Those in the restoration business apparently think otherwise. “New 16-bit 4K digital restoration of Monterey Pop, supervised by director D. A. Pennebaker, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack” The Complete Monterey Pop Festival What’s ignorant is suggesting that a clearly visible issue is something that people should not have strong feelings about.
Just watched Part 1, and only noticed a small handful of scenes where I thought the guys looked soft, waxy and unnatural. 99% of the footage looked gorgeous to me, and the noise removal was not a distraction at all through almost all of it. It looked STUNNING, IMO.
The most obnoxious quality those types have is an innate inability to see anything from any other POV but their own. Talking about ignorance, that's an insanely huge blind spot.
To my eye the image looks like it isn't necessarily DNR'd, but like some shots are just plain out of focus or otherwise very soft.
I won’t be able to watch this until tomorrow. I take it the film itself looks identical to the trailers? I would be surprised if it’s any different.
Skimmed through just to judge the picture quality. The dimly-lit shots away from the main "stage" area are the ones that seem to suffer the most from the DNR. I would post a screenshot if I didn't feel the Mouse's lawyers breathing down my neck.
On the positive side, if you watch on a very small screen the weird smooth plasticity is not so noticeable, and maybe an old tube with lines tv would help further?
Get Back looks as I said on other threads that it was visually mastered using a Snapchat filter. Worse, it’s like when you visit your folks’ house and their large TV has all the factory default settings like noise reduction and motion smoothing to the max - along with over saturation. Jackson has two major flaws as a filmmaker - he’s obsessed with technology and looks for stories to utilise his new tech fad rather than look for tech to tell the story he wants to tell (the opposite of Spielberg) and he also sorely can’t edit himself. It’s great to see 9 hours of footage - but some of it could be cut down. There’s about thirty false endings in his LOTR movies.
Topaz knows about windows, straight lines and buildings and makes them sharper, but knows nothing about faces, so the faces are still blank in the Topaz version. If this was shot on a HD camera, you could see the faces.
Topaz is just a dumbed down VSGAN (vapoursynth single image super resolution Generative Adversarial Network). Why pay the price of a budget hi-fi just to get a software with non-trainable models that does awful preprocessing when you can spend a bit of time and get way more capable open source software to work?
George Lucas developed this problem with being so enamoured with the technology rather than focusing more on the story and acting - see the Star Wars prequel trilogy ...
It's fair to say that the restoration community (in general) is very passionate and opinionated on a lot of issues. I try to balance them all out as rationally as I can and speak my truth. Ignorance is in the mind of the beholder. If I live to see July of next year, I will have worked in television for fifty years. I've seen a lot in five decades, and I think I have a good concept of what looks good and what looks bad. Differences in opinions are not absolute -- they're clouded by emotion and experience and other factors. We don't know for a fact that's what they did. A video mastering pal of mine at Universal just took a look at the show and said, "it looks to me like they took all the noise out and superimposed 35mm fine grain on top of it," so he has the same opinion you do. But we don't really know the workflow that Park Road Post used. I can say that real 16mm grain is really course and ugly, and this is much finer, smoother grain that what I'd normally see in Kodak 7254 (what they shot the doc on). '54 was an awful film stock, just awful to deal with in video in the 1970s and 1980s. The later 7247 was better, but to me the film only got usable when the T-grains came in 1986. To me, the grain level with those 1970s stocks was overpowering and ugly. BTW, my Universal friend said the same thing I did: "the flaws are there, but it's not terrible and it's mostly good." We'd both like to see what it looked like uncorrected and corrected, just to see how much they did. I just looked up at a later wide shot in the first part, and it did look "waxy and weird," so there are definitely problems with consistency. I see some weird softening in highlight chrome glares on the amps, so there's been some futzing going on. Close-ups look fine.
Despite previous reservations, after about 20 mins watching the first episode of Get Back, my brain largely adjusted to the DNR and was able to focus more on the action and emotion up on the screen rather than the technical vagaries of its production. Having said that, I did find it mildly distracting having so much of the sound not match up with the images. But I still feel lucky to be able to finally see intimate footage of this iconic band ...
Yeah... my god, the out-of-sync images, and wild shots jammed in with the wrong sound... that knocks me flat on my ass. There's always a degree of "cheating" involved with sound sync on documentaries, where they steal a shot and try to force a square peg in a round hole, but it's a tough battle. And sometimes the lip-sync is just off by about 3 frames, but somebody looked at it and said, "ehhhh, close enough" and let it go. I know how hard this is: I synced up about 150 hours of the Scorsese Shine a Light concert documentary, and most of that was done purely by eye, so it really takes a lot of time and dedication to get it dead on perfect.
16mm tends to be less than "tight" as a film stock period. Throw in the "on the fly" nature of the photography and you'll inevitably get a lot of shots with iffy focus.
To be fair, the multiple endings of "Return of the King" come from Tolkien - PJ didn't invent those. Now that doesn't mean he had to use them. He could've altered the source. But then the "LOTR" fans would've gone after him. Kind of a no win!
He did recreate that lost King Kong scene, so it's impossible to totally hate on Peter Jackson, and there probably is some extremely manicured,clean, and freshly painted place in Switzerland that looks in real life like the London backgrounds in this new Get Back.
There was a scene about halfway through the first episode where Ringo looks like a CGI version of himself while he's talking to Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It was very distracting.
He even left one out! I can't imagine how the "ugh, another ending" crowd would have reacted to an hour of The Scouring Of The Shire.