Time travel back 122 years to the Charles River, Boston, Mass c.1904. Dozens of canoes filled with young women and men on a summer outing. Enhanced and colorized to an amazing 4K 60fps with added sound.
Cameraman, Edwin S. Porter. Filmed July 18, 1904 in Boston, Massachusetts.
The presence on the canoes of early gramophones is priceless, so I added a little appropriate music from the era.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century recreational canoeing was Boston’s hottest leisure time activity. In the long winding Charles river, young couples took advantage of the privacy for a little romancing.
In 1903, the Metropolitan Park Commission, expressly forbade kissing or "canoodling." This meant couples could not kiss or even lie down in their canoes. In this film folks are happily ignoring this rule. From 1903 to 1905 37 couples were arrested. After boathouse owners reported a 50 percent loss of business, the ban was relaxed and romance returned to the canoes.


The AI Film Restoration Process:
I take early fragments of silent 16fps footage and restore them to life by a combination of manual frame by frame colorization as well as the use of deep exemplar-based video colorization techniques. The footage is upscaled and the original frame rate is interpolated from 16 fps to a higher frame rate - in this case to 120 fps.
Finally I produced a soundtrack which helps build a new immersive experience for the viewer.
Together, these processes revive old fragments of footage, offering audiences a more
vivid and engaging glimpse of lives long since lived in the distant past.


The colorization process used Deep exemplar-based Video colorization.
[ Ссылка ]

Original footage:
Porter, Edwin S., Camera, Inc Thomas A. Edison, and Paper Print Collection. Canoeing on the Charles River, Boston, Mass. United States: Thomas A. Edison, Inc, 1904. Video. [ Ссылка ]

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