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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#271

Post by pessimizer »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #119
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 a…

I don't think this comment demonstrates an understanding of the argument. An unavoidable side-effect of the medium is part of the medium. You will consider unavoidable side-effects when you are building something for a particular medium, unless you are stupid. If that unavoidable side-effect were not part of the medium, you would have made different choices.

Colorizing a black-and-white film, for example, is not ever restoring the original intention or vision, even "subjectively." If the makers of a black-and-white film had been making a color film, they would have made different choices.

This does not mean that you should not colorize black-and-white films, you should do whatever makes you happy. I honestly can't wait until AI is recreating missing scenes or soundtracks from partially lost films, or even "re"creating entire lost films from scripts or contemporary reviews and cast lists, and expanding films to widescreen by inventing contents on the edges. But this will not be restoring a vision, this will be original work.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#272

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #120
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'…

Regarding your first paragraph, the other thing worth mentioning is that in addition to smear/motion blur in film, it's also a passive medium. Video games are interactive. You're responding to and making decisions based on what you're seeing.

In a FPS, trying to track movement at only 24 fps is pretty much impossible unless your target's movement is entirely predictable.

In a flight simulator, trying to land a plane in gusty weather conditions is a lot harder with only 24 fps.

Lower framerates don't just make motion choppy, it increases latency. At 24 fps, any change in movement could be up to 42 ms behind. At 120 fps, that's down to 8.3 ms. And those numbers assume that you can notice the difference in only a single frame.

I'm convinced that people claiming 24 fps is fine for games just because it's fine for film don't actually play games. At least, nothing that requires quick reaction times.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#273

Post by phantasmish »

phantasmish wrote: post #146
haunter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Self-reply because I’m outside the edit window: the dvd “original” releases are based on the laserdisc, but supposedly they modify it to restore the pre-1981-re-release title, so I’m actually wrong!

I can’t find out if they fix the 3% speed-up from the laser disc. The audio mix, at any rate, will be a combination of the three (stereo, mono, 70mm) original mixes, like on the laser disc, so identical to none of them. The source should predate the replacement of Latin script with made-up letters (not conceived until ROTJ then retrofitted on some releases of SW and Empire) so that’ll be intact unless they “fixed” it.

Still stuck with sub-ordinary-dvd-quality picture, as far as official releases go, so that’s too bad. Oh well, fan 35mm scan projects solved that problem.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#274

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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.

> and multiple full motion video codecs were being used in games, albeit for cut scenes

Yeah, but we were still using MPEG-2 back then, weren't we?

They would have looked like utter garbage. Bitrates would have had to be so high that I'm not sure we would have actually had enough storage. I guess we could have shipped TWO hard drives.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#275

Post by thaumasiotes »

actionfromafar wrote: post #108
phantasmish wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I clicked this link going “oh god it’s because they printed to film, I bet, and man do I hope it looks worse so I don’t have to hunt down a bunch of giant 35mm scans of even more movies that can’t be seen properly any other way” But no, of course it looks between slightly and way better in every case. Goddamnit. Pour one out for my overworked disk array. And here I was thinking it was just my imagination that se…

When it comes to Star Wars, people are literally spotting them in Photoshop frame by frame. :)

I recently watched the despecialized edition. During the lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, there are moments where Obi-Wan's lightsaber has no glow and looks more like a very thick metal antenna, or like he's play-dueling with a short curtain rod.

I can't figure out how to determine if that's intentional.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#276

Post by mrob »

the_af wrote: post #220
tsunamifury wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motion blur. 24fps. Grain. Practically everything we call cinematic

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…

>Motion blur happens with real vision, so anything without blur would look odd.

You watch the video with your eyes so it's not possible to get "odd"-looking lack of blur. There's no need to add extra motion blur on top of the naturally occurring blur.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#277

Post by phantasmish »

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.

24fps looks a little different on a real film projector than on nearly all home screens, too. There's a little time between each frame when a full-frame black is projected (the light is blocked, that is) as the film advances (else you'd get a horrid and probably nausea-inducing smear as the film moved). This (oddly enough!) has the effect of apparently smoothing motion—though "motion smoothing" settings on e.g. modern TVs don't match that effect, unfortunately, but looks like something else entirely (which one may or may not find intolerably awful).

Some of your fancier, brighter (because you lose some apparent brightness by cutting the light for fractions of a second) home digital projectors can convincingly mimic the effect, but otherwise, you'll never quite get things like 24fps panning judder down to imperceptible levels, like a real film projector can.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#278

Post by phantasmish »

jmb99 wrote: post #263
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Is getting something like this wrong why e.g. The Hobbit looked so damn weird? I didn't have a strong opinion on higher FPS films, and was even kinda excited about it, until I watched that in theaters. Not only did it have (to me, just a tiny bit of) the oft-complained-about "soap opera" effect due to the association of higher frame rates with cheap shot-on-video content—the main problem was that any time a character was moving it felt wrong, like a manually-cranked silent film playing back at inconsistent speeds. Often it looked like characters were moving at speed-walking rates when their affect and gait were calm and casual. Totally bizarre and ruined any amount of enjoyment I may have gotten out of it (other quality issues aside). That's not something I've noticed in other higher FPS content (the "soap opera" effect, yes; things looking subtly sped-up or slowed-down, no).

[EDIT] I mean, IIRC that was 48fps, not 60, so you'd think they'd get the shutter timing right, but man, something was wrong with it.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#280

Post by MBCook »

quuxplusone wrote: post #173
vodou wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some concrete or specific examples of intentional compensation or purposeful scaffolding in mind (outside the topic of the article)?

Not scaffolding in the same way, but, two examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations" are - the fashion for unpainted marble statues and architecture - the aesthetic of running film slightly too fast in the projector (or slightly too slow in the camera) for an old-timey effect

Isn’t the frame rate of film something like that?

The industry decided on 24 FPS as something of an average of the multiple existing company standards and it was fast enough to provide smooth motion, avoid flicker, and not use too much film ($$$).

Overtime it became “the film look”. One hundred-ish years later we still record TV shows and movies in it that we want to look “good” as opposed to “fake” like a soap opera.

And it’s all happenstance. The movie industry could’ve moved to something higher at any point other than inertia. With TV being 60i it would have made plenty of sense to go to 30p for film to allow them to show it on TV better once that became a thing.

But by then it was enshrined.

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