing something that looks good, but are the details authentic?

    You can't get any new real information that wasn't there in the recording in the first place. The software can take something that might be a small crater, and upscale it to look like a crater, but what if it was really a rock?

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