Well that's a grain management, not grain removal, the grain is still there. If I understood it correctly it smoothens out just a little tiny bit to make it not interfere too much with compression
I don't understand all arguments saying that footage would've looked older if no grain removal was done. Like no, it would've looked newer because this amount of blurrynees is often associated with the mid 2000s TV broadcasts and home videos, and those crappy new music video remasters as of recently, especially one for Foo Fighters - the best of you
So far I've watched two 16mm films scanned to 4K and released in UHD Dolby Vision from the original negatives. The Evil Dead (1981) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) Both looked exceptional in 4K without excessive noise nor overbearing graininess. They aren't perfect, with The Evil Dead being a bit better, yet they both display how properly restored 16mm can look. The information is in the film; the extra details are great in 4K. I think it's a fair comparison to Get Back, since standard 16mm film stock didn't advance much since the early '70s (I'm not talking Super 16mm, or other variants, which isn't applicable here). In fact, I've seen worse 35mm scans to 4K, which were shot on cheaper film stock with a high ISO, when compared to The Evil Dead. I'm waiting to for Second Sight's release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 4K to give my final edict on that one, but it should prove to be a more professional restoration than the one released by Turbine, in Germany.
I think the difference is the two horror motion pictures were filmed with equipment and -just guessing here- film stock that was better than what was used for Get Back?
TCM was shot on Eastman Kodak 7252 while Beatles Let it Be/Get Back seasons were shot on eastman Kodak 7254
A bit off-topic but this is one of the most hilarious examples I've ever seen on the abuse of digital restoration tools. All parts of the pictures were characters are not moving have been transformed into still pictures to get rid of heavy warping in the surviving film elements. I laughed out loud the first time a saw this restoration on Bluray. They should've just left the warping untouched. The foreground plus the right side of the picture has been redone as a still in this scene
I mean, leaving a movie looking like you're watching it drunk is not ideal either. The actual solution is to provide the original and restored versions alongside each other but, y'know, $$$$$.
I think I'd have to see the "before" to make up my mind on that one perhaps the foreground element in this scene was deemed "distracting" or something. I did notice when looking at the brush that the focus changes on the foreground but the rest of the table stays in focus because it's a still frame from somewhere in the scene which has been sort of pasted on top. I also think they could've done a better job making it blend with the rest of the image as it still has grain in it but the rest of the image appears to be denoised. I've seen that the movie is on AppleTV so I might have to rent it and have a look at the complete movie. I did a sort of sloppy job in photoshop to show how if they had just denoised the still part of the image beforehand it might have blended in a bit better. Particularly if they had placed a layer of grain back over the top of it to help sell the illusion that they haven't just pasted a still on top of the video. Though I haven't seen them before so maybe the wobble in the image isn't as bad as they thought it was and would've looked better than taking a still frame to try and hide it.
Thanks! I watched the Bluray on a 83'' OLED so the digital weirdness was very apparent. I did try to add fake-grain in realtime using Madshi Video Renderer and it definitely made it look more seamless. I'm a purist and appreciate the look of analog film in digital restoration more than anything so I would still prefer to see it with all that warping intact. The warping is very heavy at times but I would still prefer it over all that digital weirdness. There's no acceptable way to correct it digitally just as there's no acceptable way of removing film grain or tape hiss.
Whilst I do appreciate the purism of leaving film grain intact and also appreciate the look of film stock I do disagree with the idea that there is no "acceptable" way to remove film grain from an image, or at least a lot of the film grain from an image as I've found the most recent version of Neat Video to produce extremely good results when you play around with the settings and get a good sample of the grain. And I'm working with compressed footage, if I had raw scans in ProRes or something I could probably get a much better result. I understand tape hiss removal has also gotten very good though I have no experience in this myself I'm sure perfect results are not far off. It could be that within 5 years grain removal and or reduction is completely flawless. Personally, I think film studios should retain the grainy image for physical media and cinema releases and use grain reduction for streaming services.
Are you sure it's grain and not video noise. It is much harder to remove grain because of it's influence on image strucutre
Nah, they missed an opportunity to make even more $ here - release both an original and a restored version separately. The Beatles completists will purchase both regardless... and there's a lot of them.
I thought I was the only one who cared about this... why did i not see this thread before? What I will say after watching the entire documentary. There are moments that are extremely overdone. There are moments that are tastefully done. Would I have preferred film grain over artificial intelligence? Hell yeah. To please everyone... I think they should release a Disney version, and a copy directly for Steve Hoffman forum members. The latter in 4:3 ratio, uncropped, with extra grain and color distortion. What I will say is, the recently remastered in 4K Sympathy for the Devil documentary of the Rolling Stones does a much better job. With that being said coming from 35mm negatives, so the quality will obviously be better. All and all, Peter Jackson did a phenomenal job on choosing the footage. I would say 30-40% of the documentary goes overboard on the nr, but coming from someone who pays attention to this sort of thing.
