Non of this matters. The difference is clear as day and is easy to spot. I don't need to be a producer to know what a compressed/limited audio track sounds like or that is sounds like excrement. That is weak age-old argument. We have properly working eyes and of it looks like a bunch of wax figures in the final product, the arguments about pedigree and experience will immediately go out the window and we'll still be left with a crappy horrible product. I could apply the same arguments you've brought up for Chicago's 50th Anniversary remaster fiasco and they'd have zero weight because of the extremely horrendous end result.
Are folks pleased with the 50th Anniversary LET IT BE... LPs / CDS packaging / sonics, or is it just the GET BACK film, least by the trailer?
I will reserve judgement, but as a someone who spent his career in editing and post-production in Hollywood, the samples presented do make me concerned that they've overdone it with the digital noise reduction. I'm actually fairly open to using digital tools to improve images, so no "purist" here. I do hope the release version has not gone too far. I seek to enjoy this when I have the opportunity and don't want to be distracted by way-over-processed video. Fingers crossed. Bill
Wow, that bottom one looks bad. I don't mind some grain reduction- that top one does have quite a bit- but it looks like they removed every last bit of it and worse is the artifacts from the sharpening. I can see the haloing around objects quite plainly. I'm sure this looks super clean and high quality to some, but to me it just looks fake. I certainly won't say the top one looks great, though. But there has to be some kind of compromise where the pic can be cleaner but not look like CGI.
Get back looks like one of those music videos that claim to be remastered. It's just denoising and sharpening. The only difference is that one comes from analogue tape and the other from original negatives.
I don't mind--at all. It's a new project. Something like JAWS...the grit/grain is missed on digital, harms the experience.
Thao Shall Not Grow Old uses footage shot in the early days of motion picture film, well before sound sync and a standardised frame rate. Hand cranked cameras and it was footage that had probably been used before in one documtary or another. The goal of that project was to take this footage which has a very distinctive look and make it feel more relatable to todays audiences. That meant that they had to interpolating the frame rate up to 24, colourizing the footage, recording new audio... Get Back doesn't need any of that, Oh it's a bit grainy because it was shot in the 60s on 16mm film, oh no. Ron Howard didn't need to DNR the B-Roll of days a week to within an inch of it's life and.
I don't know what system they used to scan this film, but I feel pretty confident in saying that whatever system they use today does a better job than whatever system they used "X" number of years ago. For instance (and this is just speculation) over the last several years, they have been using x-rays to examine paintings to discover "under paintings" or the charcoal drawings that the artist used to make a sketch to plan out the painting. It occurs to me that the same technology could be used to scan color negative film in depth, to extract each area of sensitivity, not letting the grain of other colors affect the specific color being scanned.
I wouldn't know the condition of all the footage and I've only seen a copy of a copy of the original on video. Who knows what they were working with? Agree to disagree. If this were the original cut, showing in a movie theater, on a film projector I might agree.
They probably used the Laser graphics Director 10K film scanner, which has some cool technology on it but what we are seeing here with the noise reduction is done post scanning with software.
I think the bottom image looks five times better. I’ve been a photographer for 50 years and if, back then, I could’ve cleaned up the image of my grainy 400 Kodak film like that - I would haven been astounded: what magic is this! I think anyone who thinks the top image looks better is cuckoo. you have to be kidding me. If you grew up doing photography you fought grain your entire life … because grain sucks. Grain means you did not have enough light. You would use every developing trick you knew to avoid grain. Grain is not an artistic statement shooting a documentary. Back then, grain was the result of picking a “fast” film that you thought might actually work indoors, Unfortunately “fast” speed films came with lots of grain. The top image looks like a newspaper someone left out in the rain compared to the bottom image for detail. It’s incredible to me that they withdrew that much information and detail. Incredible. Unless of course your idea of detail is looking at GRAIN. LOL. I ask you viewers, do yourself a favor and zoom in on your iPad only to Billy Preston’s face and tell me which looks better. Then imagine seeing that on a 30 foot screen.Honestly I find this noise reduction complaint absurd, when we’re looking right at these samples and the magic of 21st-century photographic technology at work - which has wrought vast image improvement to this film.
Basically, all you've said here is that you hate grain therefore the image below is better, I wonder myself how closely you've looked at this image because the tradeoffs to get rid of all that 16mm grain you hate so much is huge, ringing artifacts from the artificial sharpening to the blotchy image, smearing all over the image but sure, yeah, it doesn't have any film grain on it. I wonder how you'll react when you see that they've added film grain back into the image on the final film.
No I said there’s less grain and MORE DETAIL. Here’s a hint, grain removes detail. Grain is missing spots in your detail. They’re using a computer to extrapolate what color would go in the missing grain spots and they are correct. Working for various newspapers I color corrected and prepared tens of thousands of news photographs for publication and worked many long hours to extract the kind of enhanced detail they are doing to this film. I hope they screen this film side-by-side with an original print, so I can relive that grungy someone’s 8mm-porno-in-the-basement feel that you always got at the midnight showings of “let it be” - of which I saw plenty as a Beatles fan. And yet I would return time and time again only to leave thinking “Boy, that was depressing.”
There is NOT more detail, how you can look at this image and come to that conclusion I have no idea. It looks sharper because they've sharpened the image, the image itself is smeary and totally devoid of any detail. The image above looks more natural because there is no artificial enhancement going on. I've looked at super-resolution images and AI-enhanced images before and this isn't that. Let it Be was supposed to look rough, unpolished. It was never meant to look like it was shot on or at least try to look like it was shot on an Arri Alexa. It should reflect its era, not people who can't stand the sight of a little film grain.
Beyond that, since the days when you were working on trying to get highly detailed images, they come up with so many new techniques. One of the main things about these new techniques is that they're not working solely with individual frames - they're collecting information from a sequence of frames, and using that to sharpen each individual frame. It dates back to a technique that was invented to analyze the video of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, where they can stack frames on top of each other, match known details from each frame, remove the motion, and use that to add that detail back - temporal interpolation. It's like the arguments against colorization, where the people who are opposed to it can't accept that there's been any improvement in the technology in 30 years. When you combine that with the inability of ultra orthodox Beatleites to accept any modification of holy scripture, we're going to wind up going around and round and round...
Pic ( bottom pic) what’s with the adjoining studio blue windows behind Billy Preston did originally have a blue light ?
