Using neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/someone-used-neural-networks-to-upscale-a-famous-1896-video-to-4k-quality/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that finds the "improved" version much worse?

There are digital artifacts all over the place, like the steam at the beginning, the people's faces, any place there is movement.

I see that some things don't move as "jerky" but I think the original is far superior to watch.

Edited to add: Here's a link to a quick comparison image. These aren't exactly the same frame or size, but close enough to see what I'm talking about. [https://imgur.com/a/A3roH54](https://imgur.com/a/A3roH54)

<comment><USER3> Someone posted a colorized[0] version and it had somewhat "jumpy" colors that change over time. I think one problem is you need temporal consistency for this to really work properly. If you pick a color for an object, or you upscale an object a certain way, it has to stay that way over a potentially unlimited number of frames. That's already hard to achieve because neural networks are typically bad at long-term dependency, but it's even more difficult if the object moves, because it implies that the neural network has to understand object identity and movement, which requires understanding physics, and what a train or a person is to begin with. At the moment, neural networks don't have sophisticated models of the world.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E)

<comment><USER4> >...because it implies that the neural network has to understand object identity and movement, which requires understanding physics, and what a train or a person is to begin with.

I agree with most of what you said, but disagree with the need to know underlying fundamentals: most 5 year olds can throw and catch a ball without needing to understand calculus or Newton's laws of gravity.

<comment><USER5> they don't need to know the formulas or mathematical logic behind physics, but 5 year olds do have a working model of physics in their head. And AI wouldn't need to know the actual formulas either, but it would need some working model that owuld allow it to differentiate between those

<comment><USER3> That's right. It has to understand how objects move, and the boundaries between objects, what's part of a given object and what isn't, as well as how a given object will be affected by light when moving, shadows, etc. This is difficult to learn from data, even if you have a lot of it.

<comment><USER4> > It has to understand how objects move[1], and the boundaries between > objects[2], what's part of a given object and what isn't[3], as well as how > a given object will be affected by light[4] when moving, shadows, etc. This > is difficult to learn from data, even if you have a lot of it.

Each one of the items you've listed has been severally accomplished by ML to varying levels of success (baseline being "workable", and more progress is being made.) I probably would have found better references had I spent longer than 5 minutes searching

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGm3hF_BlYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGm3hF_BlYM)

2\. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/20999646/google-arcore- au...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/20999646/google-arcore-augmented- reality-updates-occlusion-physics-depth)

3\. Same as 2 :-). AR Occlusion requires both. Additionally many recent phones use ML models to fake depth-of-field; boundary between foreground objects has to be detected

4\. Also see 2; Augmented Reality is _hard._ bonus: [https://www.awn.com/animationworld/how-klaus-uniquely- combin...](https://www.awn.com/animationworld/how-klaus-uniquely-combines-cg- lighting-techniques-traditional-2d-animation)

<comment><USER3> I work in deep learning research. In my opinion, pose estimation with one human centered in a frame is nowhere near the level of difficulty of constructing an accurate model of a complex a scene with multiple people and moving objects of various sizes. For instance, it wouldn't be so hard to detect that there is a train in this video, but to do upscaling correctly, you need a 3D model of this specific train. Yes, there exist deep learning models that try to do 3D reconstruction, and so far, I haven't seen anything that works robustly. Combining this information with an upscaling model is another challenge. It's not as easy as just plugging components together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The same approach is being used to enhance the textures of older games, ranging from Doom, Witcher 2, Final fantasy 7, and others. People have turned them into mods [0,1].

I actually showed a few examples on day one of the deep learning course I'm teaching this semester as an emergent application of the technology.

[0] [https://www.pcgamer.com/heretic-looks-stunning-with- neural-n...](https://www.pcgamer.com/heretic-looks-stunning-with-neural- network-texture-improvements/)

[1] [https://www.pcgamer.com/AI-upscale-mod-list/](https://www.pcgamer.com/AI- upscale-mod-list/)

<comment><USER7> See "AI Neural Networks being used to generate HQ textures for older games (You can do it yourself!)" [https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural- networks-being-us...](https://www.resetera.com/threads/ai-neural-networks- being-used-to-generate-hq-textures-for-older-games-you-can-do-it- yourself.88272/) (Dec 2018) - people create it for old games, it is easy to set in on one's own computer, or on Colab.

Also, super-resolution is being used not only to statically enhance textures, but also - work on the flight. See Atomic Heart RTX Tech Demo, with ray- tracing and deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) [https://mundfish.com/en/rtxtechdemo/](https://mundfish.com/en/rtxtechdemo/).

</comment></comment><comment> valiant-comma There are a number of speed-corrected vintage film clips on Youtube. Here's an example from late-1890s France:

[https://youtu.be/NjDclfAFRB4](https://youtu.be/NjDclfAFRB4)

While not upscaled, they are still pretty impressive, and interesting to watch.

<comment><USER8> Somewhat OT: Can someone enlighten me why exactly we need to "speed correct" them in the first place?

It always struck me as odd that those old b/w clips were often shown playing too fast on TV. Isn't it more like they were simply recorded at lower fps rates? Then how can you call this speed correcting, when you merely just played them at the wrong frame rate before, just because TV is 25/30/50/60/59.4i² frames/fields per second and you didn't want to convert it in any way. And then suddenly a few years ago these speed corrected versions started to pop up on the internet, like "hey we just fixed the past, people didn't actually move twice as fast back then!"

I guess I just don't like the term, but maybe there is more to it.

