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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#261

Post by jesse__ »

shrinks99 wrote: post #25
jtolmar wrote: post #18

Is it possible to replicate the digital->film transition with tone mapping? (I assume the answer is yes, but what is the actual mapping?)

Generally yes, but we're still working on it all these years later! This article by Chris Brejon offers a very in-depth look into the differences brought about by different display transforms: https://chrisbrejon.com/articles/ocio-display-transforms-and... The "best" right now, in my opinion, is AgX, which at this point has various "flavours" that operate slightly differently. You can find a nice comparison of OCIO c…

Wow, those links are a goldmine, thanks!

I went down the tonemapping rabbit hole for a hobby game engine project a while ago and was surprised at how complex the state-of-the-art is.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#262

Post by shevy-java »

Hmmm. I saw the first three toy story; the fourth one I never saw, even though people said it is not bad, but to me Toy Story was over with the third one.

Now, while I liked the first three, the first one always has a special place, because at the time it was really quite new-ish. Fully computer animated movies were quite rare. Pixar did several short videos before Toy Story, and I think there were some other movies too, give or take, but Toy Story kind of changed everything past that. Unfortunately many other computer-generated movies are absolute garbage nowadays. The big movie makers want money and don't care about anything else, so they ruin the interest of people who are not super-young anymore, because let's face it: older people are less likely to watch the latest marvel 3D animated zero-story movie that is a clone of prior clones.

It would be nice if AI, despite it also sucking to no ends, could allow us to produce 3D movies with little effort. I have a fantasy game world my local pen and paper RPG group built. Would be interesting to feed it a ton of data (we have generated all that already over decades) and come up with an interesting movie that relates the story of a part of this. This is just one example of many more. Quality-wise I still like Toy Story - I find it historically important, and it was also good at the respective time (all first three actually, although the storylines got progressively weaker; I did like Ken and Barbie though, but too much of the story seemed to go into wanting to milk out more money selling toys rather than telling a story. Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear was always great though.)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#263

Post by jmb99 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #225
the_af wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it "fetishizing" though; not all of them anyway. Motion blur happens with real vision, so anything without blur would look odd. There's cinematic exaggeration, of course. 24 FPS is indeed entirely artificial, but I wouldn't call it a fetish: if you've grown with 24 FPS movies, a higher frame rate will paradoxically look artificial! It's not a snobby thing, maybe it's an "uncanny valley" thing? To me h…

I suspect 24fps is popular because it forces the videography to be more intentional with motion. Too blurry, and it becomes incomprehensible. That, and everything staying sharp at 60fps makes it look like TikTok slop.

I think the "real" problem is not matching shutter speed to frame rate. With 24fps you have to make a strong choice - either the shutter speed is 1/24s or 1/48s, or any panning movement is going to look like absolute garbage. But, with 60+fps, even if your shutter speed is incredible fast, motion will still look decent, because there's enough frames being shown that the motion isn't jerky - it looks unnatural, just harder to put your finger on why (whereas 24fps at 1/1000s looks unnatural for obvious reasons - the entire picture jerks when you're panning).

The solution is 60fps at 1/60s. Panning looks pretty natural again, as does most other motion, and you get clarity for fast-moving objects. You can play around with different framerates, but imo anything more than 1/120s (180 degree shutter in film speak) will start severely degrading the watch experience.

I've been doing a good bit of filming of cars at autocross and road course circuits the past two years, and I've received a number of compliments on the smoothness and clarity of the footage - "how does that video out of your dslr [note: it's a Lumix G9 mirrorless] look so good" is a common one. The answer is 60fps, 1/60s shutter, and lots of in-body and in-lens stabilization so my by-hand tracking shots aren't wildly swinging around. At 24/25/30fps everything either degrades into a blurry mess, or is too choppy to be enjoyable, but at 60fps and 1/500s or 1/1000s, it looks like a (crappy) video game.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#264

Post by tyrust »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #237
tyrust wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average) Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic…

That makes sense, thanks for the reply!

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#265

Post by mrguyorama »

pinebox wrote: post #176
KaiserPro wrote: post #114

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…

> However! that doesnt affect the colour. That has been something I've wondered about since seeing frame comparisons of (probably) telecine'ed prints of The Matrix vs. the myriad home video releases.

I was going to mention the Noodle video on that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk

TL;DW, different physical rolls of film sent to different movie theaters can have slightly different coloring, if they were done by different people or different companies or even if someone just did their job differently that day. Film color was not an exact science and not always perfectly repeatable, and depended on chemistry.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#266

Post by dsr_ »

halapro wrote: post #232
wpm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been a fan of repos that I come across with ARCHITECTURE.md files in them, but that's a pretty loose framework and some just describe the what and not the why. Otherwise, I wish I worked at a place like Oxide that does RFDs. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer Just a single place with artifacts of a formal process for writing shit down . In your example, writing down "The greens are oversaturated by X% beca…

You're assuming people RTFM, which does not happen at all in my case. Documentation exists for you to link to when someone already lost days on something finally reaches out.

Culture changes under the impact of technology, but culture also changes when people deliberately teach practices.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#267

Post by Kye »

opello wrote: post #64

> He [David DiFrancesco] broke ground in film printing — specifically, in putting digital images on analog film. > Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story ’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie. While I have no doubt that this hadn't been done at the scale and resolution, it struck me that I'd heard about this concept in a podcast episode [1]…

For Flight of the Navigator (1986) they sent renders of the ship directly to film because the system could only hold one frame at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#268

Post by babypuncher »

I have blu-rays for all the movies mentioned in the article. Today, there are some very powerful tools for processing digital images to make them look like film, going as far as letting you mimic specific film stocks.

It might be a fun experiment to make custom rips of these movies that look more like their theatrical releases. I'm curious how close one can get without needing to source an actual 35mm print.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#269

Post by VikingCoder »

alfonsodev wrote: post #207
VikingCoder wrote: post #189

I've grown very fond of having shaders available for my retro games. I suspect having shader plugins for TV and movie watching will become a thing. "The input is supposed to be 24 FPS, so please find those frames from the input signal. Use AI to try to remove compression artifacts. Regrade digital for Kodak 35mm film. Then, flash each frame twice, with blackness in-between to emulate how movie theaters would project…

would it be posible today playing from computer using vlc or similar + plugins ?

ShaderGlass probably gets you pretty decently far down the path.

https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#270

Post by samdafi »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #237
tyrust wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average) Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic…

Music, as tracked by Billboard, cross genre, is as loud as ever. Here’s a survey of Billboard music:

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/mastering-trends?srsltid=Af...

I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90’s (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over exuberantly because of its newness) but the meat of the talk may be of interest anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hj7PYid_tE

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