Hideo Kojima blew the gaming world away in 2000 when he premiered the exciting trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty during that year’s E3 event.
The trailer made a huge impression at the time thanks to its real-time footage, which did a great job of demonstrating the graphical capabilities of the PlayStation 2 like no other title before it, as well as the inclusion of a rousing score from Hollywood composer Harry-Gregson Williams, who provided a new rendition of the original title’s main theme.
Over two decades later, Digital Foundry has given MGS2 fans another reason to revisit its iconic and classic trailer by sharing a much higher-quality version that’s been enhanced with the magic of Topaz’s Video Enhance AI software.
This is an application that allows users to upscale older video and address their shortcomings (e.g., interlacing and artifacts) via various algorithms with a single click. While it takes a significant amount of time to process longer clips on typical hardware configurations, Video Enhance AI’s results are stunning and can genuinely bring out details that may have been tough to spot even in the original source.
Topaz also has a complementary product called Gigapixel AI that does a similarly impressive job of upscaling images. Thanks to the power of deep learning, image detail and resolution can be enhanced by 600 percent, producing far better results than typical resampling methods such as bilinear interpolation.
AI upscaling is gaining traction in the games industry in “remastering” textures and dramatically improving pre-rendered video sequences. In this video, Rich puts the technology to use in “remastering” classic Hideo Kojima’s E3 2000 debut trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2.
Source: Eurogamer