Paul restores videos to HD

Recently, Paul McCartney released his “Coming Up” music video on YouTube in high definition quality and for once uncropped in the 4:3 TV format it was made for, instead of the zoomed in fake widescreen edition used for the “McCartney Years” and “McCartney II” DVDs.

Soon, the second video from that album will be available from Paul’s official YouTube channel and we are hoping this video will also be back to its uncropped incarnation. The music video for “Waterfalls” from the McCartney II album was directed by Keith McMillan and released in 1980. The song was the second single off the McCartney II album.

6 Responses

  1. rick says:

    His voice is too high I thought in the Comin Up video

    • David Fisher says:

      Too high for what rick? 🙂 I remember when it came out I was a bit taken aback but you get used to it and the song is a catchy bugger. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the end of the video for WATERFALLS – hilarious! Macca as Mr Gumby breaking things. They always faded it out on TOTP in the day.

    • William Campbell says:

      The video is sped up a bit. When I synchronized CD audio to the 1080p video, I had to speed up the audio slightly.

  2. Shad Radna says:

    Actually the video seems to run slower than the 2011 remaster, although it’s only about a second out over almost four minutes, which you’d be doing well to discern. The video was obviously originally shot at a fixed frame rate to accompany an analogue dub of the record, so presumably if the frame rate was maintained, they’ll have adjusted the remastered audio to match the speed of that original dub.

    Maybe Rick is making a more general comment about the “video version” of the song though, i.e. the proper one? In the US the live version was promoted as the single, but the video obviously still showed the proper version. In one interview where John Lennon said he preferred the proper version, he described it as having speeded-up vocals.

    Paul played around with varispeeded vocals quite a bit around 1966-67. While it seems possible that he and Linda could hit those “Coming Up”s in the chorus, I’d guess they were actually recorded at a slower speed.

  3. Isaac says:

    Waterfalls is my favorite Macca video!

    Maybe someone might be interested: I recently recorded a video of a reimagined version of Waterfalls with my Duo and the participation of Laurence Juber.
    If anyone wants to see it, just search for “Lindsay Isaac Waterfalls” on YouTube.

  4. michael b says:

    it seems to me that “waterfalls” was restored from a video master tape (possibly Umatic) not from a film. I don’t know if they shot the video directly to video tape or it’s just the only tape that survived

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