As powerful workstations slowly but surely work to remaster all the world’s old film and video footage to higher resolutions and frame rates using machine learning techniques, you’d assume that one piece of footage would have been a top priority. But apparently Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video has only just been given the 4K, 60 FPS upgrade, and your eyes may never forgive you.
Watching the original music video again, which boasts a respectable 871,696,897 views on YouTube at the time of writing, it looks like “Never Gonna Give You Up” was shot on professional-grade video tape, presumably Sony’s Betacam format, giving it that recognisable ‘80s video look.
The remastered version, which was created using Topaz Video Enhance AI to boost the resolution to 4K and the Flowframes video interpolation tool to boost the frame rate to 60 frames per second, looks like it was filmed on a modern smartphone just yesterday. We now have the ability to Rickroll someone so that they’re not only inconvenienced, but also feel like they’re actually on set with Astley while this video was being shot. Astley may never desert you, but your eyes will want to.