<comment><USER9> " While the illusion of motion works at 16 fps, it works better at higher frame rates. Thomas Edison, to whom we owe a lot of debt to for this whole operation (light bulbs, motion picture film, Direct Current, etc.) believed that the optimal frame rate was 46 frames per second. Anything lower than that resulted in discomfort and eventual exhaustion in audience. So Edison built a camera and film projection system that operated at at a high frame rate.

But with the slowness of film stocks and high cost of film, this was a non- starter. Economics dictated shooting closer to the threshold of the illusion, and most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up."

[https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking- film-24-frames-...](https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking- film-24-frames-per-second/)

Another take on film speeds says that films were projected at a variety of speeds, depending on the original filming as well as the economics of fitting multiple showings into a schedule. [https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinema...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Totally unrelated but I'm curious if anyone else experienced this phenomenon.

When I was a kid, people in old pictures and movies(say, pre 1920s) looked genuinely strange. The structure of their faces, the shape of their bodies... it just looked really weird to me. Now that I'm older, I find people in old media very familiar, like I know people who look enough like them and I can suddenly relate to them on a new level.

I'm guessing my younger brain just hadn't seen enough faces yet. In any case it always struck me as odd.

<comment><USER11> "Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else."

\- Ogden Nash

<comment><USER12> How does he define old age?

<comment><USER11> The vast majority of his work was humorous poetry, but on rare occasions he got serious. Since I like this one and it's sort of appropriate to the subject, I'll share it:

        Old Men
        by Ogden Nash

        People expect old men to die,
        They do not really mourn old men.
        Old men are different. People look
        At them with eyes that wonder when...
        People watch with unshocked eyes;
        But the old men know when an old man dies.

(Copy/pasted from [https://westegg.com/nash/](https://westegg.com/nash/), which has several other good ones.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am an author of this video, you can feel free to ask anything – I covered algos that I have used in video description, you can find them there

<comment><USER14> Why did you crop it? 25% of the picture is gone.

<comment><USER15> This is an age old question when converting 4:3 footage to 16:9. Do you keep the original aspect ratio (OAR) in the converted footage to keep the purists happy (small percentage of audience), or do you fill the frame with as much picture as possible to avoid mattes to keep the average content consumer happy (much larger % of audience)? At the end of the day, the producers will make the decision that they feel will please the largest group of viewers.

I have personally been involved with these types of projects. The purists are the smaller section, but they are much more vocal on the internet. While reading forums and tweets and other soapboxes, these purists will eviscerate you publicly. However, using other metrics (sales figures, independent surveys, etc), the numbers show that the overall product is well received. There are so many people online that believe they know everything, but know nothing; yet these people are the most vocal. I was once accused of uprezing existing video tapes rather than re-scanning the film like the company claimed. Never mind that I was personally carrying the film to the transfer house. We took pictures of the employees with the film, took shots of the film on the shelves in the vaults, and wound up making "making of" type documentaries showing the process of the film on the telecine, interviewing the colorist transferring the film, showing the artists doing the restoration, and the sound department working with the audio from the original optical track, etc. Still, the know-it-alls kept on yelling.

<comment><USER14> Are there any merits to removing 25% of a film, other than higher sales?

<comment><USER15> Your choices are to keep the OAR as 4:3 so that you have ~240 pixels of pillar bars on the left and right of the image (for HD), or crop into the image to make it full frame. The average viewer tends to not like mattes of any type. They tend to prefer a full frame image to fill up the pixels on their screen. Because of this, producers will make the decision to crop into the picture to get a full image.

The same decision happens when making a 16:9 (1.78) image from content that was shot in the common 2.35/2.40 aspect for feature films. To get those images to 16:9 so the image is full screen requires cutting of pixels from the sides of the original. Content shot at 1.85 requires even less cropping. Even true 4K content is cropped slightly to fit the 16:9 aspect of UHD. It was even worse when television was only 4:3. Content in 2.35/2.40 would crop so much of the content, a shot of 2 people could remove one of the people from the frame entirely. They would use the Pan&Scan technique to slide the image around in the frame to reveal the 2nd person. This was one of the reasons for the slate at the beginning of a movie saying that the video had been reformatted to fit the screen.

<comment><USER16> Video containers (or the stream itself) should really have a "center of frame" coordinate for each frame, and let playback devices crop based on that center. Maybe this already exists in some standards and im unaware.

<comment><USER15> For digital files, ideally, the file only contains active pixels so that the file is the frame size of the image. However, for video formats with a clearly defined standard (TV/Broadcast/DVD/Blu-ray/etc), the video frame size must be what is defined in the spec. This is why the mattes exist to fill in the space to make the content fit the space required.

<comment><USER16> If some people want to crop video to fit different screen aspect ratios, it would be nice for the frame to advertise its "center" so the playback device can apply the appropriate cropping and matting.

Maybe I have my player set to "3:2 full screen, up to 30% crop.". It's not something I would do personally, but it would be better than pan and scan being something implemented in the encode itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a sort of swimming/breathing effect in the video that's nauseating to me in the same way that TV motion smoothing is. It looks like artifacts from trying to perfectly crop the video when the source film likely has become distorted over time, but it's hard to watch.

