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GeekyBear

I've really come to enjoy these sorts of upscaled videos that allow a view of various cities in the early 1900's.

New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85WMpJMv8aA

San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8

Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOPaxhhgyd8

Wuppertal, Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk

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This one of Berlin, though not as early as the ones you posted, is the most spectacular one I've found:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YSDgruADlE

This gives a much better view into what everyday life must have been like at that time, it almost reminds me in some ways of movies such as Koyaanisqatsi.

This is absolutely astonishing. The colorization isn't great, but you can tell it will get much, much better as the algorithms improve.

The stabilization, however, is ... well, astonishing. There is zero visible judder except in a very few places.

In the early 90's I was working in early streamed digital video. One of the projects was a history of aviation documentary. The original negatives of early flight, including the original Wright Brothers flights are lost. But in many cases paper print outs of them remain. Before copyright was extended to film, to get a copyright a film had to be printed to paper. These paper print outs are all that remain. But this being the early 90's, there was no machine learning nor a formal field of computer vision as we know it now. We painstakingly scanned the thousands of feet of printed film, and reconstructed them as CLUT-127 (color look up table) animations. I seem to remember that project got streaming media awards of some sort. It was a long time ago.

Me too, really interesting to see and easier to connect somehow when the quality is better, compared to the black and white versions with strange frame-speeds.

Here is another one:

Barcelona, Spain (1911): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-3NlMAdq9I

I agree. Correcting the frame rate jitter and also motion stabilization (in addition to upscaling the resolution), really does result in a much more engaging view into the past.

I'm perfectly happy without colorization, but also willing to overlook it.

Groningen, The Netherlands : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogsTc9JLfWY

This source material is very well done, given it's age.

That is truly interesting, but I also find it quite depressing. There's almost not a tree in sight. I'm glad that I did not live in such a place.

Edit: The one from the Netherlands is lovely though, and an example of how life in our cities could be without cars.

The city council started pushing cars outwards from the late 70s onwards and the city is more or less back to the situation at the time of the video.

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