Too bad the Shea show won't be part of the video release. It looked and sounded amazing.

But how can you make a documentary about the Beatles' early years and not even mention Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe by name, or have their images on film?

Btw.....were you guys affected by the Chelsea bombing last night? IFC is down that way and I believe there is a movie theater on 23 Street.

Sid Bernstein Presents, LLC (the company run by the late concert promoter) is currently suing Apple over ownership of the Shea footage. Once that's sorted out, I'm guessing that we'll see The Beatles Live At Shea Stadium as a separate release.

Saw it last night in NYC with an audience of Beatlemaniacs. Great fun. But how can you make a documentary about the Beatles' early years and not even mention Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe by name, or have their images on film? <snip>.

'The Beatles: Eight Days a Week' Editor Recalls Sifting Through Archive Footage

Ron Howard's The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – the Touring Years includes among a compendium of fan-sourced clips and remastered videos a surprise 1964 photo of a teenage Sigourney Weaver at a Beverly Hills party where the Fab Four appeared.

Paul Crowder, who cut the concert documentary for Apple Corps and Imagine Entertainment, recalls first spotting a young Weaver in news footage of the Beatles and other celebrities arriving at the party. "I saw in the background a couple of girls sitting by a car, and I thought one looked vaguely like a young miss Weaver," Crowder told The Hollywood Reporter.

In fact, going retro to assemble 1960s amateur and archival performance footage and TV news clips for Howard's concert doc called for detective work to get raw materials, and deft editing.

Besides source material from the Beatles' Apple Corps., the producers reached out to fans for concert footage, in addition to interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from the British pop group's first four years.

Crowder, also a co-executive producer on the doc, says the logistics of handling and restoring raw material with so many different format and frame rates was daunting. Much of the source material, including lost touring act footage shot by fans, was first handled at the offline stage using Avid Media Composer.

"It's incredible how, whatever format the footage arrived in, we would always bring it in its native form — so whether it was PAL, NTSC, or HD, 720 or 1080, whatever it might be, or if it's 25 frames 23.98, or 23.997 — I'd be able to open all those bins and all those frame rates and immediately edit with them and put it in a timeline and it worked," Crowder recalled.

But getting the project to the online stage at an HD level was a different story. That's where Los Angeles-based Chainsaw, which provided postproduction finishing on the project in July and August, came into the picture.

"One of the biggest challenges is a great deal of the source material wasn't in the final cut," Michael Levy, vp business development at Chainsaw, recounted as his team worked with an incomplete master source list while waiting for anticipated media to arrive.

Another challenge: much of the 1960s concert and TV news clip footage was shot in black and white, as color was expensive to produce back then.

"That's why we chose in a few areas to colorize the footage or a photograph, because that would present it slightly differently," Crowder said. For example, when Miami-based reporter Larry Kane is covering the Beatles on tour, only third-generation copy and no master tape was available.

"If you look at the footage, you can tell it's degraded, it's not good, but you still get a feel for the image and the image showing concert mayhem was more important than the quality at that point," Crowder said. In another case, the Fab Four are on a train headed to a Washington, D.C., concert and a BBC interviewer asks Paul McCartney where his band may end up in the history of Western culture.

McCartney appears flummoxed by the question, adding the band were just "having a laugh." Crowder recalled the degradation of that BBC footage in its offline form was bad, and the master didn't improve the faded film's quality.

"But that was such a strong moment, we decided to use it anyway. We put a vignette on it to make it feel not as bad as it was," Crowder explained. His team also had to be detectives to clear certain footage and photos where the originators were no longer alive and the paperwork to clear rights wasn't available.

"So suddenly a piece of footage disappears, or it doesn't arrive until that contract is finally sorted because you're desperate to get that footage," Crowder recalled. What's more, Beatles collectors at times bargained hard to sell rare footage and photos for a big payday.

"It may be about the Beatles, but you don't have deep pockets, and you can't pay the asking prices," Crowder said of the indie doc being held to ransom for crucial materials. White Horse Pictures, Imagine Entertainment and Apple Corps Ltd. teamed in making The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, now on a hybrid Hulu and theatrical release.

