Daily Archives:January 9th, 2021

Fireworks of the Future

I missed this at the time, but there was a lovely presentation put together for the Hogmanay New Year’s Celebrations in Edinburgh, using a swarm of drones carrying lights.

A short summary video is here:

but it is really worth watching the full presentation, which you can find here, with music and narration.

You don’t want to think too much about the fact that the effect was really only visible from one location, or that they weren’t allowed actually to film the Edinburgh scenes over the city so they had to do it in a remote bit of the Highlands and overlay it on images of the Edinburgh skyline… It’s still a lovely combination of software, hardware and poetry.

P.S. It turns out that there have been quite a few of these type of displays in recent months, if you search YouTube for ‘drone light show’. But most of them aren’t narrated by David Tennant 🙂

Artificial History?

Here are some lovely examples of what can be achieved with a combination of technological prowess and human patience. Denis Shiryaev takes old, noisy, shaky black and white videos, and adds stabilisation, resolution enhancement, facial feature enhancement and some light colourisation. Then he adds sound. This is far from a fully-automatic process: he takes weeks over each one, but without the help of neural networks, it would take months or years if it were even possible.

Here’s a collection of old Lumière Brothers’ films that have had his treatment. Even though, by modern YouTube standards, almost nothing happens in them, I found them surprisingly compelling, yet also calming.

Oh, and this, though less convincing, is also fun:

More information on his YouTube channel and at his new company site.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser