[HN Gopher] Film: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion
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       Film: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion
        
       Author : memorable
       Score  : 189 points
       Date   : 2022-08-31 08:18 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (film-net.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (film-net.github.io)
        
       | bfirsh wrote:
       | You can run it on Replicate here: https://replicate.com/google-
       | research/frame-interpolation
        
         | vanderZwan wrote:
         | Inspired by their own Gulliver's Travels[0] example I tried it
         | out on two frames of an anime with 15 FPS. Not quite ready for
         | that type of animation[1], although that is to be expected
         | since the differences in arm positions of the input frames are
         | pretty extreme. Having said that it got a lot of other details
         | right!
         | 
         | [0] https://replicate.com/google-research/frame-
         | interpolation/ex...
         | 
         | [1] https://imgur.com/6GZSZSO
        
       | samwillis wrote:
       | Just wait until someone releases a model trained on 10 second
       | TikTok videos. That's going to fascinating.
        
       | Zobat wrote:
       | This feels like something that would be perfect for one man, or
       | small team, animation studios. If this could draw the in-betweens
       | i imagine a talented artist (which I am not) could produce films
       | in literal fractions of the time it takes to draw every frame. If
       | you're not happy with the result, just add another frame.
        
         | kranke155 wrote:
         | Hard to say, but this is kind of what A. 3D animation already
         | does and B. Sort of a misunderstanding of animation.
         | 
         | Animated frames are supposed to convey intention. They're
         | fantastic at doing this since you can manipulate every detail
         | of every frame. The idea that you'll just run an AI through it,
         | that might work for dialogue scenes of a typical Japanese TV
         | anime where intention is low and mostly it's indeed grunt work.
         | But I would imagine it would be a bit lifeless - unless someone
         | trains an ML specifically for anime using good animation as a
         | reference.
         | 
         | Basically just moving between two frames is an example of
         | extremely poor animation.
         | 
         | Source: am animator, sort of.
        
         | aimor wrote:
         | This was my first thought too, even for large studios, even for
         | existing media. Would be neat to see the comparison between an
         | existing animation or stop-motion that was done at 12 fps and
         | see it scaled up.
        
           | lancesells wrote:
           | Whatever this is it's barely animation. It's interpolation
           | and it's linear and far away from any thing that's animated
           | or animation.
           | 
           | In an animation those two photos would be drawn and created
           | as keyframes which would then get interpolated many ways
           | (hopefully not linear and as robotic and weird as this).
           | 
           | Very interesting technology though. I could see this coming
           | to an smartphone near you any day now. And there will be ways
           | people animate with these tools but this isn't it.
        
         | AlexandrB wrote:
         | Isn't this what flash tweening already allowed 20 years ago?
         | The technique here seems ideal for already-existing drawn
         | images or photographs, but if you're drawing something from
         | scratch you can provide a lot more context for interpolation by
         | starting with vector data instead of raster frames.
        
         | DylanDmitri wrote:
         | We're going to get an explosion of indie animated shows. Will
         | soon be possible to make as a year-long passion project what
         | used to require $15 million and network exec buy-in.
        
       | arriu wrote:
       | It seems like this could be a good way to provide smooth weather
       | / cloud animations using real or raw cloud images rather than
       | those heat maps most apps use.
        
       | ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
       | I still can't wrap my head around how people absolutely ignore
       | kids' rights to privacy putting their photos/videos without their
       | consent.
       | 
       | I would have been pretty bummed by my teens if I found out all my
       | life's history was there for the whole world to crawl, collect,
       | train their ad/surveillance NNs on, etc.
        
         | NoSorryCannot wrote:
         | You may not approve of it but I doubt you "can't wrap [your]
         | head" around it.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | OzzyB wrote:
         | Don't worry, by the time this kid's old enough to even care,
         | he'll be unrecognizable. If it's any consolation. I cannot
         | recognize this kid as anything other than a "kid". Good looking
         | kid for sure, but still a kid.
        
           | kleiba wrote:
           | No doubt that an AI could identify the same person at
           | different ages given sufficient source material.
        
             | jjk166 wrote:
             | And thus prove that they took a bath 20 years before?
             | 
             | Sure you could potentially identify the kid, but nobody
             | would ever have any reason to go through the effort.
        
       | zx8080 wrote:
       | Is it only me who noticed how teeth appears absolutely out of
       | nowhere when people smile on the demo footage? And it looks not
       | facinating. It looks horryfying.
       | 
       | Probably because of falling into the uncanny valley [0].
       | 
       | 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
        
         | revolvingocelot wrote:
         | Indeed, this one example makes me want to eat garlic with every
         | meal and hang crosses over all the doorways: https://film-
         | net.github.io/static/images/000628/interpolated...
         | 
         | Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible feat, and seems to
         | handily beat the other automagic interpolators (eg, 3:49 in the
         | video at the bottom of TFA) in terms of minimizing "pop-in",
         | but it's still clearly present in dentition.
        
           | aidenn0 wrote:
           | Wow, it looks like the teeth don't move with the head,
           | uncanny indeed.
        
           | mzs wrote:
           | the one where I noticed:
           | 
           | https://film-
           | net.github.io/static/images/000204/interpolated...
        