In the summer of 1966, a film crew from National Geographic was in Alaska working on a wildlife documentary when they learned that a quarry of a different sort had been spotted at the Anchorage airport.

It was the Beatles, on their way to Japan for a concert tour and momentarily marooned in Alaska as they waited out a typhoon. The National Geographic crew shot footage of John, Paul, George and Ringo getting off their plane and into a waiting bus, crowds of rabid fans craning for a view.

“It was just another reminder that no matter where the Beatles went back then, cameras would follow,” said Matt White, the Silver Spring-based film and video archivist who 13 years ago had the idea to gather as much undiscovered film of the Fab Four as possible.

The result is the stunning new documentary directed by Ron Howard, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.” (It’s playing in area theaters and is available on Hulu.)

The film was born right here and then nurtured at the University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library, where Matt established an office to solicit and collate amateur footage of the Beatles from around the world. He started the project in 2003, certain there had to be movies and photos of the band hidden in the world’s attics and archives. He approached Apple, the company founded by the Beatles, and got the go-ahead to embark on his quest.

Matt, 60, has spent his career working to find moving images. For a 1987 documentary, he gathered cigarette commercials from when tobacco was considered healthy. He also headed a project to preserve the nation’s public broadcasting archives, including hours of civil rights footage sitting on the shelves of PBS affiliates.

Some of the footage for the Beatles documentary came from the oddest places. Everyone knew that Japanese television had filmed the band’s Tokyo show in color, but Matt’s crew unearthed black-and-white film in the police department archives. It had been shot to aid in teaching officers about crowd control.

“No one knew it was there,” Matt said.

Matt’s team also reached out to film transfer facilities, those places that will scan your home movies onto digital media.

“We asked if anyone had brought in Beatles things,” he said. That’s how they found a Massachusetts man who was 10 or 11 in 1966 when the Beatles played Suffolk Downs, a venue outside Boston. Said Matt: “His mother told him he couldn’t go, he was too young. He could go the next year. The Beatles never toured again. He’s been spending his entire life recreating the entire concert.”

In 2012, Matt went to London for three days of meetings with Apple executives. They were delighted with what he had found. A year later, Oscar-winning director Ron Howard was brought on board. The production team screened 100 hours of material before whittling it down to 90 minutes.

The movie emerged from the material, which Matt said is the reverse of how documentaries are typically made, where a script is written and footage is sought to fit it. The film is the story of four friends, their music, the reactions their performances caused and how the stress of touring grew until they decided to stop touring altogether.

The documentary is especially fun for Washingtonians, as it includes tastefully colorized scenes from the Beatles’ Feb. 11, 1964, debut at the Washington Coliseum.

“They were so pumped up,” Matt said of the band. “You can hear the music. It was a different crowd than it would become. It’s not all screaming girls. . . That concert in particular, of all the things they do, is their best live performance. I’m not alone in thinking that. It is a D.C. treasure.”

Lately, Matt has been traveling to Havana to help sort through Cuban film archives, much of it threatened by poor storage amid high temperatures and humidity. And he’s working with a Maryland artist named O.F. Makarah on the Prince George’s Memory Project, seeking old home movies from the county.

“We’ve gotten film of amusement parks that no longer exist, local baseball teams, Cub Scout groups, a rich assortment of pictures,” Matt said. (For information, visit PrinceGeorgesMemoryProject.org.)

Matt’s hope is that the Beatles film will do more than entertain fans. He wants it to spur investment in exploring archives and digitizing film.

“YouTube has created a lot of problems,” Matt said. “People think you can find anything there. It’s kind of an illusion.”

He pointed to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization estimate that of the 200 million hours of analog film and video in U.S. and European archives, only about 10 percent has been digitized.

“Twenty million is a lot of hours, but it means 180 million hours hasn’t been digitized,” Matt said. “It is a demonstration of how there are things that are hidden from sight. If you don’t take care of it, it’s going to go away.”