YouTube is working with Universal Music Group to remaster iconic music videos
youtube.googleblog.com
youtube.googleblog.com
Stop. Please for the love of all that's good in the world, just STOP.
"Remastered" would be fine if it was just cleaning up the sound and improve the quality but it's not. So many are worse versions of the originals because someone decided to "improve" the original by adding stuff just for the sake (it seems) of "making their mark".
Outside of music it just reminds me of the terrible changes to the original Star Wars trilogy (can we get the originals, Disney, PLEASE?).
If you really feel like you need a different version, do it. Just don't hide, destroy, delete and otherwise eliminate the original.
Perhaps they are re-sampling, upscaling, enhancing color and filtering to get rid of NTSC color artefacts, etc., contained in the original edited masters but they are almost certainly not re-mastering using the original sources or even submasters (such as might be done when re-mastering audio from the original multitrack master).
Here is the remastered Petty Free Fallin' and although it is presented at 1080 it is still 4:3 aspect and is clearly not at HD resolution; it looks very soft by today's standards.
To make things even worse, sometimes companies will even crop 4:3 footage to be 16:9, resulting in less things being visible than in the original.
Thankfully judging by the videos linked in the blog (at least the ones I've looked at), they've left the restored videos in 4:3.
For a good idea of how bad things can get when a company doing restoration messes with aspect ratios, this video highlights the bad restoration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
I learnt a while back that George Lucas allegedly did those edits to prevent his wife from earning her royalties as editor: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7g5gfr/til_m...
For an extreme example of this, check out Blind Guardian on Spotify and compare some of the songs to the versions on YouTube. Some of them don't even sound like the same song.
Great option, however.
Yada yada, yes copyright should have sane term limits, and yes maybe copyright is a weird idea to begin with, but that's not the issue here.
Fair use is essential to allowing open debate in our country, and Youtube is negligent in creating a system which does not allow for legally exempted fair uses.
https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/copyright/fair-use/#yt-copy...
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
If they want to collect any revenues YouTube should force them to sue individual creators in the courts. Unfortunately YouTube is rewarding the bad behavior of one of their biggest clients instead.
What if your video contains two fragments, owned by different people? And what if one of those people is you or a friend?
So really, there's nothing to fix. Notice that the text keyed on top of the still is at full resolution.
Having good quality music videos playable on my own media server is something what I've been wanting for at least 15 years.
The excessive compression YT applies, only they can fix. It especially annoys me they take a SD definition source to mean "well surely the uploader doesn't care about the quality of this video, so lets apply the lowest quality setting to it". If you have a high quality but low resolution video you have to upsample it before uploading to get around this. But of course most SD videos on there didn't do this.
How can you download something in opus using youtube-dl? I mean downloading it in opus, not telling youtube-dl to download it in some other format and then convert it to opus. I've tried it on some of the videos and before reencoding, the audio was in vorbis which is a great format and at high bitrates not very distinguishable from opus, but still opus is better.
--prefer-free-formats
Prefer free video formats unless a
specific one is requested
-x, --extract-audio
Convert video files to audio-only files
(requires ffmpeg or avconv and ffprobe or avprobe)
--audio-format FORMAT
Specify audio format:
"best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a",
"opus", "vorbis", or "wav";
"best" by default; No effect without -xhttps://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md...
youtube-dl -f 251 <url>
(Use `youtube-dl -F <url>` to see all available formats.)
EDIT to add: the above downloads only the audio, FWIW.
youtube-dl -f 251 $url
ffmpeg -i "$file" -vn -acodec copy basename -s .webm "$file".ogg
youtube-dl -f 140 "${@%%&*}"
I've checked one of the remastered videos, and not seen any better audio option.
Since you're already using automator, you should be able to add the "run an applescript" action to add the file to itunes
From https://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/info03.php:
open
Use this command to add a file to a Master Library ("Music", "Audiobooks", and so on, depending on the kind of track) and start play. Requires the alias of the file to open, which suggests you might want to use the AppleScript "choose file" command.
tell application "iTunes"
open (choose file)
end tellSee for example the highest quality available version of Stan Bush - The Touch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZKpByV5764
Versus the "HD Restoration" using footage from the Blu-Ray rip of the Transformers Movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A52--FKUQgU
Unfortunately, you lose the actual performer in the restoration.
Well he’s still present, except relegated to the bottom right corner. But I see what you mean.
Also, I hope that they adopt flac. Right now they seem to use lossy codecs.
Furthermore, you underestimate the amount of bandwidth savings when you multiply it over millions of viewings. It really adds up. It totally makes sense for them to use Opus. They save money, and the viewer loses nothing. Shaving pennies is an effective way for a business to cut expenses. Thousands of small changes, insignificant by themselves, can have a significant impact on EBITDA.
(i.e. Youtube)
The people who really care could turn it on (perhaps at the account level), and they'd be happy, and YouTube still saves on bandwidth costs.
It may be this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9OofzEMBAk
I think that one day this will totally be possible. Can you imagine, with the help of future technology and algorithms, watching film from the 1940s (Gone with the Wind) that looks just as sharp and real as a modern day movie in 4k? Or even, seeing a concert (Michael Jackson) from the 80s that looks so clear that you can really feel what its like to be there?
I like how the new version is attached to the original database entry for the video: it still has a 2009 upload date, 65M views, and user comments, etc.
