Bonus Material: PS3's Infamous Reveal: 2005 Sony Conference 1080p AI Upscaled (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Rich here. As part of John's DF Retro Motorstorm episode, he asked me to take a look at cleaning up the existing footage we have from Sony's infamous E3 2005 press conference - you know, that one. Principally it was about doing our best to restore the Motorstorm target render. The results impressed me enough to run the entire one hour and 48 minutes of footage through the AI to get the result you can see here. Pretty good!

For a long time this conference was only available in murk-o-vision as decent quality video streaming didn't exist at the time. John had a DVD quality version of the conference (higher quality footage sold on after the show) and the event itself was likely captured via SDI at the 'media riser' - essentially, an area of any given conference where broadcast outlets can jack in to capture or re-broadcast the event. These days, this is all done at HD or even ultra HD. Back in the day? SD only, of course.

Still, the footage here is still very blurry and the AI does a pretty great job of deinterlacing (which also turns 30fps into 60fps), upscaling and extrapolating the missing detail. You saw the Jensen comparison shot from last week's content blog, but here's a Motostorm comparison: https://images.gnwcdn.com/2022/screenshots/motostormAI.jpg

I did consider adding a second upscaling pass on the letterboxed 16:9 content but ultimately decided against it. With the scale to 1080p, the letterboxed material resolves at around 800p - close to the likely resolution of the source. I also found that the cross-fades from the event to the footage also caused problems. Still, I reckon this holds up very nicely.

By the way, if you're expecting the regular content update today, we're still on the holiday weekend so that'll be coming tomorrow. In the meanwhile, revisit this classic-for-all-the-wrong-reasons E3 presser - it's available to all supporters.

Downloads: https://digitalfoundry.net/2022-04-18-playstation-3s-infamous-reveal-2005-sony-conference-1080p-ai-upscaled