With more time unexpectedly on his hands, Jackson transformed his feature film into the six-hour epic." Jackson's documentary "was originally set to open in theaters last year as a two-and-a-half hour feature film, but was pushed back by the pandemic.Jackson's team also "carefully restored, upgraded and enlarged the grainy original 16-millimeter" footage from the 1969 documentary Let It Be "so that it now pops with vibrant color.".Jackson and his team started work in 2017. "Get Back" tapped nearly 120 hours of previously unheard audio recordings.Other interesting observations from the Post: "What we've managed to do is split it all apart in a way that is utterly clean and sounds much better," Jackson said. Using MAL, Jackson and his colleagues were able to painstakingly and precisely isolate each and every audio track - be it musical instrumentation, singing or studio chatter - from the original mono recordings made for most of "Let It Be." The Washington Post describes it as "a sort of sonic forensics," adding that the name MAL was a deliberate homage to the HAL computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey - and to the Beatles' beloved road manager and principal assistant, Mal Evans. They consulted with Paris Smaragdis at the University of Chicago and started to create a neural network called MAL (machine assisted learning) and a set of training data that was higher quality than datasets used in academic experiments. The team scoured academic papers on using AI to separate audio sources but realised that none of the previous research would work for a music documentary. It also recorded background noise and chatter, which made much of the footage unusable. Sixty hours of footage were recorded but most of the audio was captured by a single microphone that picked up the musicians' instruments in a noisy jumble rather than a carefully crafted mix. But long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes writes that the whole documentary "would have been impossible without custom-made artificial intelligence, say sound engineers."
#LET IT BE THE BEATLES DOCUMENTARY TV#
In late 1968, the group agrees they’ll invite an audience to see them perform what would be their penultimate album, and it will also be a TV special.Peter Jackson's seven-hour documentary "Get Back" (now streaming on Disney+) edits footage from the Beatles' ambitious recording sessions for their 1970 album Let It Be. Parts of this story were previously told in the 1970 Michael Lindsay-Hogg film “Let It Be,” which painted a limited picture of events (the Beatles put restrictions on the content Lindsay-Hogg could show), but Jackson and his New Zealand-based production wizards have restored the 16mm color footage to create incredibly pristine and crisp visuals, and have used modern digital audio techniques to separate and isolate guitar pieces, drums, vocals – and unvarnished conversations between the band as they spend January of 1969 rehearsing and recording songs.Ĭlocking in at a total of just under eight hours, but never coming across as padded or anything less than fascinating, “Get Back” opens with a 10-minute montage that serves as a visual Wikipedia entry about the Beatles for the young or the uninformed, taking us through their early days in Liverpool through their meteoric ascendancy to top of the pops, through the hit movies and the controversies and the metamorphosis to more sophisticated and socially relevant music to their decision in 1966 to stop performing live.