Folks, I'm not really surprised. I had very similar impressions when I first saw the Terminator 2 trailer, which had been scanned in 4k not so long ago. And I'm assuming it was shot with the 32mm film and James Cameron was involved as well. The trailer looked like a plastic Barby land, especially hair and skin. I admit, I never went to see the new T2 in cinema, but that trailer was just a bit off putting.
Not the same thing, with Python they went back to the original film pieces and animation elements which were transferred to high definition....standard definition video, (such as Ed Sullivan and the DC show) has no more information to make it any better.
You know , watching the 60 Minutes footage , my first thought when I saw the rooftop scenes was that the visual quality of the footage looked so different to the rest of the preview , not to mention the different aspect ratio and the way they've seemingly been trying to make the rooftop performances the "big reveal" once the documentary comes out - maybe the rooftop footage used was from one of the earlier re-workings, and was just used to illustrate that part of the doc - I didn't look at it too closely, and it doesn't seem like they would go to that trouble, but it definitely flashed in my mind while I was watching it ....
Yeah maybe. It was shot on 16mm and was pretty grainy even before they blew it up to 35 which just made the grain appear worse.
I have a lot of respect for Jeff Kreines, but he is very, very opinionated and demanding about what he thinks a documentary should be. He's notoriously anti-grain-reduction. Me, I'm on record as saying some grain reduction (and sharpening) is necessary, but you have to use good judgement and not crank it up to 11. The original 1970 theatrical release of Let It Be was just grain city... plus the home video was worse, because they wound up zooming in on the image to get it back to 4x3 in the 1980s. It was a big mess.
I'm curious, is Kreines' antipathy to grain reduction based on the premise that grain is inherently virtuous, and so _any_ amount of grain-reduction, regardless of how well it might be done, is simply "wrong"?
From what I understand, "T2" needed noise reduction for its 3D version - I guess the grain would've caused issues with the 3D presentation - and then the 4K just used the degrained image meant for 3D. Not sure if that was a mistake or intentional.
I remember reading somewhere that one of Ringo's houses in the late 70's or 80's had a massive fire and ALL his Beatles memorabilia was destroyed. My best guess is that camera and whatever was in it was lost.
Well, he has his Sgt. Pepper suit and tons of photos and postcards, as evidenced by his books. I’d say the claims of what has been destroyed have been exaggerated.
If I'm not mistaken, a lot of Beatles video bootlegs were leaked from a film-to-video transfer service that Ringo used to transfer his personal film copies. So that also means at least those weren't destroyed in the fire either. Perhaps he still owns a video transfer of whatever he recorded back then in Jan '69, but I would put my money on it being someone else's camera that he just played around with.
Looks like it was a fire in a home he owned/rented in Hollywood Hills, CA - so I imagine his Beatles memorabilia was NOT there:
Not true. Blu-ray can offer superior video codecs and higher bitrates. I have a number of SD blu-ray titles, and I can tell the difference between that and the same content on a DVD. It doesn’t magically make it HD, but it looks clearer. This is why I would prefer to have this particular video on blu-ray over a standard DVD.
Technically 4.7GB, 8.5 GB if you used a Dual-Layer disc, though you did have to weigh up how you would use those limits particularly since you only had around 11.08 Mbit/s including audio to work with. That said for Standard Definition video in MPEG-2 I think it was fairly sufficient. Particularly if you ran it through a good encoder, I remember talk about hardware encoders being better than software ones but I'm not sure how true that is. I still have a copy of DVD demystified somewhere.
gonna go out on a limb and say that any young(ish) person who's psyched to watch six hours of beatles rehearsals will pretty much also be a fan of (or at least aesthetically tuned into) things such as chunky film grain and vintage aspect ratios. it comes with the territory. so this 'cleaning things up and dumbing them down for modern audiences' bit (if it's the case) strikes me as an exercise in futility
Some clips of the restored “Let It Be” appear in this Guardian piece. Hard to truly judge on my smartphone screen at the moment but to my eyes it looks like it’s gone through a similar processing.
Some of the processing seems heavier than for old Laurel & Hardy which got some criticism for lacking grain, and they were having to use very well worn and much older prints. I would never have expected something from 1969-70 to look like what I've seen of this... and I loved the work done on the WWI film. I'm thinking if I have noticed then it has gone to far.
You would have to ask him. I'm just quoting what he said on Facebook, which was a public message anybody can see. Again, I'm not anti-grain reduction; I'm anti-too much grain reduction. I think they could have (as we say) "split the difference" and gone half way between tons of grain and no grain at all. There's a middle ground that I think most people would have found acceptable. But my philosophy is always "when in doubt -- do less." The guys from the UCLA archive were part of this L&H project, and they generally err on the side of "less is more." The general feeling in the archive/restoration business -- particular from the Association for Moving Image Archivists -- is to avoid heavy noise reduction. There is a tendency to try to clean up stuff too much and sacrifice detail. I've already outlined ways you can do it subtly without any artifacts, and just let about half of the grain go. For a 50-year-old 16mm negative, it's going to be grainy, and I don't think it'll turn the audience off.
