At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, just as San Francisco, California, was beginning to wake, an earthquake lasting less than a minute shook the city to its core. The tremors ignited fire after fire around the city, which burned for three days. The disaster killed an estimated 3,000 people and left half of the city’s 400,000 residents homeless as buildings topped and burned.

Just four days earlier, on April 14, 1906, moving picture photographers the Miles Brothers shot footage of the city as it would never be seen again, capturing the transportation, fashions, and bustling atmosphere of San Francisco. Titled A Trip Down Market Street, the film is a point-of-view-style video shot from the front of a cable car. The 116-year-old footage takes viewers eastward down Market Street, beginning at 8th Street and heading towards the cable car turnaround at the Ferry Building.

Recently, video restorer NASS remastered the footage, and the result feels like a trip back in a time. Watching the enhanced footage feels like riding at the bow of the cable car, giving a front row seat to the rather chaotic traffic criss-crossing the street, hearing the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, and waving to enthusiastic children at the turnaround. The restoration process included boosting the original 15 FPS to 60, upgrading the image resolution to HD, and improving the sharpness and brightness of the picture. While the AI-generated colorization and added sound design are for ambiance and are not necessarily historically accurate, they still give viewers a sense of what it would have been like to ride a cable car down Market Street in 1906.

The original footage is stored at the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco. What you see online is a scan of 35mm material, shot by Harry J. Miles hand-cranking the Bell & Howell camera placed on the front of the streetcar. The negative was taken by train to the Miles’ New York office on April 17, 1907, when the brothers were en route to NY. When they heard the news of the earthquake, they sent the negative on ahead and returned to San Francisco, where they discovered their studios had been destroyed in the fires.

Scroll down to watch both the original and remastered footage, and subscribe to NASS’ YouTube channel for more remastered historic videos.

San Francisco had a massive earthquake in 1906 that destroyed much of the city. This footage was taken just days before.

[archiveorg MarketStreet19064KScan20181016 width=750 height=422 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

Now, the footage has been remastered to give a realistic sense of the city before it shook to its core.

h/d: [Laughing Squid]

All images via NASS.

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The post San Francisco Earlier than the Earthquake: Exceptional Remastered Footage appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Video restorer NASS, who has a passion for restoring and upscaling old videos using neural networks, has breathed new life into footage of a busy San Francisco street originally shot on April 14, 1906.

The scene was shot from a cable car that was traveling eastbound down Market Street in San Francisco from between 8th and 9th Streets until it reaches the car turnaround point at the Ferry Building. The footage was shot just four days before a massive and tragic earthquake hit the city, sparking a massive fire that nearly brought the city to its ruin.

The original footage is stored with the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco and was produced by “moving picture photographers” Harry, Herbert, Earle, and Joe Miles. The brothers hand-cranked the Bell & Howell camera that they had placed on the front of a streetcar during the strip to the Ferry Building. Just a few days later when the brothers were on the way to New York they learned about the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and its destructive force. They then sent the negative to New York to be processed and returned to the Bay Area city to discover that their studios had been destroyed.

The technique NASS used to enhance the video follows his previous colorization techniques. The first step he takes involves boosting the frame rate to 60 frames per second, after which he upscales the image resolution to high definition, before working to improve the video’s sharpness and brightness. At this point, the footage is colorized and sounds are added to provide additional environmental tone and feel. Once these steps are done, the entire package is then stabilized, cleaned, denoised, and deblurred to complete the restoration process to be as close to today’s standards as he can obtain.

NASS, who says the goal of the colorization is to create an aesthetic rather than for accuracy, says as much to his viewers. The actual colors of many of the things captured in these old frames have been lost to history.

“Please, be aware that colorization colors are not real and [are] fake, colorization was made only for the ambiance and does not represent real historical data.”

Colorization is a contentious topic among historians. While some say it helps make important historical events more interesting for a modern audience, others argue that the practice does more harm than good and takes away from the original intent of the capture.

The post Colorized Footage of San Francisco Taken 4 Days Earlier than 1906 Fireplace appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

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