Is restoring and colorizing old films with Artificial Intelligence acceptable to historians? 

*If you want to know more about the latest video colorization techniques then watch this video on my other channel* : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AZvFAsuo3G4.html *If you don't like technical and/or analytical stuff then please do not watch this video. No need to click on the thumbs-down button* . Just skip this upload and come back next time to view more historic footage. Thank you very much. *By all means DO SHARE YOUR VIEWS on this topic with us* ! Just to add that in no way are we deterred from continuing to use A.I. to enhance, restore and colorize old film footage. Nevertheless, it is always good to take a helicopter view to analyse all the ins- and outs, pro's and con's plus positive or negative opinions about the use of very new, ground breaking technologies. Just to emphasize that the main point I am trying to make is that film archives, who are sitting on loads of great historic material, don't like or even refuse to enhance or restore old film simply because it would not be "historically correct". They just sit back, do nothing and in stead keep spreading low, even pathetic quality material on their websites. They don't seem to realize that the overall majority of "normal" viewers would love to see these films in the best possible quality. Purist historians are a minority but their attitude seems to block almost any film restoration project. At least channels like mine can try to fill these gaps.

As long as the original films are preserved, enhancements are welcome. The originals are history. All history must be preserved for present and future generations.

I feel that the enhancements really add to it. I adore how it brings everything to life, and makes it so much more real. Truth is, I might watch them without the enhancements ,but I wouldn't love them as much and, might lose interest in time. Please don't stop making the enhanced versions.

I love colorizing! It’s not like you’ve destroyed the black and white originals. People can enjoy both!

I've been here since before black and white sinking in some of that old Dutch feeling, but I think the AI coloring is wonderful and adds a lot more 'life' into the footage. For historic preservation purposes, sure, I can see why some banal historians would want the originals, but those are well preserved as they are.

Historians should refer to the original only. As long as the original does not get tampered with, and the AI version is marked as such, there should be no discussion. If the goal of studying the images is historic understanding, then the original footage should be used.

Unless someone intentionally tries to make the footage misleading in some way, say by deliberately miscoloring some important aspect of a scene (a flag, a logo, etc.) I don't think there should be concern. As others have mentioned, the original footage is still available. As long as that is the case, then more power to you and everyone else doing this near-magic on these fantastic old scenes!

Hi Rick, even though I know these types of videos probably get significantly less views than your standard uploads, I find them very interesting and informative. Thank you for taking time to give us some background on the topic and for sharing your own well-informed opinions. I appreciate your willingness to be aware of and open--mind to outside opinions on the value and veracity of your work.

Thanks for sharing the background technology of this process, very interesting, to me about as interesting as the final result. Dankjewel !!

I like it. It makes it look like you’re actually there instead of learning about something that doesn’t exist anymore.

Love your content and look forward to more! Useful in showing my kids the past where our roots came from too 👍🏼thank you

Fantastic work as always, and really good insight into the problem. Thank you!

Thank you for all truly thought-provoking analysis. Much more to what you do than meets the eye.

Great video Rick, any restoration has got to be a good thing, preserving old footage for future generations to watch, personally I think it's amazing 👌👍😀

I just subscribed. I think you're doing a great service. Thank you!

I think it helps modern day people connect more with the past. I frequently restore and colorize old family films, and can see peoples actual reactions to seeing their own family history.

I love this Chanel. Please go on!

Rick, bedankt voor al je werk en zeker deze ophelderende video kan ik waarderen. Toevallig volgde ik Two Minute Papers ook al! Ik sta er vaak verstelt van. Je Engels is overigens ook buitengewoon goed, chapeau. Ik ben blij dat er mensen de vraag stellen of iets ethisch wel de juiste kant op gaat. Dat gezegd hebbende; alle punten die jij maakt klinken mij heel juist in de oren en je lijkt me ook iemand die liefde heeft voor historie. Hopelijk krijg je geen ongegronde tegengas want ook ik ben erg blij met jou producties.

Let these tool developments continue. Just make sure you keep the original, and a copy of every step along the way. Great job!

I find that stabilizing film, reducing the flicker. removing grain and colorizing adds so much to old film that makes it look amazing if the film scan or transfer is of high quality (4k)

Very good to address this topic and shed a light on the several views vs the pros and cons.

Wonderful to hear your voice, Rick. Much love from Rotterdam.