<comment><USER18> Could be the frame rate, I feel a similar way when I first started watching 60fps. Now I feel like it's a more substantial jump than 4K->8k

<comment><USER19> Rolling shutter is one possible explanation of "wavy" effects if they digitized cinematic footage improperly. However, in this case I think we see aliasing effects of static Gigapixel AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is a colorized version:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E)

<comment><USER21> Not as convincing when clothes change colors between frames

<comment><USER22> Makes it feel like a psychedelic trip without having to take anything though, so that's a positive. Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the framereate is what makes it feel more vivid. I didn't experience that big of a difference with regards to resolution.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it seems the NN in this particular implementation just does edge sharpening (almost like a "dumb" algorithm), the interior of textures and faces etc. still seem to lack detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can people in this thread genuinely not see a difference between the before and after or are you just being contrary? The change in resolution should be clear enough, but the FPS change is amazing and gives a great sense of presence to me when watching.

There are some jarring artifacts, such as the ladies' hats glitching at 10sec, but these artifacts are in the original and simply become clear in the upscaled version. It's very impressive.

Side note, They Shall Not Grow Old is just stunning, with its restoration pipeline. I can't wait until all media can be updated in such a fashion, and I assume it's just a matter of time before e.g. YouTube and Spotify have filters to offer restored VHS footage, old phonograph recordings, etc

<comment><USER26> I honestly couldn't see much difference. I did not study it in detail to find the differences, just a casual view of both clips. I did look at the comparison clips at the end of the 4K version but still didn't see much of a difference.

A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to begin with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this enhancement is great", only turns out that was the original clip. They should have chosen something that has more room for improvement (which would also give them a lot more interesting material to choose from).

<comment><USER25> > A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to > begin with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this > enhancement is great", only turns out that was the original clip.

Funny, I did the same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One thing I've never understood is why people keep playing back old film at too high a frame rate. It seems that the film cameras of the day recorded at a lower-than-expected framerate, and the playback machines played at a higher frame rate, resulting in the telltale weird effect of everyone moving too fast. If they'd recorded audio along with it, everyone would be talking like chipmunks.

<comment><USER28> Correct. Hand-cranked cameras are obviously extra-problematic (though fun to work with), but the first automatically cranked cameras worked at 18fps. Most broadcast systems work at ~30, 25, or 24 fps (and there's a system for doing 24fps playback on 30fps TV). Retiming video used to be ridiculously tedious/labor-intensive, and it's only in the last 5 years or so that it's become sufficiently easy to pull it off and have it look good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there techniques to ensure temporal consistency when performing this kind of upscaling? Currently it seems like each frame was upscaled independently leading to weird artifacts.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it seems like each frame was upscaled independently leading to weird > artifacts

Yep, they used an off the shelf nn (gigapixel) to upscale each individual frame. You could try to achieve your proposal using a guassian convolution windowed in 3d across frames. I suspect it may make a mess of the video's framerate, but the motion appears smooth enough that it might work.

<comment><USER30> It's not as if the source material's got a steady frame rate, there's a lot of places where it jumps about 2-4 frames.

Which is quite possibly due to lapses in the hand-cranking of the film through the camera back in 1896, or maybe due to frames getting lost when the printed reel of film got damaged and spliced in the hundred and twenty-odd years between then and now. Possibly both, one could probably work out _some_ of the cranking speed variations by looking at how the train's frame-to-frame motions change, at least until it's come to a stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> At 35 seconds, the woman running with the child in the direction of the camera, her face is almost completely blurred out. If you look really hard you can see an outline of her nose and what not but overall it is interesting to see how the neural net works in this region of the video.

Not surprising, but still drives the point home that good ML/AI algorithms have a bottleneck at the input data.

<comment><USER32> I think she is wearing a kind of veil, as are several other women.

<comment><USER33> I thought it was a veil also. This was France, so it could have been someone from one of their colonies at the time?

<comment><USER34> Old French (and Italian and Portuguese and etc) women commonly wear veils/babushkas, even today.

<comment><USER35> They're wearing a veil that covers the entire face though. Eyes included- I assume a very thin see-through veil.

<comment><USER36> yes it's a see-through veil to protect their faces from the sun. Like this [https://www.dhgate.com/product/wholesale-fashion-foldable- su...](https://www.dhgate.com/product/wholesale-fashion-foldable-summer-veil- sun/451965835.html) or [http://www.coastalchrome.ca/womens-sun-hats- wkmovizpxj-6/abu...](http://www.coastalchrome.ca/womens-sun-hats- wkmovizpxj-6/abusun-sunscreen-hat-veil-sun-hat-summer-hat-outdoor-sunscreen- hat-for-women-b071gnb7hg-gmsmpjzkyy-1164.html)

<comment><USER35> Of course, sunscreen will be invented only in 1936!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#History)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone else experienced this: when watching old movies (or just black/white movies), it feels uncomfortable for only the first few minutes, and then you completely forget about the bad image quality. It's like the brain performs the upscaling/coloring for you.

<comment><USER38> I'm colour blind, and strangely when I start watching something in black and white, _I don 't know it's in black and white!_ \- I only realise when someone else mentions it, and even then it takes a while for me to see it.

It's weird, like my brain is automatically filling in colours that aren't there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can someone point at specific things to see the upscaling at work? The two videos look the same to me, both when taken as a whole and when zoomed in to compare the same points in the videos...

<comment><USER40> Look at the ground in the thumbnail, for example, or the hill, for that matter, as well as the building in the background. And the fence, too.

The details are much more distinct in the upscale.

It actually surprised me, I was just expecting it to effectively be a de- speckle with edge sharpening, but it's exceeded my expectations.

