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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#111

Post by BoxOfRain »

sph wrote: post #90
Affric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really been the driving force of modern life for centuries at this point.

Centuries is stretching it. It’s central to industrialisation, Taylor, Ford, etc. The relentless pursuit of efficiency and technique. Its anti-thesis is art for art’s sake. In modern tech circles, the utilitarian mindset is going strong, now that the hacker ethos is dead and it’s all about being corporate friendly and hireable.

Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they found it an artistically fulfilling place.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#112

Post by Cthulhu_ »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #103
sersi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as someone who is part of those conservation communities that scan 35mm with donations to keep the existing look, a lot of the people doing those projects are aware of this. They do some color adjustment to compensate for print fading, for the type of bulb that were used in movie theatres back then (using a LUT), etc... I do find that often enough commercial releases like Aladdin or other movies like Terminator 2…

Whats wrong with terminator 2? Are there like multiple digital releases, one with better colour than the other?

There's a 4K version out that does interesting things with colour grading, here's a post I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/Terminator/comments/d65pbi/terminat.... The one on the left is the remaster.

There was similar outrage (if that's the right word) about a Matrix remaster that either added or removed a green color filter, and there's several other examples where they did a Thing with colour grading / filtering in a remaster.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#113

Post by Cthulhu_ »

beAbU wrote: post #68
nappy wrote: post #50

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture w…

> It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical Same applies for people buying modern vinyl records believing them to be more authentic than a CD or (god-forbid) online streaming. Everything comes from a digital master, and arguably the vinyl copy adds artefacts and colour to the sound that is not part of the original recording. Additionally, the vinyl i…

I dunno about authentic but for a while (as another commenter pointed out) they didn't have the loudness maxed out and / or had better dynamic range. That said, music quality aside, vinyls have IMO better collectability value than CDs. They feel less fragile, much more space for artwork and extras, etc.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#114

Post by KaiserPro »

Aha! I used to work in film and was very close to the film scanning system.

When you scan in a film you need to dust bust it, and generally clean it up (because there are physical scars on the film from going through the projector. Theres also a shit tone of dust, that needs to be physically or digitally removed, ie "busted")

Ideally you'd use a non-real time scanner like this: https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/northlight/overview_nl... which will collect both colour and infrared. This can help automate dust and scratch removal.

If you're unluckly you'll use a telecine machine, https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283479247780 which runs much faster, but has less time to dustbust and properly register the film (so it'll warp more)

However! that doesnt affect the colour. Those colour changes are deliberate and are a result of grading. Ie, a colourist has gone through and made changes to make each scene feel more effective. Ideally they'd alter the colour for emotion, but that depends on who's making the decision.

the mechanics are written out here: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/film/digital-intermediary/

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#115

Post by sunaookami »

coopierez wrote: post #105

I'm stunned so many people here can remember details as fine as the colour grading of a film. I couldn't remember specifics like that from 6 months ago, let alone 30 years ago when I was a child and wouldn't have had the thought to watch for cinematographic touches. Side node - I wonder if it's a millenial thing that our memories are worse due to modern technology, or perhaps we are more aware of false memories due t…

Different people just remember different things. I bet most people don't remember either and only going "ah yes of course!" after reading this blogpost (which means they didn't remember at all).

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#116

Post by Theodores »

opello wrote: post #48
charcircuit wrote: post #40

>Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures. This is not true at all. Being compatible with outdated, film based projectors was much more important for being able to show it in as many theaters as possible. If they wanted to do a digital screening it would have been technologically possible.

I bumped on this too, since 1994-1995 was about the time when multi-gigabyte hard drives were readily available and multiple full motion video codecs were being used in games, albeit for cut scenes. Theater projector compatibility makes complete sense.

In period I was somewhat in charge of the render queue at a small animation company. I had to get rendered images onto tape, as in Sony Digibeta or better. Before that I had to use film.

We had an incredible amount of fancy toys with no expense spared, including those SGI Onyx Infinite Reality boxes with the specialist video break out boards that did digital video or analogue with genloc. Disks were 2Gb SCSI and you needed a stack of them in RAID formations to play video. This wasn't even HD, it was 720 x 576 interlaced PAL.

We also had to work within a larger post production process, which was aggressively analogue at the time with engineers and others allergic to digital. This meant tapes.