I love it and watch all of them more than once. It gives you a feeling as if you are in a time machine and wish you can import yourself to those times. You wsh you could talk to the people and experience their moments knowing that they do not not exist anymore. Excellemt and I could careless about the ways and means to create these stunning images. Thank you very much for the creators and hope you continue your excellent presentations of periods now gone forever.

Excellent channel, thanks a lot for those footage

What a great video, thanks so much for your effort to inform us viewers and your critical analysis!

Beautiful work. The restoration of the films can never replace the value of the original tapes, but they are a valuable tool to better appreciate the past.

Boris was extremely accurate 🤣

Met veel interesse deze video bekeken. Als Amsterdammer spreken mij natuurlijk de Amsterdamse films het meeste aan. De stabiele beelden en de toevoeging van kleur zijn een grote meerwaarde. Deze wijze voorop u deze films verbeterd hebt is in mijn opinie bewonderenswaardig. Ga zo door . . .

That analysis was excellent. Thank you.

Worst case is that the original is lost or buried among enhanced versions and then the twitter audience bases their understanding of events on some detail that an AI made up.

Hi, I’m Dutch but have lived in the USA for the past 30 yrs. I was born in Soest and I was very pleasantly surprised that you used images of the Soester Natuurbad in the first two minutes, which does not exist anymore (now there’s a hotel there 😢). I swam there a lot as a kid and teenager with my friends. Nice to see it again, and thank you for using that!! 😀👍🧡

Thank you for theze great films. No need to take in consideration the opinions of historians that don't appreciate your skillfully restored films. Just keep up the good work.

You are doing a wonderful job! Please continue, don’t let the political correct ones ruin your work.

May I say well done and great work :) loving what your doing here and keep up the good work. I will be checking out all of the videos as I find this fascinating :)

The animated photo of Boris Johnson 8:44 looks just like a normal video closeup of him...😆 This is a fantastic video. Really enjoyed hearing you explain the process and the ethics behind restoration. Keep up the great work. 😁👍

Thank you for this thoughtful exploration.

CARUSO Geweldig!!! Bedankt mijnheer.

It's wonderful to watch , bringing it to life.keep it up.

Thank you so much for your efforts

Cave paintings, the 1st documentaries, were usually in color. An educated guess is better than a shade of grey.

I like the enhancing and colorizing because it makes things more approachable. We should keep the originals for the historians, but encourage making things for the mass market so that people get interested in history

Awesome work ...... So many old b/w films NEED this! Love it, brings life to history... it was never b/w.

I remember hearing or reading somewhere that after Steven Spielberg made the movie "schlindler's List" in black and white, his father said something like "I was there and it happened in color".

It brings these old films to life. Thanks.

Keep up the good work

Zeer verhelderd en leerrijk voor iedereen en ook voor zogenaamde historici.

The most humans who grew up with color television have difficulties with watching black and white movies, like me Colorizing those video's make the video's more alive and specially with old war footage colorizing make them more easy to watch and understand what the video's are showing Your channel does a great job with this!

It all needs to be digitized anyway. After that is done, anything goes. The historians can study the wobbly black and white and us regular folks can enjoy the nice colour job.

I used to work at Colorization in Toronto as a ‘tracker’. Anyone else? Interesting video. I think the process today, using AI with human augmented correction can be very valuable.

They don’t want people to see how beautiful the past was

I like it when short fragments of original footage are added to a restored film. This way you can see what the effect is and continue to add value to the original. Naturally, all original images must be preserved and accessible for the sake of their historical value.

Fascinating , thank you

enhancement is the next step in education and preservation of history.

Thanks what an interesting lesson in your craft.

Oh, what a fascinating video, thank you for taking the time to make it, but in reference to AI learning (to accurately reflect the context correctly), I suppose it needs to be given a thorough walk-through of the whole of Human history as far back as the earliest films eh ? Whew !

As long as it does not change what was originally on the film. It certainly brings the past closer. As long as it's the intention to improve the original i see no problem. If science wants to study films let them study the original. Love your channel btw.

Appreciate all the work you bring into those videos. I also like how you've recently started to incorporate more period-accurate backing music instead of the hollywood-esque "inspirational" music, which at times is a bit too melodramatic for my tastes.

Absolutely fascinating

Both qualified as a historian and a marine engineer in steam (I did my undergraduate thesis on steam tugs). I showed the Rotterdam dock/steam tugs video to some tug skippers and marine engineers - They were blown away and we saw a lot of extra detail like the current catching the extra underwater area of the semi-submerged dock and the tugs struggling to pull the dock around before it would have swept into the bridge supports.