<comment><USER41> It's sharper, but it's the type of sharper that happens in a dream, look at the text on the left building (quonset hut with a hole in the side). The text flutters as the net fever dreams context from it. Like a dream it has more detail the more you look but it also isn't real. It's like how I can read shit even why my eyes are very dry or it's beyond the extent of my vision, it's tossing it's guesses into a viewable object, but it's just extrapolations, like how I can tell the score in a nfl game across the bar, I know the game isn't 88 to 9, it's likely 28 to 7.

This doesn't make it any less cool, just putting it in context.

Zoom and enhance away.

<comment><USER42> The inference resolves to a high-detail and _plausible_ result, but not necessarily one that has any fidelity with the ground truth. Which is somewhat like a dream, in ways.

Additional information -- say, a close-up image of the quonset structure's signage, or even knowing what the text was, might result in additional detail. A method that was specifically designed for extracting textual information out of blurred images (several exist, and they're frighteningly accurate -- any image-hiding based on _only_ pixelation or blurring without _additional_ noise introduction is not particularly secure) might also be able to identify a text from the original film source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Using Deep Learning models trained on static images is usually not a good idea. But one can simply extend the model to use 3D convolutions instead of 2D, use time as 3rd axis and then feed a sequence of images for training, getting much better results out of it without the wavy effects.

<comment><USER43> And have the amount of training data and time scale from n^2 to n^3... That's why nobody has achieved good results with this yet...

<comment><USER19> Oh yes, but that might be comparable to attention-based models for NLP, complexity-wise. Using C3D is quite common since 2015 actually:

[http://vlg.cs.dartmouth.edu/c3d/](http://vlg.cs.dartmouth.edu/c3d/)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.0767.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.0767.pdf)

Training a great model is expensive these days, FB routinely pays 6 figures per training run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if a similar technique could be used to turn old 4/3 videos to widescreen just by learning the surroundings of a scene through other shots, then mapping them back and forth to build a complete widescreen scene on all frames.

<comment><USER45> I've watched a few movies in what's called ScreenX[0]. It's a cinema experience where they project the movie on the main (front) screen, and project the surroundings on the two side walls. The result is an immersive viewing experience. Obviously the film is not recorded in the ridiculously wide aspect ratio, so usually the side images are computer generated. For landscape imagery, this is fairly seamless. You can't really tell that the images aren't real. However, during a scene with people, the side walls projected static images that drifted around slightly (as if they were cardboard cutouts). I guess the idea is that most things happening in your peripheral vision are lost anyway, so no need to make them detailed.

[0]: [https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/ScreenX](https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/ScreenX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Honestly, I watched the original and the 4k and don't really notice any big difference. The wider aspect ratio of the 4k is more pleasant, but this has nothing to do with the enhanced resolution.

<comment><USER13> Have not you notice FPS boost?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A thought I had while reading about this was what is the limit to upscaling via this method? By that I mean if one where to just keep upscaling and had a monitor capable of displaying the image, how long until the image became unrecognizable? Surely upscaling an already upscaled image would result in some strange artifacts.

<comment><USER48> There's no limit when you upscale with neural nets. Make one good enough and it can fill in the blanks properly.

<comment><USER49> > Make one good enough and it can fill in the blanks properly.

I would say it can fill in the blanks _likely_ or _plausibly_. But one can't guarantee that it is the proper or real content, since the neural net is imagining / inventing the upscaled version.

<comment><USER48> Sure. I'm not saying it will represent reality 100%, but it could be good enough that you probably couldn't tell the difference.

Current neural nets might perhaps not be able to upscale with no limit and still make it look good, but it's not like it can't be done. A good human artist could take a small grainy image and given enough effort draw an upscaled version that would be a very reasonable representation of what a larger image would have looked like, there's no reason to believe that artificial neural networks can't do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Could this be used to generate "missing" frames in stop-motion animation as well?

For example for this sequence from "The Terminator" (1984): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI)

<comment><USER51> There is a user-friendly mature software for this already (which technically did not even use ML in the recent sense because it is much older): SVP project. You can connect it to many players and play any video of your choice in realtime. Then there are high quality tools in video editing software like Premiere or Davinci Resolve which do this also (pixel flow framerate adjustment)... Then there is hardware accelerated version of this in NVIDIA graphics cards which can be used in some video players too...

This is mostly a solved problem, it has existed for many years, no real need for ML here. (Possibly for some quality improvements?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I can't help to think that we will -one day, probably soon- have enough 3D face models to just replace those in these movies with some that will fit the original version.

The resulting faces won't be an exact match due to the low quality of the original, but unless you knew these people, no-one will be able to tell.

Same with pretty much every other aspect of the scene: have good models that fit the original scene and re-create a full 3D version of the whole movie, at any level of definition.

Once this process can be automated, we'll be able to recreate all the classics, shot for shot.

<comment><USER14> For what purpose?

<comment><USER53> VR and re-editing come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> That's a lot worse than the original.

<comment><USER55> I agree. The upscaled version is both more smoothed and more mottled. This matches the "look" of a lot of low bitrate HD video, but I would argue that information has actually been lost in the upscaling process, not gained. It would be much easier to tell with before / after screenshots, I think, but at any rate I don't see a lot of reason to hope neural net upscaling will be useful for many "real world" purposes.

The HFR was pretty convincing to me, however.

<comment><USER56> I agree with your points, but I'd also argue that Nvidias DLSS implementation is a real world purpose, no?

<comment><USER55> That's a great point. Using approaches like this as a less computationally complex method of resampling for the purpose of anti-aliasing (and not upscaling) seems worthwhile, definitely.

