Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Hu Chen
On October 20th, Watermelon Video and Volcano Engine held a "Rebuild the Old" classic Video 4K Restoration Conference in Beijing. Ren Lifeng, president of Watermelon Video, delivered a speech entitled "Brush away the dust left by time to memories". He said that in the next year, the two sides will jointly repair 100 classic animations.
Image source: Watermelon Video
The first partners in the restoration plan include CCTV Animation Group and Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio. Six works such as "The Legend of Nezha", "Hulu Brothers" and "Black Cat Sheriff" after 4K restoration have been launched on Watermelon Video. In the coming year, 4K restored versions of 100 cartoons, such as "Haha Mirror Flower Edge" and "Shuk and Beta", will also be launched on Watermelon Video.
4K fixes are not easy. Many old cartoons use film as a storage medium, which will cause problems such as fading, scratches, and noise due to the passage of time, and the repair process is complicated and trivial. Wu Yunyue, a restorer at Shanghai Film Studio, once said, "The resolution of 4K is as high as 4096*3112, and the workload is equivalent to 4 times that of 2K restoration." ”
Take the 4K restoration of "Hulu Brothers" as an example, the film is a combination of ink and paper cutting, the restoration work on the one hand to improve the clarity of the prospect, on the other hand, to take into account the artistic effect of ink, so that the landscape to maintain a hazy sense of art. In order to prevent "accidental injury" of artistic effects, the algorithm that eliminates defects usually does not set a high intensity, so some defects are missed and marked by manual assistance. For old films with serious damage, it takes a lot of manpower to completely eliminate flaws.
"Intelligent Processing" Technology Flow Chart Image Source: Volcano Engine
"Through technical means such as super resolution and intelligent interpolation, the video resolution and fluency of old films can be improved." Zhao Shijie, a researcher at the Volcano Engine Multimedia Laboratory, said that the volcano engine has an independent video quality evaluation system and customizes the restoration plan for each old film to achieve the best restoration effect.
In addition, some works also introduce artificial repair links, which are manually marked frame by frame and then repaired twice. Generally speaking, a 10-episode series of animation with a single episode of more than ten minutes has a total frame count of about 200,000, and the amount of repair is huge.
Volcano engine repair data shows that the algorithm can directly eliminate more than 95% of the flaws, and the rest should be supplemented by manual labeling, and then adjust the algorithm to do secondary optimization. In the process of eliminating flaws in "Hulu Brothers", the designers saw 200,000 frames of the picture.
At the press conference, Watermelon Video said that it will open the entrance and provide free AI repair support for ordinary users; at the same time, it will also provide in-depth public welfare repair for valuable videos.
"Classic works embody the wisdom and spirit of old artists, and it is worth investing a lot of effort to repair." Ren Lifeng said that whether it is repairing cartoons or repairing old images in the home, behind it is to repair the memories of the past, in order to present the resonance and sparks of generations because of these memories.
It is worth mentioning that for the restoration of classic cartoons, Watermelon Video is not the first in the industry. In May last year, Youku carried out high-definition restorations around a number of domestic classic cartoons, and launched nearly 50 films of about 700 episodes before June 1. Many classic domestic cartoons such as "Hulu Brothers", "Black Cat Sheriff", "Shuk and Beta", "Haunting the Heavenly Palace" and many other classic domestic cartoons that were once the childhood memories of a generation were launched in high definition, attracting many "big children" to watch.
Among them, "Black Cat Sheriff", which was broadcast in 1984, is still hot after hd restoration. This classic cartoon from nearly 40 years ago, after time erosion, noise and jitter have been very obvious, but after high-definition repair, the picture quality has also been improved from the initial standard definition to Blu-ray 1080P, which greatly enhances the viewing experience of netizens and allows 8090 to immerse themselves in "childhood killing".