I think original b&w footage also doesn't capture things 100% accurately , so it always has been just an impression of what something looked like.

As long as the original and authentic media is saved and public, anything afterwards is fair game. Colorization, and audio additions are fine as long as new research updates the media to make it more authentic. And image stabilization and speed adjustement makes it as if you were there.

I think your AI is brilliant. Certainly got me looking at more history. Dont think i will look at any BW film again after discovering yours and a few others brilliant work. Brings the past up to the present. Thanks

It’s not the same as restoring an old master painting where there is only one original and the restorer must alter or add to it. It’s not a zero sum game. We can have our cake and eat it. Historians can study original archive footage, the public can watch the AI restored and enhanced versions. The reality is that FAR more people, millions more, will view enhanced footage, enjoy it, learn from it, empathise with it, discuss it and share it and thus preserve living history this way than if only silent, shaky, foggy, erratically flickering scenes are available. That can only be a good thing. The alternative is these old films will become the preserve of a tiny coterie of specialists. Let’s not be snobs about it.

No, please. B & W actually ADDS a flavor, emphasizing more than just a historical background personna to a documentary and those PEOPLE CONTA8NED THEREIN. We lived our lives in basic black, clothing mostly drab for the masses, our cars were black in the beginning production years. Our photo albums were B & W the first hundred years or so. B&W puts a stamp of validity on WW War Doc7mentaries, right and wrong, us and them, tyranny and freedom, YES EVEN black and white were/was more clear. Just preserve the originals. Colorized prints are welcome of course. Thank for listening. Good work !!!

This is a very well thought out and important video. Thank you for making it. A few random points that occur to me: 1. The original footage should never be destroyed, and should whenever possible be easily available to the researcher (or even the casual viewer) for comparison. Of course if the new work is based on copyrighted original footage the byzantine copyright laws of various countries may make access to the original impossible for a viewer of the new work. But if the new work in based on a freely available older work, there should be some method easily accessible from the new work's sideband information to find the original work(s). An example of this occurred on an old film you recently enhanced. The frame interpolation tends to lose fine detail. In this case, the overhead wires, support structures, and sometimes even the support poles for the streetcar power wires were lost. In fact even the trolley poles on the streetcars were lost in all but a few frames. This led to some deluded soul claiming that the 100 year old streetcars were powered by some magical "Tesla batteries" that the oil interests had suppressed. Argument of fact with this individual proved useless, and I was unable to point him to the original footage that would have clearly shown the wires, as there was no citation of this footage in the video description. 2. Motion stabilization and frame rate enhancement (combined) is generally a good thing for all the reasons you stated in the video. Currently though it has some drawbacks. One is the loss of fine detail mentioned above. Another is along the lines of creating fantasies: the AI software will pick some detail (such as part of a face) from a single frame, and then use that fragment of an image unchanged through possibly many seconds if subsequent motion frames. At full speed this can look OK, but it can also look strange. Since the detail the AI captures can be part of both the foreground and background of the image, this can result in inappropriate bits of background being pasted into other locations in subsequent frames. A third problem is that the AI may see a sign with wording that is readable in many frames, but pick an enhanced (and unreadable) version of some blurred frame, and replace the readable text in subsequent frames. I see this frequently when film from a moving video passes a road sign or billboard. 3. A couple of decades back I was sitting around at a Hollywood SMPTE section meeting having a discussion with a couple of other people. They were arguing vehemently against colorization as being historically inaccurate. Of course 20 years ago a lot of colorization was awful, so there was some reason to complain. I argued that it served a useful purpose of making old movies more accessible to modern audiences that had not developed the learned ability to easily watch B&W footage and enjoy the process. This still didn't do much to convince them against their argument. At the time of this discussion, there was a lot of interest in professional circles for 3D movies. As devil's advocate, I asked them to ponder this question: In say 30 years, all the movie houses will be showing movies in 3D, and the home television will also. Everything new will be shot in 3D, including the nightly news. Everyone will be used to seeing things in 3D, and seeing a "flat" picture will seem unnatural. What then will they say about people that want to not only colorize old B&W footage, but convert it into 3D so that new viewers will find it acceptable? They did not have a good answer to this scenario. 4. One point that you missed in your discussion was sound. From casual observation of RU-vid comments in channels that do historical film preservation, modern viewers are very uncomfortable with silent video, often claiming that "the soundtrack is missing", or accusing the poster of censoring the video by deliberately removing the soundtrack. Of course you do a very good job of adding appropriate music to your restored (if that is the correct word) videos. Guy Jones does an excellent job of putting realistic stereo sound effects on the motion stabilized videos he posts from time to time. This should also be a concern for historians, since historically non-original sounds have been added to make the image seem acceptably real to the modern audience. 5. Real historians should probably see both the enhanced version and the original version. The motion stabilization and interpolation can bring out details that will be completely missed in the original, even though they clearly are there, and might be important to historical interpretation of the video, area, or period. I have noticed this a number of times where watching some AI version of a film and then doing a frame by frame comparison with the original, I realize the AI brought out some important detail of the original that my eyes glossed over, even while staring at a single still frame of the original. But having seen the (usually distorted) version in the AI, I can then easily pick out the detail in the original. 6. On your point that film archives sit on old stuff and put it out in the worst possible resolution if they put out anything at all, I think this is related to copyright (and money), to a belief that people wanting to view the stuff should show up at the archive in person during business hours (with an appropriate "researchers id card"), and also to the belief that non-researchers do not deserve access to the pristine images. They would most likely never do colorization or AI, and perhaps should not, but they should at least release more than tiny clips of longer works, and in resolutions greater than 320x200, or perhaps the exceedingly generous 640x400 formats.