I was thinking more of attempts to create neural nets that map from e.g. the set of 480p images to the set of 1080p images. The "best case" results seem to be trained on low bitrate HD video, which gives results that "look good" to many people (especially those who grew up watching Youtube) but in terms of real detail are worse than a simple upscale (with e.g. Lanczos). I haven't yet seen results where content aware upscaling provides a real improvement over "dumb" algorithms for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Math upscale'd it, and my internet connection downscale'd it. I suppose it was math on either end.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think it's great we're developing this capability, but I prefer the original-- we're seeing the film as it was originally seen then. The captured scene isn't made better by higher fidelity, it's the opposite for me.

As with most advancements in technology and art, we'll see a proliferation of people using the new technique with mixed results at first. It's the shiny new toy. Then over time, people will figure out how to use it and apply it with intent.

The upscaling projects we've seen in gaming have generally produced spectacular results, probably because the intent in gaming graphics has always been for the sort of pixel density we're finally able to start achieving. Remember the huge disparity between the box art and the game? lol.

Gaming aside, I don't think we've left the toy phase just yet.

</comment><comment><USER59> Seeing this little girl, long born and dead, jumping and smiling got me quite emotional...

<comment><USER60> Watching old movies is always a very melancholy experience for me for this reason. To think that everyone in the film you are watching is dead, when they seem so alive before your eyes.

(Interesting thing I read once about the Hanna-Barbera cartoons with the canned laugh track - it was using some old recording that had been knocking around since the 20s. So if you watch them now, the whole action is ringing with the laughter of the long dead. Now how's that for a macabre thought!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> It states that humanity's standards for video have risen in 125 years.

Viewing the film, it seems that the standard for clothing to wear whilst going outside has done the opposite, quite drastically.

<comment><USER62> And if there was sound, you could argue the same with the quality of the language.

Idiocracy!

<comment><USER63> From a linguistic perspective this couldn't be further from the truth.

We only perceive older language as more polite, but it doesn't mean it was.

What matters is the level of rudeness perceived by the receiver at the time. If someone was called a 'Scoundrel' they might have been shook while today it's a laughable insult.

<comment><USER62> I completely disagree. If you look at speeches or interviews from the 30s or the 40s, in French or English, the quality of the spoken language is significantly better than today. Sentences are better constructed, richer vocabulary. And if you look at XVIII french literature, it is night and day with anything written today.

<comment><USER63> > If you look at speeches or interviews from the 30s or the 40s, in French or > English, the quality of the spoken language is significantly better than > today... And if you look at XVIII french literature

There's probably some selection bias there. I'm not disagreeing there might have been a reduction in vocabulary, etc, but we tend to see older (usage) words as more erudite as well.

Compare the vocabulary/grammar on social media with current newspapers or a book and there's a big difference as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Call me crazy but I prefer watching the original

</comment><comment><USER65> It is common in video player software these days to use neural network based filters to upscale and downscale, eg see [https://artoriuz.github.io/mpv_upscaling.html](https://artoriuz.github.io/mpv_upscaling.html)

</comment><comment><USER66> If we're killing garbage in garbage out, that's going to take us some weird places.

</comment><comment><USER67> The upscaled version looks worse to me. Seems like it's lost information, not gained.

</comment><comment><USER68> Strange to think none of these people knew what was coming their way 18 years hence...

<comment><USER69> This was filmed at La Ciotat, on the southern coast of France. This region actually survived WWI relatively unscathed. It did see a bit more action in 1944. But the war would have been a major event in these people's lives, even if the location wasn't directly in the middle of it.

<comment><USER70> The town did not see any action but, as all towns in France, all fit men were sent to the front lines, and many never came back, as illustrated by the monuments listing the deads of WWI and WWII in all French towns and villages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Oh this makes me happy. Im stoked with the 4k results. The gravel under the tracks looks so good. I feel like it's a definite improvement and I know it's only going to get better.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tangentially related, a real-time video upscaler: [https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K](https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K)

<comment><USER72> IMO in the v1.0 comparisons, v0.9 is sharper in every case.

<comment><USER17> Yeah .9 has more aliasing artifacts but has much better contrast and is easier on my eyes.

Edit: Smooth gradients are much better in v1.0 though, look at the background differences here: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bloc97/Anime4K/master/resu...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bloc97/Anime4K/master/results/Comparisons/0.9-1.0/0_RC.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Anyone know of similar projects for audio? Music within a genre tends to be similar enough that you ought to be able to upsample. I tried doing this once myself but got nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER74> I've seen lots of old sports and news footage from the 1970's that looks bad. The color looks particularly bad, for example. It would be nice to automatically fix that.

</comment><comment><USER75> It may appear higher resolution but I don't enjoy looking at the extra details knowing that they are probably fictitious.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is pretty awesome!

But those dresses the women wore look awfully hot an uncomfortable.

<comment><USER70> Not least if you consider than it's very sunny and 30+ degrees (C) during summer in that area.

</comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z-L We can finally csi pictures then!? Yeah</comment>


Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/western-digital-agrees-to-buy-sandisk-for-about-19-billion <comment><USER2> The consolidation in the semiconductors/chip IP industry, thus far in 2015:

1\. Intel-Altera: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/intel- buys...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/intel-buys-altera- for-16-7-billion-as-chip-deals-accelerate)

2\. Avago-Broadcom (and earlier, Avago + LSI): [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/avago- said...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/avago-said-near- deal-to-buy-wireless-chipmaker-broadcom)

3\. Silicon Imaging-Lattice: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/lattice-to-buy- silicon-image-for...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/lattice-to-buy-silicon- image-for-600-million-1422358580)

4\. NXP-Freescale: [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327236](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327236)

5\. (2014) Cirrus-Wolfson: [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322171](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322171)

6\. Avago is further looking at Xilinx, Maxim, and Renesas: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-chipmakers- m-a-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-chipmakers-m-a-avago- idUSKBN0NZ27520150514)

This is one industry that is in flux ATM.

