Thing that hurts the most is the fact that Peter decided to use an awful DNR algorithm. Like if you are going to overdo DNR, at least apply one that doesn't suck.
While I think it is better to wait for the official Blu-Ray to audition, I've watched that program at full HD and all bits from the movie look blurry and out of focus.
I think that point would be more appropriately addressed to those who actually speak about DNR in a way that goes beyond mere criticism of its implementation and instead treat it with a kind of indignation that suggests a moral offense.
I guess if you want to hang an anchor on it, it is a question of integrity vs artistic license. Do we want the film as it is, warts and all (fitting for Let It Be), or cleaned up smoothed out and futurized?
You've just described this in the moralistic way ("integrity") that I was referring to, and so I assume it's now safe to say that you are no longer gobsmacked. In any event, while the question you've raised is valid, I'[d say that what tends to be sidestepped in discussions of this kind (usually involving only audio) is that the pro-"warts and all", or "purist," point of view is sometimes expressed in a way that suggests that those who have a problem with the "warts and all" approach are ipso facto a lesser species of viewer/listener, which is a mistake.
Can you please, for God's sake, use normal words, like the ones you would use in everyday speech. It took me 3 minutes to understand what you were trying to say.
I follow Edgar Wright on Twitter and he tweeted this recently: "I’ve now seen all 7 plus hours of ‘Get Back’ and it’s an incredible window into a band at a fork in the road, as well as a director trying to finish a movie. Funny, emotional, insightful, candid to the point where’s there’s a secretly recorded conversation. Fans will be in awe." I then tweeted: "How did it look? There seem to be some indications they used a LOT of grain removal!" Wright replied: "Looked great to me. They even discuss the merits of blowing up from 16mm to 35mm within the movie." Just tossing this out there as an interesting nugget!
Possible, though Wright made no comment that specifically addressed noise removal. He might like lotsa noise reduction! Also, I doubt Wright would publicly badmouth Jackson on Twitter with criticism of the project. Of course, he could've just ignored my tweet and not responded, so the fact he replied implied he thought they did it right - plus he mentioned the 16mm and 35mm blowup, so it's not like he doesn't understand how those stocks look. I guess we'll know soon enough!
A friend of a friend saw some of it on the big screen and apparently said it looked like you were watching Pixar animation. YMMV
It's a bit of a meme on Twitter, now. Turns out excessive NR makes younger people crack jokes, not get further immersed. Who knew? If all these people who typically don't notice NR are noticing it, they went too far.
I think that noise reduction is not necessarily evil. When used properly, DVNR helps to cut down on bitrate, and reduces the compression artefacts that would result from trying to encode thousands of random grain particles. But I'm certainly not impressed with what I've seen of Get Back. The trailer looks like someone imported the footage into After Effects and applied the default "Remove Grain" filter on max settings. It's a real pity that such an ambitious project has slipped up at the last hurdle.
Small correction: DVNR was the old Digital Vision NR (literally D.V.N.R.) made in Sweden in the 1990s and early 2000s. It never worked well, but it was a fast, easy way to do real-time noise-reduction with standard def. We were pretty horrified by how bad it looked with HD, and to my knowledge they were never able to get it to work. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- uses DVNR anymore. They're doorstops now, a big box of hardware nobody wants. It's all software these days, and there's like 12 or 13 different systems that are all vastly different, all working non-real-time to process and render the final results. What did work pretty well was Digital Vision's later 2010's system called Nucoda Film Master, and they had NR, sharpening, dirt fixing, stabilization, deflicker, and lots of other tools as part of that package. They actually did a pretty good job, but it's like any mastering equipment: you have to have somebody at the controls that says, "wait a minute -- let's dial this back and not goo too crazy here." Nucoda has kind of fallen out of favor, but there are people who like it for some shows. As I've said many times, NR is not a single thing: it's a bunch of stuff. I do plenty of negative that has a noisy blue channel, and once in awhile, I'll apply a bit of NR just to blue only and leave everything else alone. Or I'll see a noisy sky (highlights) and just do a little NR there. Faces are untouched, walls are untouched, objects are unblemished, you can barely notice it. Shadow areas also can get pretty noisy and sometimes we specifically target those alone for NR. Or we do none at all. There is a school of thought that advises that we add grain to help the compression, and compression does have problem when images are too squeaky-clean. Lots and lots of digital TV shows and movies these days add film grain as a final step to give it "texture." So we've kind of come full circle: we used to worry in the 1980s and 1990s about removing grain... now we're putting it back in because the digital stuff is too clean. Anyway, we'll know for sure on Wednesday how good/bad/ugly Get Back looks in 4K Dolby Vision on Disney+. And I'll be watching.
Okay - now that I've seen more footage, I understand your concerns, and agree. They look like wax figures; it's weird and distracting.