Picture source: official
On April 18, the 14th Beijing International Film Festival officially opened. Among them, the 4k restored version of the Hong Kong film "Plan A", jointly produced by China Film Archive, Douyin and Volcano Engine, and the world premiere of "" were selected into the "Tribute·Restored" unit and were released on April 18, Screening on the 19th.
"a plan " is directed and acted by Jackie Chan , and is his early masterpiece of stunt comedy; "The Affair" is Xu's satirical comedy directed by Xu Guanwen and co-starring the three brothers Xu Guanwen, Xu Guanying and Xu Guanjie. The two movies were released in 1983 and 1978 respectively, more than 40 years ago, and they laid a certain foundation for the peak of Hong Kong comedy.
The restoration and screening of two old Hong Kong films is a continuation of the previous "Classic Hong Kong Film Restoration Project". In August 2023, the China Film Archive, Douyin and Volcano Engine jointly launched the "Classic Hong Kong Movie Restoration Project" and announced that 100 Hong Kong movies will be restored in 4k.
"Plan A" and "The Pledge of Allegiance" were re-screened in 4K high-definition in the "Tribute and Restoration" section of the Beijing Film Festival, which also benefited from the rapid progress of AI technology in recent years. According to the introduction of Volcano Engine, in the "Classic Hong Kong Movie Restoration Project", Volcano Engine applied AIGC technology to the restoration scene of old films for the first time. With the help of the powerful generation ability of large visual models and rich prior knowledge, the restoration effect was achieved in clarity. , color, fluency, and defect elimination.
According to the official introduction of the Beijing International Film Festival, the digitization and restoration of the "Plan A" film will be completed in 2024. The film restoration work was completed by the Digital Restoration Laboratory of the China Film Archive in cooperation with Douyin and Huoshan Engine. The original filming negatives of the film were scanned in 4k format in Hong Kong using an arriscan scanner. The sound restoration was derived from the saved 35mm sound mix of the film.
According to public information, the film restoration process is complicated and trivial, and it takes an experienced restorer one month to complete a film. In recent years, through deep learning and other AI technologies, it has become possible to significantly improve the quality and efficiency of old film restoration.
movie "Plan A", before repair vs after repair
"On the one hand, the large model generation ability is strong. With the help of stable diffusion large model generation ability, the repair effect is better than the previous algorithm, and the picture details are more natural; on the other hand, the large model generation ability is strong. The model has very strong information structuring capabilities. After learning massive data pairs, it can extract a large amount of knowledge and "store" it in the model parameters. Its generation space is richer and can handle more repair scenarios. "Introduced by Wang Yue, Director of Technical Architecture of Volcano Engine Video Cloud.
Volcano Engine is a cloud service platform owned by ByteDance. It has worked with Xigua Video and Douyin to complete 4K restoration of 100 domestic classic animations and beyond classic concerts. The stable diffusion mentioned by Wang Yue is currently the most popular Vincent diagram AIGC model, and it is an open source project.
Ma Kede, assistant professor of the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong, said during the screening of other restored movies last year that the current rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has shown great potential. In the future, not only the problem of out-of-synchronization of audio and video in some old movies will be solved by aigc Get a more effective solution, and it is even expected that AI will learn to automatically judge the repair effect.
