It would be great to take B&W films and add some kind of color effect…just if you get normal skin tones…the rest does not matter as much.
That would be a great model to have.
There are numerous software solutions out there that do this.
Just dont expect great results if your source is poor.
I would really like to see Topaz offer AI colorization software, either as a separate program or an “add-on” to VEAI. I recently tried (via trial) a commercial “AI” colorization software and the results were quite subpar. The software took forever and the results were a sloppy, horrendous mess. I recently watched a short clip of a Full HD colorization of Casablanca that looked quite good. That kind of quality would be very welcome and I would have no problem paying a fair price for it.
There are so many good TV shows and movies that would benefit from colorization, which with the computing capability available today, should be so much better than it was years ago.
If Topaz is interested in doing software like this, I would be happy to sign up as a beta tester!
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Yeah I think getting skin tones is realistic. Most other colors would just be a guess.
Worse, you can’t easily train an AI model by converting color movies to black and white, because several movie sets and costumes were designed and colored to look good in black and white, but look out of place or incorrect in color. I could double check that, but I seem to remember reading that somewhere years ago.
If I were going to do it, I would start with something like the pilot episode of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, which was filmed in color but shown in black and white, see if the AI could ‘learn’ from that. And from the 2nd and subsequent seasons which were filmed and shown in color. See what it could do on the first season and go from there. Lots of other mid-60s TV shows in similar situations, Wild Wild West, Man From UNCLE, Lost In Space…I think even Gilligan’s Island and the Beverly Hillbillies had some early seasons in B&W and later seasons in color. If the software could “learn” from the color episodes and apply properly to the B&W episodes…you might have something there. I agree that getting skin tones right is important. The other stuff – I would not care about (perceived) accuracy as much as consistency. I would want to see the same “color” applied to the same outfit without significant variation from scene to scene. There are so many good “old” shows and movies in B&W that would get new life with color applied. And, I would think that such software could possibly be used to “correct” color with faded or damaged films.
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Please consider adding a “Video Stable(no flickering) Colorize” model for black and white films.
You can take a look at the code from GitHub - jantic/DeOldify: A Deep Learning based project for colorizing and restoring old images (and video!)
Or even get a licence for commercial usage of DeOldify and integrate it with VEAI.
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In addition, colourise.sg has a better effect. This Singaporean style is more suitable for the coloring of old black and white photos in Asia. If possible, please add this model, of course, models with other regional styles are also worth looking forward to
This is an interesting idea for old footage.
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I think VEAI could significantly improve on DeOldify which is an ok colorizer but not at all great yet.
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I agree, the current model for DeOldify has some nasty artifacts when the program attempts to colorize the sky in a video around silhouettes of people. A halo forms and it’s quite annoying. The Google Colab notebook UI is extremely hard to learn and requires the user to have internet access, I’m also pretty sure it can only download YouTube videos and colorize them, I don’t think it’s possible to load local files into it. It would be really cool to have it built into VEAI.
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VEAI is one of the most used programs for restoring old films from what I can tell. It also is the only frame interpolator that I know of that is actually easy to get a hold of and then actually works. DAIN app is one of the most popular interpolators but it just will not work because of lack of VRAM on most machines (it takes a tremendous amount of memory from what I can tell).
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BLACK & WHITE FOOTAGE
I came accross this problem with the On The Buses TV series.
On some of the Black & White episodes there is a rainbow coloring effect that is
very off putting. So i needed to remove it…Nothing in TOPAZ to do that.
In this case MKV encoding was not possible…I used Handbrake, it has a
Greyscale (Black & White) output setting…Check out the stills…I Also used to other filters…See the stills.
Now i can input into TOPAZ With The Interlaced Setting, This remove any lines left behind by Handbrake.
This would be a great feature request, would you mind if I moved it to the Idea’s forum? Or is the rainbow effect being introduced by TVAI?
Yes…Move it if you want.
Hello,
There is nothing quite like Topaz imo. My question is, will an AI Colouriser model ever be added? It seems to be the only thing that other AI video suites have, that Topaz does not. I would then happily pay the update fee too and I imagine many others would too. I know there are other options out there, but Topaz could easily be the best all in one out there.
Thanks.