The issue surely is labelling? If you take old footage and process it, then it should be a requirement that you make it crystal clear, via bookended captions and metadata, that this has been done and that what the viewer sees is a representation of the original which may have key differences. If the film is just a basic cleaned up version of the original, then that too should be labelled as such. Footage which is purely AI hallucinated (as in your examples here of Abraham Lincoln and Enrico Caruso etc) should be clearly labelled "AI Generated". It somewhat akin to the old "What you are about to see is a dramatisation of..." versus "This is actual footage of..." captioning. Of course there will always be edge cases and grey areas to deal with.

The main reason for me watching these video's, is *because* they are restored/colorized. Black & White footage gives me a bit of a "distance" feeling, which causes me losing all interest in watching it, I know, it sounds very strange but it's true.

As long as you don't take credit for the filming, and do it respectfully, especially knowing the limitations of the technology. Its not true colour, its "helping colour". Helping people to see what it could have been like - your imagination can fill in the rest. Look forward to seeing more.

My biggest gripe with it is these days the saturation of these videos, its so hard to find the originals in black and white which 99% of the time look better than the lazy inaccurate colourisation by AI. I originally thought it was so cool, but the novelty has worn off and the technology hasn’t really visibly improved, not substantially, and it looks tacky

First thank you very much for this incredible work. For the first time I look at those old films with a lot of interest and emotion. They are not boring and I enjoy all of them. Now to answer your question on the "acceptability", in my humble opinion we can split the public in a simple way into two categories: The first category are made of professionals like historians of our civilization but also those that study the history and techniques of photography and film. For them maybe touching the original film apart from having an identical copy for preservation would be unacceptable. Maybe the historians studying the human civilizations would accept the bare minimum to have the existing information that cannot be seen to become visible and be revealed but no more that that. The second and most common category is made of viewers like me who look at the film just to travel in time and have the pleasure and emotion to feel connected to that past which can be also part of the viewers personal past. Many of the very old original films when viewed as is, in stock mode, just do not create much of an emotion, they feel as if they were coming from another dimension, with humans that are not real humans but kind of puppets ore some artificial beings. We can do an analogy about sophisticated humanoid robots that try to resemble as much as possible to humans and human faces but where our brain says it's something wrong and is even completely unpleasant. This is called the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. Those old unrestored films depict a world that is in the Uncanny Valley. With your work you have taken that past world out of the Uncanny Valley. This is why you got such a success in terms of audience. Your films become believable to us. We could be in there. Your film of Lausanne (an excerpt) was aired on the Swiss television during the evening news. To arise that emotion and feel that these are images from our same world, they need to be "restored" to a quality to whom our eyes of today are used to have. Our eyes are trained on perfect high resolution images on digital screens with excellent contrast, high dynamic range, color depth, and luminosity. This means that all the techniques that we can possibly apply to have stable, clean, color images and running at the natural speed in a stable mode, should be used. Improving lighting, contrast, sharpness is also very important too. This being said and for the future I am sure that we can go much more further in "restoration" level. One thing is to "restore" the information that exists, but I am even for going further where missing information is also added. This is not "restoration" but I would say "reconstruction". If a film surface scratch has deleted let's say some parts of an object, it is possible fill that missing pixels either by what is adjacent or from what we know of the object or by having those elements maybe visible some frames later maybe not exactly in the same aspect but allowing us to make a realistic reconstruction. This can go much improve even further the visual quality of the film. There is a limit however to this as we must not "invent" a complete object that just does not exist. "Reconstruction" means that maybe some parts of the picture will not be authentic but if this makes it more "lookable" as long as the fundamental elements of the scene and what the global information ("semantic" message) it conveys is not changed I am fine with it. Not to say that this kind of reconstruction work can be enormously time consuming as it probably cannot be automated by AI, and really is a frame per frame work.