- "exclusively on YouTube"
- Tom Petty’s music video for “Free Fallin’” released 30 years ago
Yup. Unless you have a license from Universal, you won't be able to host/download/reproduce/show the original version for another 68 years. You won't be able to do the same with the remastered version for possibly much longer time.
Welcome to "most important works in history carefully protected by corporate shills"
Perhaps it's just the fallibility of my own memory, but looking at the No Doubt and Beastie Boys videos linked I don't recall them looking terribly different to what they do now.
It'd be great to have a side by side comparison, or perhaps some information on which ones they're going to work on so I can grab them now and do it myself later.
Often times, even professionals working with older, standard-definition video end up processing it incorrectly, or may be working with digitizations in which someone else already made an error. Interlacing is almost never handled by a "double framerate" method (in which a 30fps interlaced video, each frame consisting of two 60Hz fields, is transformed into a 60fps progressive video). As well, often times such video is even captured with every other field missing (more common in VHS captures than professionally-handled captures, but that's a slight digression).
Also, SD video really does look best on an SD CRT display. Often times, the upscaling to HD, as well as the differing visual properties of typical HD displays, will cause the inherent flaws of the SD material to be more pronounced. You won't ever get a true comparison without seeing the video playing on a decent SDTV. And honestly, playing these videos on an SDTV would probably look amazing compared to what you would have seen on MTV in the 80s and 90s.
As it goes for new digital transfers from 16mm or 35mm sources, it's a case by case thing to me, if the production looks "cheaper" when, it was not intended to by consumed beyond SD quality, better don't go over 720p remasters or it might look weird.
The new version can't compete with new content in 4k of course, but it is much better than the previous official copy.
I don't know the production history of the music video industry, but The Killers and Lady Gaga are from an era (early 2000s) that could have been shot digitally.
It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K.
Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master."
Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating.
Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.
I can't prove it, but in the decades that followed, this vocal was replaced. The vocalist and backing may have been the same (??) but the vulnerability was gone. The original version became unavailable in any format (except originals).
Same music?? hardly. Many 'B' sides became hits -solely- because of the qualities of the performance. (Example: 'Louie Louie'.) So, it all hangs on who does the re-mastering ... and whether the mastertape survived.
Björk - All is Full of Love
Made in 1999 :-O
The first difference you can notice is that the old version sounds kinda metallic, while the new one actually contains details.
The second difference, opening it in audacity, is that there is a slight time offset between the two versions of about 500 ms, the remastered version being "later". This of course has implications to old links that point to parts of the music video at specific offsets and in other music videos the offset could be larger.
After I've manually synced the file, and normalized both waveforms, I've made some screenshots of the waveform and fft at around 7 or 8 seconds covering the 5-6 second long part where he sings "I could lie to myself but it's true" [4]. The stereo channels of the new version are above while the old version's channels are below. You can notice that they have reversed some effects of the loudness war here: the old sample has far more dnymic compression than the new one. In the FFT plot you can see much more detail, especially in frequencies above 2kHz.
Except for the offsets, they've done a great job!
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKO5ozLVo
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190402133747/https://www.youtu...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110930072812oe_/http://o-o.pre...
So much emotion in most of the comments. Love it, hate it... but not much info.
Looks like the video was filmed originally. Wonder if any more quality could be squeezed out of it, the 1920 res vesion does have additional details but not a ton. This is much better than the average old video on yt, however.
I'm having trouble identifying the differences.
Supply has exploded exponentially. Music is never going to be as profitable as it was previously (and it wasn't very profitable previously). Their lack of a modern business model is not a valid reason to rent-seek the poor if they want to participate in culture.
The music industry is doing pretty decently. Streaming revenues are significant and industry revenue has been growing for years.
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-record-industry-e...
For the artists themselves, live touring looks to be their most reliable way to make money.
I'm more inclined to think that streaming revenue will plateau around ~$10-13B. It makes sense that demand for streaming is a bit more than demand for CDs, because it allows cheaper monetization of the long tail and recurring revenue. However, I'd be surprised if the industry ever pushes over that $21.5B inflation-adjusted peak again though.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
Rent-seeking music labels have done a good job determining the maximum amount that consumers are willing to pay for music. Now we as consumers should make an effort to ensure the maximum percentage of revenue reaches artist. UMG siphoning 85% of revenue is abhorrent.
The right to determine the terms by which their product is distributed.
When you want something, and you don’t want to pay for it.
It's one thing to steal and acknowledge it, but it's a completely different thing to steal and pretend as if you're doing the world a favor and standing up for disadvantaged people. You stealing music helps you and only you at the expense of others. You're cheapening legitimate anti-capitalist rhetoric by abusing it for such a self-important and intellectually void purpose.
The equivalence between cultural content sharing and theft was manufactured by the intellectual property lobby in recent history.
None of moral reasons for prohibiting theft apply to intellectual property. The marginal cost of production is zero. Society is poorer for enabling the greedy to charge admission for access to culture and information.
You're free to make your own calculus, but it seems that your opinion is in the minority here.
What is your definition of 'music theft' that is distinct from sharing music?
I believe in situational ethics. If someone steals, and you can avoid paying them, why pay someone who would steal from you?
Let's not pretend that using lobbyists to buy politicians to curtail freedom is less than stealing. It's actively participating in the undermining of democracy.
Rent seeking institutions should be taken down via any peaceful means available.
Seriously, couldn't we do it using deep learning?
Regardless of the techniques one might use to remaster it, you always want to start the remastering process with the best-possible source material.