131–140 of 348 posts
> These companies, ultimately, decide how Toy Story looks today. LOL, what? Anyone with a Blu-Ray rip file and FFmpeg can decide how it looks to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with low compression to keep things like grain. But you have algorithmic grain in modern codecs, so no need to waste so much space for noise?
Because one is genuine physics and another is a fake crap?
Neat! The Youtube channel Noodle recently did a related deep dive into the differences in the releases of The Matrix [0]. The back half of the video also touches on the art of transferring from film/video to digital. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk
I always felt the old matrix had a more colder blue. And it changed drastically when the second and third hit cinemas. At least that was my memory because I watched a double feature when the second one hit the theatre's and complained then that the Matrix somehow looked weird. But it could also be my memory since I also own the blue ray release. Another movie with the same / similar problem is the DVD release of the…
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/n…
Some examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/bvqaec/why_and_how...
I run into this same failure mode often. We introduce purposeful scaffolding in the workflow that isn’t meant to stand alone, but exists solely to ensure the final output behaves as intended. Months later, someone is pitching how we should “lean into the bold saturated greens,” not realising the topic only exists because we specifically wanted neutral greens in the final output. The scaffold becomes the building.
In our work this kind of nuance isn’t optional, it is the project. If we lose track of which decisions are compensations and which are targets, outcomes drift badly and quietly, and everything built after is optimised for the wrong goal.
I’d genuinely value advice on preventing this. Is there a good name or framework for this pattern? Something concise that distinguishes a process artefact from product intent, and helps teams course-correct early without sounding like a semantics debate?
I just showed Toy Story to my kids. It looked really bad. Mostly textures and lighting. I wonder if artificial grain would actually make it look better. Like when the game Splinter Cell was released, there weee two additional ‘views’ simulating infrared and thermal cameras. Those had heavy noise added to them and felt so real compared to the main view.
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/n…
It just seems like there’s a lot of variability in each step to end up with an unintended colour, that will taken as the artist’s intent.
There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the screens on the original devices often had low color saturation, so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate. Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously bright colors. Thankfully now many emula…
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#2C02
In addition to CRTs having variable properties, it turns out a lot of consoles (understandably!) cheat a little bit when generating a composite signal. The PPU's voltages are slightly out of spec, its timing is weird to work around a color artifact issue, and it generates a square wave for the chroma carrier rather than an ideal sine wave, which produces even more fun problems near the edges. So we've got all of that going on, and then the varying properties of how each TV chooses to interpret the signal. Then we throw electrons at phosphors and the pesky real world and human perception gets involved... it's a real mess!
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…