I'm no engineer. Just a hobbyist photographer and history appreciator. There should be a new video format that preserves the original inside the enhanced version, just like PNG images does for raw photo data. Would be a bigger file for sure, but if the original would be zipped and needed to be unzipped by some software to read it, maybe it would be acceptable?

Very interesting, thank you. Personally, I don't mind, as those enhanced films are for my entertainment. I find the keeping safe of the original films more important than creating an "enhanced copy". To ensure proper working with the films, a marking for processed material is necessary, and should be included in the results. Thank you for your work, and the information of the background discussions.

mooi werk man!

I believe restoration/perservation is different than remastering. I certainly welcome the first two cause it's a reflection of how that piece of art looked at best and not modifying elements in it that already existed.

Restoration is not wrong as long as the original image remains unchanged. In colors does indeed give a different view of the film, but whether they are the original colors is also not certain. I think the technique is fantastic.

"At what level of accuracy will historians start to accept the output of colorization as suitably correct?" My guess would be none. There will probably always be some assumptions made about the b&w footage. If the colorized footage is labeled clearly as "approximate color as of December 2023," that may be the most one can hope for. The march of unearthing new facts about history goes on, so the colors used have the potential to shift as new data is unearthed. Just as you would not want an old history book, with inaccurate facts, to continue to be printed and sold, a historian would not want 12 different color versions of a piece of footage to be forever roaming around the internet. It would become another endless stream of fact-checking for someone. I very much enjoy seeing cleaned, stabilized, colorized pieces of footage. Having tried some of these techniques myself for old family video transfers, I applaud all the effort it takes to make this happen. Still, I have to remind myself that it is not the actual :"footage", so as to not fall into that trap.

It's important to always keep the original in it's highest possible quality archived and available and regard all enhanced versions as a temporary means to view the content. Technology changes so fast that the best results now are outdated a year from now. In the future these AI restorations can probably be applied in real-time on the original footage as if you were using some filter in your video player and parts can be switched on/off on demand. For historians there should be no problem as the original source footage should be archived to study. Enhanced content is great to offer a feel of an period in time beyond choppy grainy images that relates more to the present. And as new technologies become available old material could look better and better.

I for one prefer watching both colourised and stabilised historical footage

There are some pretty impressive examples of colourisation on RU-vid (by amateurs). However, I cannot help but notice that some of the colours are very unstable and fluctuate regularly. Why is that and is there anything that can be done about it?

I use topaz video enhance for upscaling and enhancing. Can get information from adjacenting frames to get a better resolution for a single frame. Also frame interpolation is possible, although not at the same time. I think that auto colorization will also be much better in the future, perhaps in the future a crappy BW video will become color hd maybe even in 3d... but as already said here, as long as you keep the original as a reference nothing wrong with it

Enhancing is good as long as the original is respected. If not, it should be mentioned. Your films are great to watch.

You don't need to generate frames (they can be really low quality) The correct way to do it is just variable framerate, or static framerate average. You don't have to use 24/30/60 and create errors or stutters. You can even get variable framerate monitors, but the video player can be a lot better (chooses a more accurate time rate) than a preset duplicate frame.

Some nice work there. I think this actually 2 different things that people get mixed up - restoring and then what you do with that restored footage. When footage is restored, it shouldn't be altered in any way as you need that original starting point. But once you have that restore footage, whatever you do with it is up to you and what you want to use it for. For the general public, I have no issues with colorization, stabilization, etc as long as people know it was done - this version can not replace the original as the only version there is, the original version can't get lost to time. I'm from the Star Wars generation - I have no issue with Lucas making his changes because it is his film however I have issues with the original version not also being restored and available because that is what was originally released and was known for years. I think in any restoration, you need to take care of the original and it shouldn't be just about what you can do with the restored version.