Edit: Further afield, though tightly coupled with this industry, on the manufacturing equipment side, Lam Research announced acquisition of KLA-Tencor today [http://www.wsj.com/articles/semiconductor-firm-lam- research-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/semiconductor-firm-lam-research-to- buy-kla-tencor-1445419669)

<comment><USER3> Another consolidation this year: Dialog is buying Atmel, although Atmel is fairly small compared to the other big players in the microcontroller market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those wondering where all the other hard drive companies went: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Di...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg/2000px- Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg.png)

</comment><comment><USER5> This sucks for consumers. Prices are already way to high for HDs and don't seem to come down anymore. It is as if there is some sort of price fixing going on.

<comment><USER6> Yeah seriously, SanDisk own patents to flash IIRC, their stuff is always less than their competitors.

I hope WD isn't going to jack up prices.

<comment><USER7> SandDisk SSD's aren't cheaper, not when you are comparing oranges to oranges, they sell allot of very very low end SSD's their performance series costs more than comparable drives from Samsung.

There are other companies that also sell cheap SSD's like Micron and Crucial but the big names Samsung, Intel, OCZ(Toshiba) usually sell quite high end devices.

Samsung pretty much blew the market out of the water with their Evo series it comes very close to the performance of it's Pro series and other high end SSD's out there where it comes to real world use at a fraction of the cost. It brought the costs of SSD's down to less than 350$ per TB while keeping outstanding performance and life span.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always have thought that companies were bought for a price of it's market value (stock price * number of stocks), or if someone did not wanted pay all in cash they would've tried to compensate in other ways until market value is reached.

But here WD bought SD for ~85-86$ per share, when it was worth ~75$ per share. It's at least 13% more.

Does it simply mean that WD hopes that SD will rise in value rapidly? Or I imagined company buying evaluation wrong?

<comment><USER9> They issued $18 bln in new debt. Does that mean they only paid $1 bln for it?

<comment><USER10> That depends on who issued the debt and what happened after that. If WD issued the debt, they could use that incoming cash to pay the old stockholders to gain the shares in SanDisk. That would be a real cash outflow. Bigger company after the transaction, and bigger debt.

Alternative is that WD pays cash to stockholders they might have had lying around. Then issue debt in SanDisk and pay dividend upstream from Sandisk to WD afterwards. Bigger company, and bigger debt result, only different place for the debt. Sometimes tax incentives help which route to choose (private equity often loads up firms on debts, since interest is deductible).

Only way to 'pay less' would be (happens sometimes) that you can buy a company that holds a lot of cash, but that has a relatively low valuation one way or the other. Perhaps stockholders sense risks and don't expect dividends (market cap in that sense is expected value of future earnings plus lots of noise). Then you buy company, and use the cash for superdividend right away. Bigger company results, but with relatively stronger solvency since you've paid part from cash that was 'undervalued'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now if they could just fix the broken firmware they released for my WD Live TV player.

</comment><comment><USER12> These companies both sound like bad western tech crossover movies from the 80's. This was bound to happen.</comment>


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We would really appreciate your questions, suggestions and feedback. You can also drop an email to firstname.lastname@example.com

P.S. - If you are facing issues with managing your teams performance then feel free to signup and turn your employees to ninjas.</comment>


Ask HN: How to raise a seed round for people with no elite connections? - <AUTHOR> How can someone with a product but no elite connections or degree raise a seed round ? <comment><USER2> I work in a fashion exposed to thousands of startups worldwide, and can report that many of them do factually raise money without having pre-existing connectedness to prestige investors. The only thing required to raise a seed round is to convince people who have money to give you money. There are a lot of people in the world with sufficient money to fund startups. Substantially all of them are on the same Internet you are.

The trend in the industry has been to more openness on this question recently, in no small part driven by YC, which basically pioneered investing at scale in companies without requiring a social connection.

Also, quick fact of life in entrepreneurship: there are many ways to skin the cat, but if you are hypothetically in a situation where the business needs connections, then the job is going and getting connections. If you e.g. take a random named person with checkwriting authority in Silicon Valley, and ask "How many people have social permission to introduce me to this person?", that answer is likely in the high hundreds to mid single-digit thousands. Substantially all of those people have an email address. Many of them respond to emails _very quickly_ , particularly when they're interesting. This suggests that the immediate problem is less having elite connections and more organizing your life such that you send an uncomfortably large number of interesting emails.

<comment><USER3> > The only thing required to raise a seed round is to convince people who have > money to give you money

One of the huge issues I see is experienced (at least a subset "prestige") investors have the terms best suited to startups succeeding.

I've seen less experienced investors have draconian (almost nonsense) terms -- crazy terms that probably hurt their investments considerably. However, these investors are less accustomed to managing risk in a technology startup.

This is much, much less common in the SFBA ecosystem. However, if you look globally the startup investor maturity can be really poor.

<comment><USER4> If you're not willing to walk away, you're going to pay retail. Good terms happen when you have multiple interested investors, bad terms happen when you don't.

