Right, but you've got to do something. The iPad Peter showed off during the Things We Said Today podcast interview just had a black screen with No Footage written on it when there was, well, no footage. I highly doubt that would be preferable to have cutting in and out over 8 hours.
I just listened to the three plus hour podcast interview with Peter Jackson, and he said there were bits of film as short as 7 seconds. He showed the hosts the iPad he had with all the Nagra audio synced up with the camera footage, and he said more than half of the audio had no matching footage.
Fact is, people don't want a technically-flawless excavation of verifiable historical documentation and SMPTE-guaranteed accuracy. They want a movie.
That's when filmmakers need to be creative. It is an art and a craft. I worked on a film project on screenwriting once, and the writer William Goldman said in an interview, "sometimes you have to kill your darlings." Meaning, sometimes things you desperately want to put in or have worked hard to shoot, must be eliminated for the betterment of the film. To me it seemed like Jackson was unable to pare down dialogue to make the same point. I feel he cut the audio strictly for content and then (badly) patched the missing sync sound footage to cover, thereby creating a mess visually. That is not cinema. Too much of this is very shoddy work. I'm ordinarily very slow to criticise the work of other editors and filmmakers, but many of the scenes simply do not pass muster in my estimation. I will watch the rest. I'm highly interested. But... Bill
Yes, and movies can be distracting when what we see and what we hear are clearly coming from different places.
No, in such cases you need to artfully balance what you have sync sound and figure out how to gracefully weave that that material with audio portions that have no corresponding film. With an emphasis on artful. That's the challenge of good documentary film editing. It is a hard job. Takes skill. This amalgamation of footage was not done artfully. I take no pleasure in saying so. Bill
Well, I take no pleasure in even bothering to point out, Peter Jackson is a director with skill and a pedigree, as well as the person who was given the responsibility to do that job. A "spy car" is perhaps not in that category, so the opinions offered have to be taken on par with the person whose reputation precedes him, and indeed, earned the gig. One man's "artfully" is just another man's opinion.
Having the tenacious ability to respond to absolutely anything that does not meet your version of the facts, as astounding as your knowledge base may be, is not a guarantee of being right about objective observation.
It's not clear what you're talking about. Could a better job have been done filling in the gaps where film didn't exist? I'm not sure. But suggesting that it couldn't be possible because Peter Jackson did it is pretty silly. As is suggesting that people don't notice or care when what they are seeing and hearing are obviously from different sources.
Literal decades of observation, having never seen a hill you won't die on to have the last word, and having never seen anything such as "you may be right about that", "sorry I didn't consider that" or "ya know what, you're right" ever come from your keyboard. And with that, I'm fine not taking any more bandwidth of this thread trying to play devils advocate for, again, the guy who earned the gig, and made the editing decisions he was empowered to make, which were approved by the guys who had that authority.
"He earned the gig" and "approved by the guys who had that authority" don't mean his work is immune to criticism, or that it is automatically the best it could be.
Jackson's work on the World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old was the proof of concept for this one, and he did a brilliant job with that one. He had an incredibly difficult job to do, because not only did he have no footage for a huge number of important things, the Beatles themselves were being a pain in the butt. For instance, if they wanted to say something to one of the other guys and not have it recorded, they would tunelessly strum on their guitars. One of the techs at Weta took a piece of software developed at Oxford University for police forensics and vastly improved it to remove the guitar sound and recover the speech.
There you are being your usual graciously insulting self. I have earned a professional reputation in my field and would not put out work that looks as hacked as many of the scenes in Get Back. There is some very poor filmmaking going on there. Bill
Honestly, not intending any sort of "insult", so much as confidently committing the grievous sin of not sharing another persons' opinion. But then, this isn't the first time you have found that irritating quality of mine to be unworthy of your patience, has it.
No, it's not that you don't simply share an opinion, it's that you have repeatedly suggested that Peter Jackson is above criticism. A bit of a difference between "that doesn't bother me" and "you're wrong because it was done by Peter Jackson".
I have a question for you guys who do video editing/restoration. It was sort of asked a few pages ago.... Would the normal denoising practice be to effect it into a final edit of the entire production? Or on individual pieces of film first that have been marked for inclusion? It would seem to me that you'd have to treat each film section as its own entity to be denoised one section at a time. But my brain tells me that the individually cleaned-up scenes wouldn't necessarily look good against other denoised scenes in the final product....because there'd be incontinuity. Curious on the workflow. As an aside, I haven't watched any of the documentary yet. I'll probably begin in a couple of hours with equal attention to the overall piece as well as technical aspects. I still vividly remember my girlfriend & I sitting in a theater, watching Let It Be the week it was released. Having experienced the entire Beatle era in realtime, we were bored out of our minds and the film quality didn't help.
I regret not putting you on ignore immediately, when I knew it was best. You have no idea of my "pedigree," but I have worked editing on an Oscar winning feature documentary, edited an Oscar nominated short documentary, and have worked on multiple Emmy nominated television docs. I know bad documentary film editing when I see it. Goodbye. Bill
No thanks to a "Get Back" with "historical context". We've had nearly 52 years of "historical context" - better to let the footage speak for itself. Besides, this is essentially supposed to be a new version of the "Let It Be" film, and it didn't come with the kinds of interviews you describe. Besides besides, an awful lot of people involved with the original are dead. Whatever "historical context" the interviews could provide would be severely limited due to the absence of so many participants.
Yup. A bonus feature interview with Peter, Paul, and Ringo (ha!) would not go amiss on any physical release, of course.
Apple scanned the footage and (electronically) sent it to PJ. The interview clips show PJ watching watermarked video. PJ was evidently allowed to see everything that way and then he would request high quality copies of the parts he wanted to use. Do we know if the noise reduction processing was done by Apple in England or by PJ's crew in New Zealand? The footage used in the "1+" videos is very grainy (and poorly color corrected). It's my understanding there's always been an analog blurring process even back then to reduce grain if needed. I would have processed the footage about half way between "1+" and "Get Back"