Time: It depends on the quality you want your output to be. The colorization was done with DeOldify at a render factor of 38 (maximum is 40). The bigger the value the more time it takes but the colors are more precise. This 3 minute clip took about 50 minutes to colorize. So the full movie would take about 75 hours to colorize. The upscaling is also slow, it took a little over an hour to upscale from 480p to 4k. So it would take roughly 90 hours to upscale. Effort: The machine does all the work, so you would only have to wait. I am using two simple products. For the upscaling is a commercial product you buy and where you put your video and click process and that's it. The colorization algorithm is open source and I applied it through Colab where you only have to provide a link and you don't need to train nor code anything. You would of course get better results with a trained algorithm specific for this movie, and that would take some effort to do. Money: The electricity bill would be expensive I assume. And also the lawyer to fight for the movie rights would cost several million dollars. But of course it would be pretty easy for the production company to do. They would only need the servers from their VFX companies for a weekend and they would have the result pretty quick. And they would get even better results with the original scan, and with custom algorithms. I think in the near future we may start seeing repositions of silent classics colorized or restored in some way with this technology (if the purists don't object).
Never again such pristine timings. Thank you, CC.
How much time/effort/money would it take to do this to the whole movie?
Time: It depends on the quality you want your output to be. The colorization was done with DeOldify at a render factor of 38 (maximum is 40). The bigger the value the more time it takes but the colors are more precise. This 3 minute clip took about 50 minutes to colorize. So the full movie would take about 75 hours to colorize. The upscaling is also slow, it took a little over an hour to upscale from 480p to 4k. So it would take roughly 90 hours to upscale.
Effort: The machine does all the work, so you would only have to wait. I am using two simple products. For the upscaling is a commercial product you buy and where you put your video and click process and that's it. The colorization algorithm is open source and I applied it through Colab where you only have to provide a link and you don't need to train nor code anything. You would of course get better results with a trained algorithm specific for this movie, and that would take some effort to do.
Money: The electricity bill would be expensive I assume. And also the lawyer to fight for the movie rights would cost several million dollars.
But of course it would be pretty easy for the production company to do. They would only need the servers from their VFX companies for a weekend and they would have the result pretty quick. And they would get even better results with the original scan, and with custom algorithms. I think in the near future we may start seeing repositions of silent classics colorized or restored in some way with this technology (if the purists don't object).
I’m pretty sure this movie is in the public domain (or will be soon)
wow