Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469840
54 S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Respectfully portraying the (arguably) greatest band of all time must be both an incredible honor and a daunting task. Giles Martin: It was a privilege to collaborate with Peter Jackson on Get Back and to get the chance to share the extraordinary music of The Beatles with a new audience. The new mixes are masterfully done, especially the rooftop performance featured in Part 3. How much of what we now hear was "treated" versus simply isolating or uncovering what was recorded on that chilly day in January 1969? Park Road Post Team: We were utterly committed to presenting The Beatles as they were captured on the day. Any re-recording of music was forbidden, and if there was any repair work done on the basis of dropouts etc., this was done within the context of that recording of the track. Peter Jackson has said that the "sound restoration is the most exciting thing" about the project. Please explain the software that he has called "a machine learning system" and how you were able to remix the original mono recordings? Park Road Post Team: Sorry, Adam, details are on a need-to-know basis. That's not the answer I was hoping for! Park Road Post Team: No, seriously, it's not a secret anymore. Machine learning is becoming part of the post-production toolkit in sound these days— although still in its infancy in how it is applied. We had the advantage of having the support of Peter and Clare Olssen (producer) to explore all the bleeding-edge approaches to enable Peter to reveal the story he could hear, but we could not present to the audience without almost total subtitle support. As it turned out, we enabled 80 percent of the subtitles first applied to be removed. TBH is a technology that cannot be explained in an audio framework. It truly is a dark art—one I often found "Unnatural"— not in the resulting quality or result, but just HOW it managed to find its way to revealing the elements we needed separated. We affectionally called our system "MAL" after Mal Evans, The Beatles' road manager. WingNut Films and Park Road Post Production are continuing to develop "MAL," so watch this space! Can you tell us about the equipment—the mixing desk, monitors, software, plugins, etc.—that was utilized on this? Brent: The mix was completed at Park Road Post Production here in Wellington, New Zealand. We