Tool that allows AI-powered colorisation of B&W videos

https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/VideoColorizerColab.ipynb

Found this through another forum I'm in. What do you want to use it on?

Fascinating, but it looks like it requires the video to be uploaded to youtube first?

Yes.

If you install the github and run it on python (I use Anaconda) you can use your local files. I've done several colorizations of mp4 files (mainly old Finnish films).
However, let me just say that getting that thing to run on a Windows 10 pc took me several hours of tweaks to the environment.yml file (and I am not an expert on Python!).
If you can give me tips to what would be a fun Queen related thing to colour, I could perhaps find time to process it.
One hour takes about 12 hours on my current gaming laptop to process.

However, please consider that the results are not always brilliant.
Here's my youtube channel with several deoldify clips I've processed...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPMtq2eg98bgIxvV9MKWhw

To be fair It Looks to be on par with the early 1980's film colorizations.

I was thinking about trying this on the Bob Harris footage. In the case any of you don't know Chinwonder is now in the general forum trying to compile all of the short clips of the Bob Harris 77 footage from all TV shows and documentaries, I was thinking if any of the black and white footage could be colorized using this method.

Unfortunately I had some serious problems trying to install Python on my machine (Win 8.1) in the past, so I'm not sure if it's worth trying for me

Thanks pittrek, I'll look around the general board. If I manage to download something in decent quality, I'll run a 1 minute clip as a test (that won't take too long).

Fantastic! http://www.queenzone.com/forums/1590247/bob-harris-news-of-the-world-ogwt-documentary-compilation-updated.aspx?page=7

I'll have a test clip on youtube in a few hours (if I don't fall asleep). Can't wait to see if the Red Special is red, could be anything since it's AI and deep-learning...

I maintained the original quality, but not sure about youtube (is it 360p for everyone now?). Note the DeOldify watermark at the bottom of the screen. The clip I used was a moderately difficult clip with plenty of dim lit rooms etc.

It's amazing that this can be done with AI these days, but in all honesty I'm not sure it adds anything to the footage.

The skintones look great, but the studio not so much

They recorded in such dim lighting in those days. The colorization makes the skintones good and the background really orangey. I agree that it doesn't add too much to the original footage. Thank you for trying it out. :)

It was certainly worth trying it out as there are some frames that look really nice.


I'm wondering if we can combine this with some hand rotoscope masking to make it look better and make the process shorter overall?

The answer to my own question is yes, it can help speed up hand colorization. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TWF7ql1Y_Y