That said, investment is difficult if you're in a place that has few exits (anywhere but Silicon Valley or Beijing/Shanghai). Investors are motivated by the percent chance of an exit, and that chance is higher in the Bay Area than in most places. The chance for exit drops off a pretty steep curve as you go down the "top cities" list (I live in Seattle so apologies to the local scene).

<comment><USER3> > The chance for exit drops off a pretty steep curve as you go down the "top > cities" list.

Exactly.

Which either means you're either: going to get a bad/mixed bag on terms -or- you need to raise in one of those cities as an outsider.

<comment><USER4> Raising as an outsider works just fine if you have traction. As if you don't, why would you be trying to raise money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good question. Before I answer, why do you think you need to raise a round? Communities like this one (although I'm much indebted to it) create a presumption that investment is a good thing. And sometimes it ain't. Think carefully about your personal objectives. They won't necessarily be satisfied by an investment.

That said, the way to raise capital if you need to is: 1\. Work for income and to fund basic build-out 2\. Look for grants. In some sectors such as green tech these are widely available. A friend just raised 1m, no loss of equity. 3\. Look for opportunities where big raises are not needed. If your main advantage is that you have a shit ton of cash to build your business, that's going to get competed away pretty quickly, as theirs a lot of cheap money swilling around.

And remember mo' money, mo' problems. It sort of burns a hole in your pocket, makes you lazy, allows you to take inefficient decisions.

As an addition: I once went to an accelerator where one of the slick VCs said, "if you want to raise money from me, you'll need to find me through my business school network". What a divot. Would you honestly want to work for an investor with attitudes like that?

<comment><USER6> > _that's going to get competed away pretty quickly_

There are lots of great businesses with moat characteristics. You spend some capital to dig the moat ( _i.e._ lock in key suppliers or customers) and then enjoy a period of imperviousness.

Funding strategy is an important component of a business plan. Bootstrapping a business that needs scale, or raising venture capital for an idea which can't scale, can both be game overs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reason this is so confusing is that investors outright lie to themselves and everyone else about it. They pretend to invest based on product vision or founder traits but it's almost universally untrue.

Investors actually invest based on their ability to justify their investment to their LPs, peers, and themselves if it fails. The fear of loss drives most people, and if you have traction they can say "Hey, it's not my fault, they had traction!" and if you have pedigree "Hey, it's not my fault, they went to Stanford/MIT/Harvard!"

So, there are essentially just two routes: 1) traction 2) pedigree.

If you don't have pedigree, then you need traction. And even if you have pedigree, at some point you're going to need traction anyway. Of course it's usually easier to get traction with funding but there's a reason so many pedigreed founders fail, and it's because they can't game the system indefinitely.

There are exceptions to this rule but it's much easier to get traction than it is to find an investor that has genuine conviction about your startup.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you need to raise a seed round?

We're bootstrapped. Never took money, never really tried.

At some point in our company's traction, investors started reaching out to us. You have to remember that their job is to find the best companies, and convince them to take their money. Make your company one of the best companies, and investors will find you.

<comment><USER9> Not all companies/products can be started with an oily rag. Many of the best companies we see in our sector are drive by entrepreneurs that are able to marshall significant resources before they build.

<comment><USER10> Which sector?

<comment><USER9> Ag and food tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few things:

1\. A lot of advice on here is "Don't raise, just bootstrap". Recognize that while bootstrapping is an option, it puts 100% of both upside and downside risk on you. If your business does well, great! If it doesn't, it's all on you. You've invested (and lost) your own money. Seed funding allows you to hedge that. If the business does well, your investors get x%, but x is generally fair. If it doesn't do well (and most don't statistically), both you and your investors share in the hit.

2\. You've said "someone with a product". How's traction and adoption for that product? Do you have users? Are they paying you? What's your current growth rate? If you have strong answers to these questions, don't be shy about reaching out directly to investors. Warm intros are preferred by investors (hell, by anyone), but investors are in the business of making investments. If you have a solid company, you'll get a meeting.

3\. Network like your life depends on it. No elite connections? Start making some connections. Go to a conference or a meetup. Are there any accelerators in your area? (e.g., I'm in Toronto and we have MarsDD and CDL here). Get known in your community. Talk to other entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, for the most part, like to pay it forward. They asked for intros when they were new and they're generally happy to do the same for newcomers. If you network well, you can expect to meet with 50+ investors over a period of 2 - 3 months.

<comment><USER6> I bootstrapped a business I exited. Would never do it again. There is a reason most of the world, where bootstrapping is the only option, doesn't look like Silicon Valley. Venture capital is a big piece of that.

<comment><USER12> That makes sense if you think a world looking like Silicon Valley is a positive thing; you do, I do not. I am happy most of the world doesn't look like Silicon Valley or, in most cases, even remotely like it.

<comment><USER13> Can you elaborate on why you think that way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To raise you have to talk to lots and lots of people.

To build a company you have to talk to lots and lots and lots of people.

So one reason funders try to make it hard to talk to them is to see if you can grind out all the conversations you're going to have to have with people that you have no connection to. Hire staff, lease buildings, sell products, get more investors, get accountants/lawyers/bankers, develop channel and consulting relationships....

So make connections with people. Get to know your local angel community (whether or not they write actual checks there are people who think they are angels), find people from your school or area that have built a company, find people that are in your space (customers, competitors, experts...). Meetups, conferences, twitter, hn, slack channels, youtube+++

I know a firm that got a capital markets fintech funded by pitching a commercial real estate investment firm (who bought strip malls and such) and getting $5MM from them. Not someone who would be in your top 1000 prospects but it worked and it was all just from talking to lots and lots and lots of people.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you decide you really need funding, talk to everyone and everyone they know.

