Whatever issues with the picture quality, I was mind-blown to find out that there was footage shot on the same day after the rooftop concert. Before, I assumed they immediately went home.
Do we know what these shots would have looked like without the post-processing, given the current condition of the reels? Would the closest reference point be the Let It Be video from the Beatles 1+ set? If so, that's a grainy mess, and I can't imagine how much worse it would look when cropped to a 35mm frame. I personally don't mind the effects at all and to me it feels very immersive and modern, rather than watching an 'old' documentary.
That's episode one during She Came in Through the Bathroom Window btw. The screenshot doesn't really capture the weirdness of that one particular shot. I don't have the exact time offhand but there's this one part it cuts to George and I was just like what the hell is even going on? I wish I could have got a gif of it.
'Natural' how? We don't see film grain when looking at things in everyday life. I totally respect that purists care about fidelity to original sources (and all of the limitations), but this project isn't simply a restoration - it's an entirely new endeavor that happens to use 50+ year old materials. I'm probably the odd one out here, but I can connect with this Get Back project more than I've ever been able to do while watching other clips from this era. It feels alive and incredibly immersive, and I don't doubt that has to due in large part to the 'cleaned up' video and audio. It's not perfect, but it's damn good.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a new endeavor or not, the materials are 50+ years old. “Everyday life” doesn’t have film grain, but 16mm film does. Not only does it have it, the grain literally *is* the image. It’s almost the same with magnetic tape and tape hiss. Does life have tape hiss? No, but tape does, and it’s impossible to remove the hiss without affecting the audio.
This thing is the video equivalent of the late 90s EMI technique of "obliterate the hiss with NR then EQ too much high end back in" The DNR on the film is egregious in itself, but the added insult of the awful looking AI sharpening on top to add some (fake!) detail back in is absolutely insulting. That frame of George above looks like a photoshop watercolor tool has been used on it. Nearly "uncanny valley" material.
This scene in Part 1 suffered quite badly, in my opinion. I'm not sure if the source footage was out of focus, but the DNR makes a total mess out of it, and it's digitally zoomed in on top of that. Spoiler This one too just goes too far: Spoiler
I'm just being funny. Most of it is not really that bad -- to me. I think if they had let 100% of the grain go just "as is," people would go absolutely crazy.
Thing is Jackson probably hasn't aimed this purely at boomers but trying to get new younger fans on board and making it look like it was shot (ahem) yesterday would do the trick. Not that I'll be watching it as...not a fan myself.
This series is a boon to Fab4 fans and PJ is to be congratulated, not least for giving Disney+ the runaround and extending the running time to 6, and then 8 hours (a bit like Apple reception staff and Mal Evans foiling police attempts to shut down the rooftop concert). Yet while I'm hugely grateful that we get to see and hear all this fantastic material at all, it's pretty clear PJ's team have embarrassed themselves with the massively OTT NR and I'm now wondering if there's any hope they'll be able to undo this element of an otherwise spectacular job for the blu ray/dvd. (I'm relieved to see video professionals becoming a bit less defensive and beginning to acknowledge there's a problem here.) I can only hope a more professional outfit such as Criterion are given the task of restoring the original LIB film.
I was excoriated for posting my thoughts on the Visuals of Part I in what I thought was the "series" thread., only to find an island of people cast off here who actually saw the same thing I did! IMO the Visuals are atrocious. Beyond unwatchable. Be it lo-rez screen grab on my cell phone or in HDR 2160p streaming, these wax Beatles are frickin' creepy. Lifeless, dead. What most die-hard fans thought of what Phil Spector did to the music is what I think Peter Jackson did to the Visuals. I'm not even sure how to take in Part 2. Audio-only, missing the subtitles (watching it didn't help as the mouths were "animatronic" to say the least)? We can talk about grain and FX and Peter Jackson doing "the best with what he had"... but in the end does it work? No! Not for me.. I would have preferred three things: 1. Peter Jackson used some kind of impressionist approach. If you're going to "paint" over The Beatles footage, make it look like a painting. Watercolor. We get that the native quality wasn't there, so paint over it. Like a painter. Make it a Visual representation. Make it a damn courtroom sketch, just not this horror show. 2. Let Ken Burns present this. Sure, first episode would begin with the Spanish Inquisition but by Episode 5 we'd be at Twickenham. It would flow naturally. No visuals would be jarring. It would tell the same story if he had access to the same footage. Likely far better. Entertaining, educational and definitive. They don't even have audio of Mark Twain speaking, but he made a completely immersive series on... oysh. Too late. Next.. 3. Don't do it, Let it Be. What did I learn from Part I? Thus far? Yoko didn't break up The Beatles. Bad CGI did. The world seems to have think they saw The Beatles? This is what I see:
Why would making it "clean" make it any more attractive to "new younger fans"? Because it doesn't look like it was shot yesterday. It looks like it was shot in 1969, and then processed a lot.
Yeah, very true. That was a modern pickup. There are strict documentarians who would scream about that, even refuse to nominate it for an Oscar (or an Emmy in this case), because of "falsified" footage. I don't recall them identifying this as a recreation, which would have been the honest thing to do. I'm on a deadline with another project, so I have to watch Get Back on the installment plan, an hour or two a day when I have time. But I gotta disagree with Peter Jackson on one major creative choice: he only used material from 1969 (for the most part) for 99% of the documentary. I think it would've been much more interesting to track down everybody still alive and interview them in modern context, so we could understand what they were thinking at the time, how they feel today, and get their perspective on how they felt since the breakup and the album came out. I think to ignore all of that is just kind of weird, plus it's visually boring. I think tracking down later interviews with all of the Beatles talking about Let It Be would have put the whole thing in a better historical context. I get that this was Jackson's choice, plus the production was affected by COVID and other factors.
On a 50" Tv sitting about 8-10 feet away it looked fantastic. But I can imagine someone with a much larger screen at the same distance might be distracted by the processing done to the image.
Now that's funny. You hate this, but you'd prefer Ken Burns do it. He'd be busy slathering his own perspective all over it, maybe making it a story of race relations in Great Britain in the 60's. He's got Billy Preston to reinforce that perspective. As it is, I like the faux Frederick Wiseman feel to the thing. Tedium and ennui with frequent cigarette lightings and the occasional burst of psychodrama and great music.
No, you're right. I'm sorry I brought up Ken Burns. I did not in any way mean to imply he should do his perspective. But that style, he nails it. The Visuals are not jarring or distracting. I guess bottom line is this horror show that Peter Jackson presented is just wrong from the git-go. It's ugly, artificial and distracting. I don't buy into "this story" because everything feels so inauthentic. Give me those unedited tape beeps in lieu of this "presentation" any day!