             | AlexandrB wrote:
             | You can also see a lot of distortion on the left side of
             | the frame here as ear comes into frame: https://film-
             | net.github.io/static/images/000032/interpolated...
             | 
             | Would be interesting to see if this can be made more
             | context sensitive - i.e. algorithm recognizes this as a
             | person's head and fills in details more intelligently.
        
           | Firmwarrior wrote:
           | ha, I'm glad you pointed that out. I didn't notice it at all
           | and was actually thinking about what an amazing application
           | that last transition was
           | 
           | I was going to download this thing and generate a bunch of
           | samples to send to my family tomorrow, possibly dumping them
           | right into the uncanny valley and being too unobservant to
           | notice I was doing it
        
       | osanseviero wrote:
       | Open-source Gradio demo:
       | https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/frame-interpolation
        
       | richrichardsson wrote:
       | Does anyone know if it's possible to run this on Apple Silicon
       | GPU? I've been playing with Stable Diffusion on M1 and having
       | fun, I'd love to be able to use this to interpolate between
       | frames as shown in another recent post.
        
         | tough wrote:
         | I could run rife https://github.com/nihui/rife-ncnn-vulkan
         | 
         | dain didn't work for me in m1 https://github.com/nihui/dain-
         | ncnn-vulkan
        
       | ThePhysicist wrote:
       | Half a dozen articles on ML-based image manipulation on HN at
       | once. Seems we're really entering into a golden age of AI-based
       | real-world applications, at least in specific niches. Personally
       | I'm really excited about the potential of this in design, art,
       | movies, games and interactive storytelling. Hard to imagine what
       | will be possible in 5-10 years from now, but I kind of expect RPG
       | games with fully AI-generated aesthetics / graphics and stories,
       | where only some core gameplay mechanics are still determined by
       | the designers of the game. Really can't wait to see that.
       | 
       | The work described in the linked article is also extremely
       | impressive and feels almost unreal, in any case.
        
         | april_22 wrote:
         | Also can't wait to see where all of this will be in a couple of
         | years!
        
           | dspillett wrote:
           | Most likely somewhere around the bottom of the trough of
           | disappointment:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
        
         | ciconia wrote:
         | > Seems we're really entering into a golden age of AI-based
         | real-world applications...
         | 
         | I wouldn't call moving pixels on a screen "real-world". Are
         | these technologies going one day to have a physical effect on
         | our lives, like, in the real real-world? I very much doubt it.
        
           | tough wrote:
           | > very much doubt it
           | 
           | It's week two, give it two decades.
           | 
           | Or come and build some!
           | 
           | Amazon in 2000 didnt knew it would become infra for the world
           | with AWS
        
         | melling wrote:
         | I've been waiting for an AI that can fix the color on all the
         | old color television footage from the 1960s, 1970s, etc.
         | 
         | News and sports, in particular.
        
           | mlboss wrote:
           | That has been possible for few years now using GANs
           | https://towardsdatascience.com/colorize-black-and-white-
           | phot...
        
           | bravura wrote:
           | Top matches for "AI color grading"
           | 
           | https://colourlab.ai/
           | 
           | https://www.color.io/match
           | 
           | https://fylm.ai/
        
           | noneeeed wrote:
           | I'm very interested in this.
           | 
           | It got some weird pushback, but Peter Jackson's film "They
           | Shall Not Grow Old" really helped make it's subjects so much
           | more real by cutting through the limitations of the old
           | footage from the 1st World War. Being able to apply similar
           | techniques more cheaply and quickly will bring a lot of old
           | footage to life and make the past much more real for the
           | viewer.
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | > AI-based real-world applications
         | 
         | I don't know; I feel the real-world applications are still
         | missing and what we are now seeing are tech demos (impressive
         | ones!) and gimmicks. I'm still waiting to see all this ML stuff
         | to be used in a productive context.
        
           | bayindirh wrote:
           | Pixelmator Pro has a ML powered image resizer built in. I
           | like that.
           | 
           | Also Retrobatch has a ML based image classifier, but I didn't
           | try that yet.
           | 
           | Other than these, yet all these are impressive tech demos. We
           | need them in production and preferably open source (model +
           | training + process) versions.
        
           | jsf01 wrote:
           | I personally use ML stuff in a productive context almost
           | every day. Topaz labs software for denoising and upscaling
           | images, Star Xterminator and Starnet for astrophotography
           | edits. Don't know if this counts as productive but the tools
           | I use to analyze my chess games are also all utilizing neural
           | nets. So if you're not seeing useful ML applications in your
           | day to day life it could just be that the things they're good
           | at don't align well with your job or hobbies just yet.
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | I don't think the pervasiveness of ML articles on HN are an
         | indicator of anything except hype trends on certain subject
         | matters. ML research in these spaces has been very high output
         | for many years now.
         | 
         | As someone in the field of computer graphics , where there's
         | been considerable ML research over the past few years that are
         | more reliably applicable to people's lives , most of the
         | exciting stuff doesn't make it to the front page of HN even if
         | it's posted here.
         | 
         | There's been lots of research in the past few years. The
         | initial shiny stuff makes it on here, but it's the follow up
         | iterations that are highly catalyzing of change that don't
         | because public interest in those topics has waned in the
         | interim.
        