A guy I had met a few times before asked me for some advice about an offer he had from a start-up. At the end of our conversation, I mentioned to him that we were raising a round of financing and were looking for introductions to angel investors.

This guy is not an "elite connection", but he mentioned that he did know a guy who had invested in a start-up and offered to do an introduction.

I met his contact for coffee a few days later and he brought on a few of his other friends and contacts and we closed a seed round.

I learned in the process that you may not be looking for "elite connections". Our investors are not flashy "elite" types, they are hard-working people who have managed their money wisely. They don't have the net worth to invest as an LP, so they invest as angels.

That to me was an interesting realization, that most angels aren't the ones who have made it to the top, but rather they are still in the fight, and managing their risk trying to get to the next level.

They are also keen to offer their help and advice.

</comment><comment><USER16> What would you like to raise money for?

HN has plenty of people that invest in seed rounds, use the opportunity to pitch them directly by putting what it is that you are doing and how much you are looking to raise right here. Also, if you mail me your deck (assuming you have any) I will look it over and pass it on to parties that may be interested.

<comment><USER17> Is there a good way to message people on HN or let them know your interest in them investing?

<comment><USER18> Try to look for their email on the profile, and if that fails, give them the yours (it can be a temporary one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My product is a business management platform for a niche industry (pet care). Think CRM+POS+ERP.

We tried the traditional VC route to no avail. The niche was too small for the big players.

We ended up finding a bigger player within our industry who had some cash to invest. He got the product his business needed and earned some interest in the process.

Just my 2c. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER20> Two ways:-

1)Ask. Ask everyone. Tell them what you are doing. Take their feedback. Good or bad. Improve your idea and update the person who made the suggestion.

And be ready for rejection. 99% will say no. Thank them for listening. You just need 1-2 investors to say yes.

2) Focus on a few people you think will be a good match. Really understand what their ideas are and how they see the world. Find a way to meet them and show them how what you are doing fits their ideology. Easier said than done. But very effective if done right. Lots of work involved in preparation.

</comment><comment><USER21> The answer is: make elite connections. It's entirely possible for someone with something real to offer but no other connections.

It's a bit like saying, "How do I become a basketball player?" Answer: get a ball and start practicing. Sure, it's easier if you're 7 feet tall, and raising a seed riju is easier if your last name is Rockefeller. But you can get a long way on your own.

</comment><comment><USER22> You might want to put some contact information in your HN profile so investors can get in contact with you.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also contract work in the market you want to approach might bring you the connections for seed funding.

<comment> sjm-lbm Or even just contract work in general. Lots of code needs to be written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Aren't there brokers to acquaint you with investors? Scratch that - you need to be an evangelist for what you're selling and try your f-ing hardest to gain traction with customers - the angels will then start showing up.

</comment><comment><USER25> There are a lot of assets that you can bring to raising a seed round, and "elite connections" is only one of many. Others include: a great dream, a great team, a working proof of concept, a working MVP, customer validation, and customer traction.

I've been a founder at two companies that raised unusually large A rounds. In both cases, it was because we had an experienced founding team. One was stuffed with folks with "elite connections", one was not. In both cases, seed was no problem even though we didn't have even a proof of concept.

</comment><comment><USER26> The real answer is that you need to get your product noticed by having spectacular growth. If you have that, no one will care what your background or connections are.

<comment><USER27> Only a small fraction of the products got that. Almost no product is getting organic spectacular growth. We overly remember the ones that do, but I would say 99% of the products are being created and funded without anyone knowing about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> it's so true that SV is missing out on so many talents because they didn't graduate from Stanford and don't attend cocktails parties in SF

</comment><comment><USER29> _How can someone with a product but no elite connections or degree raise a seed round ?_

Isn't that what kickstarter is for?

</comment><comment><USER30> Empirically, at least among people I've met, what seems to work best is partnering with another person who does have elite connections. Of course, it's true that it might be hard to find such a person. But you only have to find one, rather than already having a whole elite social network.

</comment><comment><USER31> Grants, friends and family, network to find one or two individuals, bootstrap. These seem to be the realistic options if you're not exposed to VC (if you even want VC).

The problem is how to do all that on top of everything else when there are only 7 days in the week.

</comment><comment><USER32> you could bootstrap instead. literally and figuratively beat the pavement to move your product.

</comment><comment><USER33> Incubators, startup battlefields can be a good place to start

</comment><comment><USER34> have you considered fundraising on an investment platform that operates under Regulation Crowdfunding and allows all of your non elite connections (and everyone else out there) to invest? Check sizes can be small and it gets the word out there and drives demand for your business while fundraising. Lots of platforms out there, Republic spun out of AngelList and does that for example.

</comment><comment><USER35> Being in the Bay Area is a big advantage.

</comment><comment><USER36> Have something actually worth investing in, and pitched well, with a capable team ready to execute.

</comment><comment><USER37> Go to where the money is. The Bay.

</comment><comment><USER38> Angellist is an option.

<comment><USER39> Angel List has _never_ been an option. You still need, and always have needed, "warm introductions" from other connected people to gain even a modicum of interest. It's effectively Facebook for the already-connected.

As others in this thread have pointed out, just bootstrap. It's what we did, and as a consequence we don't answer to any of the rent-seeking parasites of the finance world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Apply to ycombinator?

</comment><comment><USER41> product traction

</comment><comment><USER42> Try to make elite connections by attending to important events and if you're without a degree, enroll your team in a online degree</comment>