How Peter Jackson's Beatles Documentary Used Custom AI To Remove Background Noise

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The story was 156851595.

EditorDavid posted on Saturday December 25, 2016 from the getting-back dept.

Peter Jackson's seven-hour documentary "Get Back" edits footage from the Beatles' ambitious recording sessions for their 1970 album Let It Be. The entire documentary would have been impossible without custom-made artificial intelligence, say sound engineers. Background noise and chatter made a lot of the footage unusable.

The team scoured academic papers on using artificial intelligence to separate audio sources but realized that they wouldn't work for a music documentary. They consulted with Paris Smaragdis at the University of Chicago and created a neural network called MAL and a set of training data that was higher quality than academic experiments.

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The Washington Post said that the name MAL was a tribute to the Beatles' beloved road manager and principal assistant, Mal Evans, and that it was a sort of sonic forensics. Jackson and his colleagues were able to painstakingly and precisely isolate each and every audio track from the original mono recordings made for most of "Let It Be." Jackson said that they split it all apart in a way that sounded better.
The Post has other interesting observations.

"Get Back" has over 120 hours of previously unheard audio recordings. Jackson and his team started working.

Jackson's team "carefully restored, upgraded and enlarged the original 16-millimeter footage from the 1969 documentary Let It Be so that it now pops with vibrant color."

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. With more time on his hands, Jackson transformed his feature film into a six-hour epic.

Jackson would like to release an expanded director's cut in the future, but there are no current plans to do so.

Jackson's favorite version of Get Back took 18 hours to finish.

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