There’s more grain on the re-created cafeteria footage during John and Paul’s secretly-recorded conversation than the actual footage of the Beatles themselves.
Naw, it's a standard documentary thing when you have lots of sound, but the cameras weren't rolling. So you have to "steal" shots and just cram that square peg into a round hole and make it work. In the 1970s, the standard thing we'd do is film the back of somebody's head or a shot of hands gesturing. There is a lot of futzing there, but I think Jackson's reasoning was: "we either grab a shot that's a little bit off, or we have to use a still frame or something worse." I do think the lip-sync could have been better, but I also bear in mind that they worked on this thing for 4 years, so for all I know they believe this is as good as they could get it. I think there were also "wild sound" and no slates and situations like that, so sometimes they have a similar take or they have a shot that almost fits, but not exactly. In those cases, we wind up with rubbery sync, which is a bane of existence for documentary editors everywhere. Yeah, one of the shots I was looking at late last night looked like they'd taken a big wide shot and zoomed into it in order to show the Beatles a little bit better. Bear in mind that a 16mm frame is about the size of a postage stamp, and that is tiny. Blowing it up makes it worse. Compound it with NR and sharpening, and it gets real ugly, real fast. It wasn't gnarly a lot of the time, but there were definitely a few shots that went by were I yelled out "holy ****, that looks awful," so I'm seeing the same thing. But it's not 100% awful 100% of the time. Just some of the time.
Spoiler: Part 2 - potential spoiler The India footage in Part 2 was mastered very well. It looks great, and like the film it is. Sharp and clean with grain where appropriate.
What happened to the other Get Back thread? I just watched a half hour of the special. Nice BRISK Beatle history to start. Good. Short and sweet. But the remake of "Let it Be?" FANTASTIC Immediately the experience felt opened up and alive. Gone was the claustrophobic feel of the original film. I'm just into it... but I'm loving this version.
Okay, since this is the great "de-noising" thread, let me clear up what is going on with this supposed horror show of grain removal. I just scrubbed ahead with the film to see these "awful" scenes. YES, there is INTENSIVE NOISE REMOVAL, but they a highly NON-REPRESENTATIVE of the majority of the film. The extensive de-noising occurs only during the LOW LIGHT SCENES. You can see this scrubbing through the film. A scene shot with no light? Yes, excessive grain removal (but to the eye of the selfie generation, I think not). During the daylight or camera-lit scenes. JUST FINE. So okay, the the footage was DARK AND GRAINY they tried to save it with de-noising, to a level which, I agree, could be called too extreme. But I counter the alternative was just as ugly and probably less palatable to today's generation.
I thought that you were referring here to the following response to another post of yours in the other thread, which does involve a different explanation than the one being given in this thread:
Wouldn't it be easier to use the deep-fake AI technology to create correct lip-synced video?This would even open a lot of "creative" opportunities to make LIB more appropriate for the 21st century viewers (eliminate excessive smoking, stronger language, alcoholic beverages, or even re-scripting some dialogues).
Having finished the 3rd episode I think the worst of the Noise Reduction happens in the 2nd and 3rd episodes inside Apple. Yes, they have added some minor grain back into the image but I guess when you care about this stuff the worst offenses always seem to stand out like a sore thumb. It was still watchable really, you just have really dodgy-looking shots here and there scattered throughout the episodes. I think the rooftop stuff looked pretty good for the most part, I liked how they cut that sequence. There is a lot more tension than in the original film.
Alright Mr sarcastic, for one thing it’s not broad daylight it’s more overcast. For another thing the light during the rooftop concert isn’t particularly interesting compared to the stuff they shot indoors the day after with the lights. I don’t think I said it looks better either.
It does look better since they were closer to beatles, making them use smaller f number, meaning that the lower film speed (ISO) was required. more iso = bigger grain = less detail
Not much lighting in cafeterias, as a rule. What generally happened with documentaries of this era is they wound up pushing the film (that is, letting the film sit in the chemical bath at the lab for a longer amount of time) in order to try to pull out another stop or two of exposure. The end result was grainier than the well-lit stuff, but it could be usable to a point. There's generally an iron-clad rule in documentary making that you cannot shove new words into people's mouths, or twist their speech into something they never actually said, like taking two disconnected sentences and jamming them together in editing. I think that principle would also apply to digitally animating lips to speak real words. The trick of using the back of somebody's head or a distant shot to cover up a camera-rollout and give you the ability to salvage that line is something that goes back at least to the dawn of sound. That is mostly permissible, but there are moral rules about drastically changing the meaning and intent of the subjects. The danger is that if Jackson did do something like manipulate live-action lips, then the question arises, "how much of this is fake? How much of this is real? What if he just hired actors to recreate the Beatles' voices, and then faked their faces to cover it up?" The last thing you want with a documentary is to create doubt and mistrust in the minds of the audience. The whole show was shot on Kodak 7247, which was ASA 100 (later ISO). That is slow as crap, relatively speaking. I've shot on it, and it is miserable film stock. But it's pretty much all there was in 1969, save for maybe B&W or reversal stock, which also was very grainy. 16mm eventually got a lot better, but not in this era. BTW, you can look at the HD remaster of Woodstock, and that was all shot on 16mm negative around the same time. But they tweaked the living hell out of that in order to make it look reasonable in the HD era. I don't recall anybody complaining about NR or enhancement or anything else with that film.
They must've done a really good job on Woodstock because I don't remember having any issues with the image, though I can't remember when I watched it and I would have watched whatever version was on iTunes.
That cafeteria footage was obviously not shot in 1969. It was a recreation to serve as some kind of visual for an audio-only sequence. In that recreation, they added in grain to give it an older look, ending up with more grain than in any other shot in the film. I found it to be ironic.
Overcast is much better for shooting - nice diffuse light, no harsh shadows to deal with. The main thing is that the film could be fully exposed, and they didn't need a whole bunch of bounce surfaces to fill in the shadows.
I've shot enough in overcast conditions to know it doesn't mean perfect shooting conditions, it can also be a very dull look unless that's what you want in the image. They had lights on the roof which shows that they were either trying to make it a bit more interesting or they were a little bit concerned about the exposure. if you watch the stuff on the 1 Blu-ray it's actually still quite grainy footage. As I said, I didn't say it was better or worse and you chose to get all sarcastic with me all I said was that it "looked pretty good for the most part".
Anyone else enjoy the exchange between Paul and the group on how they should have gone with 35mm film instead of 16mm, since 16 blown up to 35 looks awful? And then George's retort that any distributor would be f***in fools to not use it either way. I feel like they could both be members on this forum.