That was fascinating. Ethics are a factor that I didn’t consider and I was sorry to hear about Peter Jackson’s adaptations to his film . However after listening to your presentation, I have to agree that preserving the historic detail through AI enhancement should be the first and only consideration. The original footage should always remain intact for historical purposes. However it is my opinion that enhancing historical details of the prints not only adds to the depth of information of the film but in my case the meaning and the relatability to the people and the settings of that particular time and place.

For me, as long as the original and the restored are kept together in the archives and readily available, (I don't mean split screen) then fine. Then historians have a choice. I much prefer the detail of the enhanced version.

Very nice video, subscribed. I'm not necessarily against colorization but the AIs I know exist don't really produce some good results... I've done it in the past, though I've had to change many details to make it better, and every time I watch a "coloured film of the past" I can't help but notice the horrible colours... Hope this can change in the future.

No, not at all, as two separate digitalized film files of the same titles can be found so we got choices to watch it the way it was intended or to see the ancient world in color. And sharpening and denoising also could benefit some historians when it comes to clues they may have missed before.

Great to enhance film: viewers can decide to watch both black and white or color.

Many people don't like change! Those people don't have to watch corrected film! As long as the original film kan still be found why complain? I only recently have seen colour restored and motion restored films and it was like a new window opening up. I don't want to be fobbed off with alterations but then there has to be a certain amount of trust. Let's put it another way:- the paintings of John Constable or of Koekoek look almost real and that's why people like them yet they are purely fantasy with a tree from here and a house from there and some children from somewhere else. Are the same historians grumpy about those? I'm very glad to see what people of this (and other) channels are doing to recreate the views of the past in a way which is pleasurable to watch.

Fascinating

I think the restoration can potentially have not just entertainment, but even historical value, actually. Maybe not yet, but when the algorithms can "hallucinate" details not present in the footage but likely present in reality -at a high degree of accuracy- it could reveal perspectives not available in the original footage. And I also think the emotional resonance that some footage may have is not completely independent of its historical value, since even historians are subject to emotions sometimes ;). The emotional response can shape some aspects of one's interpretation (not all aspects, obviously, as historians can make use of scientific methods). It's not like the original footage is a perfect reflection of reality either though. So I think they, ultimately, can compliment each other in the long run. Just make sure that the AI is viewed critically so as to not mislead. Overall, I think AI has incredible potential in the study of history, and I think it may be our best bet for reconstructing the past world.

Anyone knows where i can see original films relatively untouched, i find unpleasing the 4k and 60fps A.I work done to it, specially the work done to the faces. and i'm not sure how much of the things i'm watching are computer generated or not, i have no problem with "corrections" but to think a blurry face was just replaced by a face of other person in the A.I database is frustrating; is there any channel or web page with these kind of films?

There might come a point where AI can rebuild the whole scene from the ground up cross referencing all known data and reference material.

Its wonderful!!

My initial feelings of adding color to these historic images was negative however enhancing and the addition of color has rejuvenated huge interest by younger generations which only helps in the respect of preservation and appreciation of life in the past.

They give a new life to them in my opinion. Incredible technology. I did our home movies a few years ago but these are on a different level. Back to reality imho 👌 Obviously originals are kept if possible. Bit difficult with nitrate though 😱

I have no problim with this been done with historic archive material and I love what you've done although I'm a fan of the fast walking days. But I just cant watch old films or the likes of Laurel And Hardy in colour that were made in B & W.Thanks.

The very first screen adaptation of Ian Fleming's iconic character James Bond was in 1954, when the anthology TV show _Climax!_ broadcasted a live version of Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson as American secret agent "Jimmy Bond" and Peter Lorre as the villain Le Chiffre. This obviously predates Sean Connery's 1962 debut in _Dr. No_ by 8 years. The episode is available here on RU-vid, but the quality is not great, and it is also is black & white. If anyone with the skills is looking for a neat restoration project, the very first James Bond adaptation might be a good job for you.

I just wanted to cite Two Minute Papers but then Rick did it himself. Even the mechanism for in between frames is even more advanced now without artifacts

ME as a gamer, I also like my old games to be in original state, but I also like it when they are remastered, I see this as the same, as long as the movie is being preserved, and presented well its fine, but I can also understand the purists, they would hate this. I am all for it, because this allows me to show this to my kids in a better presentation..