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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#141

Post by davidferguson »

jama211 wrote: post #60
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 an interesting and valid point that the projectors from the time would mean current scans of 35mm will be different too. However, taking for example the Aladdin screenshot in particular, the sky is COMPLETELY the wrong colour in the modern digital edition, so it seems to me at least that these 35mm scans whilst not perfect to the 90’s are closer to correct than their digital counterparts.

See my top level comment for more info on this, but the Aladdin scan used in the article was from a 35mm trailer that's been scanned on an unknown scanner, and had unknown processing applied to it. It's not really possible to compare anything other than resolution and artefacts in the two images.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#142

Post by jorvi »

vanderZwan wrote: post #97
beAbU wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't know if this is still true, but I know that in the 2000s the vinyls usually were mastered better than the CDs. There even was a website comparing CD vs vinyl releases, where the person hosting it was lamenting this fact because objectively CDs have a much higher dynamic range than vinyls, although I can't find it now. CDs were a victim of the loudness war[0]. Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough t…

The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s, because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to sound good on those.

Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering became dynamic again.

This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.

[0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#143

Post by bspammer »

sunaookami wrote: post #115
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).

Anecdata here, but I played Zelda Ocarina of Time on CRT when I was a child, and have since replayed it many times via emulator. The game never looked quite as good as I remembered it, but of course I chalked it up to the fact that graphics have improved by several orders of magnitude since then.

Then a few years ago I was throwing out my parent's old CRT and decided to plug in the N64 one last time. Holy crap was it like night and day. It looked exactly as I remembered it, so much more mysterious and properly blended than it does on an LCD screen.

I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to films, sometimes our memories aren't false.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#144

Post by chromehearts »

cbolton wrote: post #135

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.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxKJeYSBmI

This video is related to that issue

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#145

Post by phantasmish »

eviks wrote: post #132
wiseowise wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one is genuine physics and another is a fake crap?

the calculations and the photons sent to your eyes are all genuine physics

One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.

The other’s fake noise.

One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter.

It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise back to them. By far my favorite version to have would be the originals, without the “noise” smoothed out at all.

Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked grain isn’t what they’re after, at all. It’s practically unrelated to what they’re looking for.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#146

Post by phantasmish »

haunter wrote: post #129
diogenescynic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t trust corporations to respect or protect art. You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars. The only option is as you say. There are many more examples of the owners of IP altering it in subsequence editions/iterations. This still seems so insane to me that it’s not even for sale anywhere…

> You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars You can actually, the 2006 Limited Edition DVD is a double disc version one being the original version. However they are not DVD quality because they were transferred from LaserDisc and not the original film stock

Even those aren’t accurate to the 1977 film.

To pick an arguably-minor but very easy to see point: the title’s different.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#147

Post by forgotoldacc »

cbolton wrote: post #135

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…

With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the case. Lots of other games didn't do that.

And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro, colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier models.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#148

Post by eviks »

phantasmish wrote: post #145
eviks wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the calculations and the photons sent to your eyes are all genuine physics

One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked. The other’s fake noise. One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter. It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise…

> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.

> The other’s fake noise

But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus...

> It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference

Not really, it doesn't make sense to care about identical noise you can't tell apart. Of course, plenty people care about all kind of nonsense, so that won't stop those folks, but let's not pretentd there is some 'real physics' involved

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#149

Post by JKCalhoun »

bee_rider wrote: post #36

How well does 35mm hold up over time? Could these movies be said to “no longer exist” in some sense, if the scans have decayed noticeably?

Hollywood does store original prints in underground salt mines (at least I am aware of a place in Kansas where they do this). Of course who knows where the frames we are being shown from the 35mm film version are coming from. Likely not these copies that are probably still in halite storage.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#150

Post by _bent »

janeway wrote: post #136

This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master because 35 mm film would darken and desaturate them. The aim was never neon greens on screen, it was colour calibration for a later step. Only later, when digital masters were reused without the film stage, did those compensating choices start to look like cre…

I know you're looking for something more universal, but in modern video workflows you'd apply a chain of color transformations on top the final composited image to compensate the display you're working with.

So I guess try separating your compensations from the original work and create a workflow that automatically applies them

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