SMDegrain - Avisynth wiki this has way more options than neat video. and i have used neat video a few times
There probably isn't really much of an audience from the younger demographic for this but there will be a general audience which Disney will want to appeal to and I imagine that will be something Jackson has in mind. That general audience will be mostly of the 'older' generation but, unlike a lot of us on here, won't care less about what the source material looked like, should look like etc. They will just want it to look nice on their big TVs when they watch it, so it looks like something that could have been made yesterday which won't be too jarring coming from watching Dancing with the Stars or The Great British Bake Off... Not saying anything is right or wrong here, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all, but I can understand why Jackson would take the approach of cleaning the film up as much as possible. Whilst I hear what you are saying about his WWI , They Shall Not Grow Old, project and that he went to far if I remember at the time most of the general film critics thought it looked excellent at really brought it into the modern age.
Exactly, that was the whole point. The fact that a first world war movie looked like it has been recently made, running at correct speed made it much much more effective. It removed the distance one can feel when watching poor footage and drew you in completely. A great movie If he produced a film that looked like the original poor looking Let it Be then I am sure the criticism would be huge. And as I have stated according to my eyes he has done a fine job
I wasn't rating the quality I was giving the stated reason. The 5.1 mixes are interesting, I don't bother with the new stereo mixes.
But the remix isn't an attempt to "sound modern" - it doesn't adopt 2021 production techniques. Whereas the movie appears to want to make the footage look like it was shot on hi-def video and it seems to change colors from the original. Look, I'm interested in "Get Back" for the content. If it looks as crappy as it might, then I'll be unhappy, but I'm not gonna reject it or be miserable as I watch it because I don't like these choices. If it's a good movie/mini-series, I'll enjoy it. I didn't care for "8 Days a Week", but that wasn't because of the dumb visual choices - it was because I thought it was a badly flawed documentary...
Superficially, I understand the appeal of "Grow Old". We're used to crappy, ugly footage from the 1910s, so the presentation of it cleaned up and in color and with a "modern audio" dazzles. For a couple of minutes. Then the flaws become more apparent. Then you see that the "colors" aren't realistic and the noise reduction techniques make everyone look like cartoons and the dubbed speech doesn't match well and the sound effects seem fake. Well, that's what I took from it, at least. When I saw the trailer, I felt blown away, but when I saw the movie, I couldn't get past how phony the whole project felt. Obviously plenty of others disagree, and... that's okay! But I felt PJ's attempts to make the WWI footage look "modern" meant I was more disconnected from the reality. It was such a bizarre presentation that I couldn't invest in the stories as well as I'd like. The interviews with the veterans were great. The actual footage as presented... not so much.
Exactly, thank you. I saw They Shall Not Grow Old in the theater (fortunately in 2D) and it was powerful and moving. Peter Jackson did something truly astounding, making these people who looked distant and "old timey" alive and vital, and it was incredibly powerful.
Here's what has happened with the "Let It Be" footage over the years: Up until around the time of the "Beatles Anthology", nobody had really seen much material from the 16mm negative. All those home video versions (and TV airings) looked awful, from cropped, blown-up 35mm prints. Then we got the footage from the 16mm negative for "Anthology" (and some subsequent projects like EPK materials for "Naked" in 2003, etc.). It looked great, and had more image information. It looked pretty pristine, and didn't look super grainy, because a lot of that 16mm film grain was being covered up by the SD resolution of TV/VHS/DVD. Cut to the "1" Blu-ray from 2015, and this was the first time any substantive material scanned from the 16mm negative was seen in full HD quality. Guess what? Watch "Let It Be", etc. from that "1" Blu-ray. Very grainy! That's how the 16mm footage looks! It looks clearer than "Anthology" footage, but also more grainy! What Jackson's team has done, at least for this trailer (and likely for the actual series) is scrubbed that grain away, because it does make the footage look old. He's pumped the colors and removed the grain to make the thing look colorful and punchy and modern. Everybody does look waxy. Now, I'd argue this isn't *as* egregious if you just watch it on its own and don't A/B it against what the film grain *should* look like. But this stuff about "well, you don't know where the other footage came from!", etc., no, we're talking 2015 footage *from Apple*, scanned in HD from the 16mm negative. Indeed, even Jackson's *own* preliminary footage from the earliest 2020 trailer is not as waxy and processed-looking. It's not going to make me not watch the series. But this footage has *absolutely* been *agressively* processed, leaving everything looking a bit like wax figures. Cropping for 16x9 and pumping the colors are also agressive modernizations. I'm hoping at least the (alleged) eventual release of the original LIB film on Blu-ray will be 4x3 and retain the grain as it should be.
Sir Paul and Peter Jackson saw this as an opportunity to write a NEW "happy ending" to The Beatles story. ALL the early comments from Paul, Ringo and Jackson run along the lines of, "See...The Beatles were still having fun!". We will very likely NEVER see the 1970 film ever again.
The Beatles weren't covered in grain when they were being filmed. Someone playing stuff in a studio in 1969 would look the same as someone playing in a studio in 2021, taking into account different clothes, hair lengths etc. We have a film made in 1970 that has many limitations, the new one will hopefully look more lifelike because of the techniques applied. We will see if this is the case. Those zooming in to a photo and worrying about slight differences in color are missing the point. The original colors as seen on film were not necessarily correct.
That's semantics. I think one could quite reasonably compare de-mixing to noise removal from film. Same intent. The results may not be to ones taste but greater clarity is the goal. If not, what then? Will there come a day where noise removal from film becomes a no-no like noise reduction from audio? I dunno.
I noticed that waxy look very quickly on this new trailer that was released a couple of weeks ago and it was distracting. And you are right, I don't notice it on the first preview trailer from Dec 2020, which I think has a much nicer and more natural look.
I feel that what they have done to this trailer is akin to what Graham Nash did to CSNY 1974, where he used autotune to fix some of the vocals (mostly his own). For me, Pushed it over the End is effectively ruined, because the original vocals were sufficiently out of tune to leave significant artefacts to the final product. Similar thing happened to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concerts, which were autuned to death.
No. Grain removal from film is the same as removing tape hiss from recordings. IMO, grain removal is more about the fact people hate grain than it is "greater clarity", as grain removal - and hiss removal - inevitably remove detail/information. With movies, they often take away grain and then artificially "sharpen" the film to compensate. So you're left with something that loses actual detail and substitutes fake "sharpness". A tasteful scan process makes the film look as clean/clear as possible while it retains the original photography. It seems weird to me that on a board where audiophiles aspire to hear music as close to the master tapes as possible, they then want movies that've been altered/manipulated.
to the "covered in grain" thing. Of course there was no grain floating around the studio. But you can't remove grain from film without the loss of photographic information. It doesn't matter what the Beatles looked like in the studio - it matters what the film looked like.
Autotune is gross. Melodyne is more subtle. Everyone seems to use it. I suppose the home vids of McCartney would be a bit painful without. Live is one thing, but I can't listen to Kisses on the Bottom, drenched in it.
And that's the crux of the issue from my POV. If they all end up looking like mannequins, what's the point of this whole exercise??? No thanks to that look, 100%.
No, this is a new film. There would also have been a transfer process in place for the original from the negative. Peter Jackson is able to do this better now it appears , and I see no loss of detail, quite the contrary it looks more detailed Of course he is just an unqualified hack who doesn't know what he is doing (insert emoji of your choice here)