           | the_duke wrote:
           | Would be great if you could share your 3-5 most exciting
           | developments that weren't discussed mich here.
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | My mind might have quite a bit of recency bias since I just
             | wrapped siggraph a few weeks ago (without catching Covid!)
             | so I'm a little scattershot. I might come back to this
             | later to post more concrete lists but here's what came to
             | mind first.
             | 
             | I should add that my point is more that there's not been a
             | slow down in ML research, and the ebb and flow of interest
             | on HN isn't indicative of accelerated progress in the
             | field. Simply of what things have captured the public mind.
             | 
             | Anyway on to the links...
             | 
             | Disney had a slew of papers out this year, the facial
             | motion retargeting ones in particular are very interesting
             | for use in production of films and "metaverse" characters
             | 
             | https://studios.disneyresearch.com/machine-learning/
             | 
             | Luma have had a lot of progress in their Nerf capture and
             | on device representation which will likely have huge
             | effects for e-commerce use cases among other things
             | 
             | https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded
             | 
             | Nvidia released an ML based version of OpenVDB that will
             | potentially improve effects in films, but could be huge for
             | games
             | 
             | https://youtu.be/uAs8X5es1DE
             | 
             | There were also a ton of neural rendering papers at
             | siggraph that I still need to separate in my head mentally
             | since I saw them presented back to back, so I apologize for
             | just sharing a dump
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/neural_fields/status/155594785627144601
             | 8...
             | 
             | Apple released some neural rendering content too that has a
             | lot of implications for spatial product training
             | 
             | https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13751
        
               | nsxwolf wrote:
               | You started with downvotes but showed up with the links.
               | Neural VDB looks wild - I can see games going nuts with
               | detailed, interactive volumetrics now, with such a tiny
               | memory footprint.
        
         | acomjean wrote:
         | >but I kind of expect RPG games with fully AI-generated
         | aesthetics / graphics and stories,
         | 
         | I think Dwarf Fortress has the story generation part. The
         | aesthetics/graphics part not yet..
         | 
         | And I think its procedurally generated, but with complex and
         | strange results.
         | 
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2ztnkw/i_thi...
        
         | lukaszkups wrote:
         | And imagine that its graphic is being generated on EVERY NEW
         | GAME START so there won't be ever same experiences :O
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | Maybe.. exciting times are back
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Speaking of which, is there any good ML-based superresolution
         | algorithm out there? I'm trying to print a poster but some of
         | my figures are in low resoltion ...
        
         | croes wrote:
         | Or it's just a hype
        
       | paskozdilar wrote:
       | This seems like a good tool to turn <60fps videos into 60fps
       | videos.
        
         | kelseyfrog wrote:
         | Yep. I'd also be interested at least in A/B-ing this against
         | current motion interpolation methods used in televisions. Does
         | it perform perceptually better in blind viewer tests? Does it
         | get rid of the soap opera effect? Does it have its own flavor
         | of "something's off about this video"? All questions I'd love
         | to see answered.
        
         | AlexandrB wrote:
         | For historical footage, I could see some use cases. For cinema,
         | I don't know why you'd want to do this. < 60 fps playback of
         | video that was shot at < 60 fps looks just fine. Even if the
         | interpolation was perfect, what's the benefit?
        
       | thomastjeffery wrote:
       | > synthesizes multiple intermediate frames from two input images
       | 
       | That's a neat use case, and definitely a good way to show off,
       | but what about more than one image?
       | 
       | The overwhelming majority of video that exists today is 30fps or
       | lower. The overwhelming majority of displays support 60hz or
       | more.
       | 
       | Most high-end TVs do some realtime frame interpolation, but there
       | is only so much an algorithm can do to fill in the blanks. It
       | doesn't take long to see artifacts.
       | 
       | I would be more interested to see what an ML-based approach could
       | do with the edge cases of interpolating 30fps video than 2
       | frames.
        
         | summerlight wrote:
         | Actually most of the video frame interpolation programs in the
         | market uses two frames interpolation. Theoretically, you can do
         | a better job with multiple frames but this doesn't bring much
         | more values beside of some extreme cases.
        
           | thomastjeffery wrote:
           | > Actually most of the video frame interpolation programs in
           | the market uses two frames interpolation.
           | 
           | > Theoretically, you can do a better job with multiple frames
           | but this doesn't bring much more values beside of some
           | extreme cases.
           | 
           | Edge cases that require more information than is present in
           | two frames are very common. That's why most frame
           | interpolation methods also have an "artifact masking"
           | feature.
           | 
           | But what if we _did_ use the information from surrounding
           | frames? That would probably be too complicated for
           | traditional frame interpolation, but that 's not what we're
           | talking about.
           | 
           | What if we used a data set trained on the entire video file -
           | or even a collection of similar video files - to fill in the
           | gaps?
        
         | zlatan28 wrote:
         | They can upsample FPS on videos (more than 2 frames),
         | https://github.com/google-research/frame-interpolation#many-...
        
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