Note that a lot of this was bad for tape machines. These cost £40k upwards and advancing the tape by one frame to record it, then back again to reposition the tape for the next frame, for hours on end, that was a sure way to reck a tape machine, so we just hired them.

Regarding 35mm film, I also babysat the telecine machines where the film bounces up and down on the sprockets, so the picture is never entirely stable. These practical realities of film just had to be worked with.

The other fun aspect was moving the product around. This meant hopping on a train, plane or bicycle to get tapes to where they needed to be. There was none of this uploading malarkey although you could book satellite time and beam your video across continents that way, which happened.

Elsewhere in broadcasting, there was some progress with glorified digital video recorders. These were used in the gallery and contained the programming that was coming up soon. These things had quite a lot of compression and their own babysitting demands. Windows NT was typically part of the problem.

It was an extremely exciting time to be working in tech but we were a long way off being able to stream anything like cinema resolution at the time, even with the most expensive tech of the era.

Pixar and a few other studios had money and bodies to throw at problems, however, there were definitely constraints at the time. The technical constraints are easy to understand but the cultural constraints, such as engineers allergic to anything digital, are hard to imagine today.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#117

Post by alex-moon »

So it's fascinating reading this looking at the screengrabs of the "original" versions... not so much because they are "how I remember them" but indeed, because they have a certain nostalgic quality I can't quite name - they "look old". Presumably this is because, back in the day, when I was watching these films on VHS tapes, they had come to tape from 35mm film. I fear I will never again be able to look at "old looking" footage with the same nostalgia again, now that I understand why it looks that way - and, indeed, that it isn't supposed to look that way!

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#118

Post by Telaneo »

coopierez wrote: post #105

I'm stunned so many people here can remember details as fine as the colour grading of a film. I couldn't remember specifics like that from 6 months ago, let alone 30 years ago when I was a child and wouldn't have had the thought to watch for cinematographic touches. Side node - I wonder if it's a millenial thing that our memories are worse due to modern technology, or perhaps we are more aware of false memories due t…

I doubt many people 'remember' this to any significant extent, but there are probably many cases of media giving the 'wrong' vibe with a new release, and you just assume it's because you've gotten older, but then when you get access to the original you experienced, the 'good' vibe is back, and you can easily compare between the two.

Although some people do infact remember the differences, but I'd guess a lot of those incidents are caused by people experiencing them in fairly quick succession. It's one thing to remember the difference between a DVD 20 years ago and a blu-ray you only watched today, and another to watch a DVD 15 years ago and a blu-ray 14 years ago.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#119

Post by Cthulhu_ »

yCombLinks wrote: post #4

The texture of the film grain makes Mulan and Aladdin really look better. The large simple filled sections look like they have so much more to them.

Which is of course highly subjective; you could argue that film grain is an unwanted but unavoidable side-effect from the medium used, just like other artifacts from film - vertical alignment issues, colour shifting from "film breath", 24 frames per second, or the weird sped-up look from really old films.

I don't believe these were part of the filmmaker's vision at the time, but unavoidable. Nowadays they are added again to films (and video games) on purpose to create a certain (nostalgic) effect.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#120

Post by Cthulhu_ »

albertzeyer wrote: post #94

It reminds me also of the 24 FPS discussion, which is still the standard as far as I know for cinema, even though 48 or 60 FPS are pretty standard for series, The 24 FPS give it a more cinematic feeling. https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/motion-smoothing-is-ruining-... https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking-film-24-frames-...

To add, when it comes to video games sometimes people go "baww but 24 fps is enough for film". However, pause a film and you'll see a lot of smearing, not unlike cartoon animation frames I suppose, but in a video game every frame is discrete so low framerate becomes visually a lot more apparent.

I think it was The Hobbit that had a 60 fps version, and people just... weren't having it. It's technologically superior I'm sure (as would higher frame rates be), but it just becomes too "real" then. IIRC they also had to really update their make-up game because on higher frame rates and / or resolutions people can see everything.

Mind you, watching older TV shows nowadays is interesting; I think they were able to scan the original film for e.g. the X Files and make a HD or 4K version of it, and unlike back in the day, nowadays you can make out all the fine details of the actor's skin and the like. Part high definition, part watching it on a 4K screen instead of a CRT TV.

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