Yeah, wait and see the actual product not the promo. MyHeritage has an overly aggressive auto-scrub tool for photos and that what it looks like meaning it's scrubbed too much. It doesn't look like film anymore. Real detail is gone replaced with waxey out of focus images.
I only care about the movie. It's too soon to get upset, after all it's only a trailer, meant to reach the largest possible audience. If the film does look too scrubbed, then you can raise hell about it all you want.
Yes, it's been thoroughly scrubbed. The other threads on this have comparison photos and has been discussed at length. A shame.
Agreed. If it’s still an issue by then, I’m sure an enterprising Beatles fan can add about 6% monochromatic noise in Adobe Premiere Pro, and enjoy that instead. It’s a nice little trick, and easy to do. But it’s 6 hours of video…
A scrubbed MOVING Sequence of images isn’t gonna look anywhere as noticeable. I’m sure Peter Jackson and his advisors have figured out how to get a good picture out of this. It’s not like it’s being photoshopped by Barney at the Walmart booth.
I think it looks fine, but I also had no problem with Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old WWI documentary. Bear in mind that grain reduction is not one thing: it's a bunch of stuff, plus the knob goes up and down. It's always a judgement call of "how hard do we push it?" When it's me, my reaction is, "let's take it down about 40% and look for artifacts." But what I see in the trailer is fine: You could quibble with the 1.78 framing (a blow up from 1.33), the color choices, the sharpening, and the new mix as well. I'm actually more concerned that they're going to white-wash the Beatles breakup and make it seem like they had a great, fun time in the last 4-5 months they were together in 1969, which wasn't exactly true. That's a much bigger conceptual problem than grain/too much grain/not enough grain issue, which is totally a subjective call. One problem is that fans have gotten used to the horrible 35mm blow-ups from May 1970, which were scum-suckingly awful. Back in those lab days, I believe they'd have to go from 16mm neg to 16mm IP to 35mm neg and then a 35mm print (or even 35mm neg / IP / interneg / print, which is worse). If people get used to seeing a horrifically-grainy, soft, bad image for 50 years, and suddenly they get a clear image right off the camera negative, they're going to immediately say, 1) "this is wrong!" and 2) "this is not what I'm used to seeing!" It ain't that simple. Also be aware that 50-year-old 16mm camera negative ain't that great to begin with. Grain in the highlights (which is how neg appears when scanned) can get really excessive to the point of being overpowering. A trick I've used is to just apply NR to the highlights and leave everything else more or less alone. I have no idea what they did at Park Road Post in New Zealand, but in general, they're highly-regarded and do good work.
Are you saying you think the image in the OP looks fine? I agree with those who say to reserve judgment until we see the actual final product on TV screens, but if it looks like the OP's image... that doesn't look fine.
Eh, I answer as I see fit. It's a question of priorities: what's the biggest problem in the film? We'll know in a few weeks, when it's actually ready for us to see. 90% of what I covered was specifically about mastering, restoration, and picture quality issues.
I’m very surprised to read you saying this looks fine, especially since you master video content for a living.
I’m case anyone is curious, they’ve uploaded this trailer to Disney+. Just watched in Dolby Vision - still looks DNR’d within an inch of its life, as expected from viewing it on YouTube. The carpet still looks like a green pad. Disgusting what’s been done here. Should still be fantastic to see, though.
Eh, you don't see what I see. This is a question of taste -- what we call here in Hollywoo "creative intent." Let's wait to judge when the movie is actually released on November 25th.
Or, we saw this in 2015: Who wants it like those horrible old green tinged VHS dubs with a black & white xeroxed cover??
The old Magnetic Video version (as far as I know, the only legit, authorized version of Let It Be on home video, which came out around 1982-1983 on VHS and Laserdisc) was mastered by my old pal, the late, great Tom Nottingham at Grace & Wild Video in Detroit. He did it from a mediocre 35mm print furnished to them by United Artists. The print was an optical blow-up from the 16mm (through several optical generations), so it was soft, grainy, and actually missing quite a bit of visual information on all four sides. Tom told me they only gave him 3 or 4 days to blow through the transfer, so a lot of it was rushed and it didn't look great. Tom was convinced he got a bad print and asked for another one, but there wasn't time... so what we got is what we got. It wasn't that far off from what went to theaters in 1970-1971, and it's better than the 16mm reductions that a lot of people saw at subsequent "midnight shows" and college shows in the 1970s. After MagVideo released it, a few weeks later they heard from Apple's lawyers, who were furious that they had not been consulted. Apparently, UA thought they owned all the rights, but it turned out they only had the rights to essentially the picture and the dialogue, and the Beatles owned all the music. UA apologized and the settlement was that no further copies could be made and the versions sent to stores would be allowed to remain. It turned into one of those "video rarities" of the 1980s that was never subsequently reissued on DVD or Blu-ray. For many years, this is basically all that fans have had access to... so like I say, people have been looking at **** for so many years, they start to believe, "ah, this is what it really looked like." But when you scan in high-res digital off the original pristine 16mm camera negative, well... that's a whole different thing. I wouldn't be so quick to condemn it because it's clean. Once it's out, the crazy fans can do A/B comparisons and look at moving images, and then we'll have a real sense of how good or bad it is. BTW, Jackson swears he's avoided using any of the material that was in the original 1970 cut of Let It Be, so we'll be seeing different angles of the same takes in some cases, plus I'm sure he'll have to cut around any editorial problems. My hope is that a boxed Blu-ray set will include both the 6-hour 2021 version and the original 80-minute 1970 film, but I don't know how much the surviving Beatles will try to suppress the latter.
What I was trying to say was that we've seen it looking good in 2015 and that is our benchmark, not the old early 80s home video release (or dubs thereof). I'm not saying that 2015 restoration was perfect but it looked a lot more like a 16mm film transfer (albeit with some digital clean up) than this new trailer does.
Fantastic post, and this flick looks SPECTACULAR! FINALLY the Beatles movie people have been waiting to see since... ...forever!
Oh - and wouldn't the promo - like the first few episodes in a TV series - get a bit more attention & clean up than the whole thing? Just for the "wow factor?"