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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#291

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#292

Post by wiseowise »

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

> Akshually

One is the real deal and another one is a simulation. End of story.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#293

Post by CGMthrowaway »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #121
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #86

Now there is the problem where many of my friends will take one look at a movie I started on the TV and say "ew, I don't like this movie, it's old" They don't realize they feel that way, viscerally, is because it's shot on film. How do I get people to watch film movies with me? They are far better anyway on average than many modern movies (from a storytelling, moviemaking pov, to say nothing about the picture quality…

Make them into a drinking game. We watched The Princess Bride the other day (never watched it), I think it's aged pretty well but then I'm old. But if they get bored, make it a game to have a drink or get a point or whatever for every sexual innuendo, lol. Some films didn't age well though. And finally, accept it and move on, ultimately it's their loss.

That's a good one for my younger friends. Most people my age don't really drink anymore other than 1-2 a night

Yes not only have the best movies aged well, but the old movies that you've never heard of (not the bad ones, there are plenty of those, but the good ones, which there are still plenty of) are BETTER than the new movies of today. It's unbelievable and it's creatively inspiring to me personally, even if it requires "time travel."

It's like visiting a museum, or a grand old architectural building. If you abstract even a tiny bit from the viewer immersion (which is great), you can't help but think "What craftsmanship! We don't get stuff like this anymore" And of course you also start to pick up on where everything came from, such that even the new stuff you love looks like a slightly sleeker yet baser, cheaper copy of the old.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#294

Post by mywittyname »

chiph wrote: post #245
entropicdrifter wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then the separate radio edit which had the compression that the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on the leased line to the transmitter site. And of course it would have all the dirty words removed or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "fun…

> I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics,

Upping the gain increases the relative "oomph" of the bass at the cost of some treble, right?

As a 90s kid with a bumping system in my Honda, I can confidently say we were all about that bass long before Megan Trainor came around. Everyone had the CD they used to demo their system.

Because of that, I think the loudness wars were driven by consumer tastes more than people will admit (because then we'd have to admit we all had poor taste). Young people really loved music with way too much bass. I remember my mom (a talented musician) complaining that my taste in music was all bass.

Of course, hip hop and rap in the 90s were really bass heavy, but so was a lot of rock music. RHCP, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot come to my mind as 90s rock bands that had tons of bass in their music.

Freak on a Leash in particular is a song that I feel like doesn't "translate" well to modern sound system setups. Listening to it on a setup with a massive subwoofer just hits different.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#295

Post by mrob »

tyrust wrote: post #223
chiph wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's R…

> 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…

It's still a problem, although less consistently a problem than it used to be for the reason entropicdrifter explained.

There's a crowdsourced database of dynamic range metrics for music at:

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

You can see some 2025 releases are good but many are still loudness war victims. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, dynamic range compression will make music sound better on phone speakers, so there's still reason to do it.

IMO, music production peaked in the 80s, when essentially every mainstream release sounded good.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#296

Post by robotresearcher »

chrisweekly wrote: post #281
robotresearcher wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Audio compression was/is necessary to get good SNR on mag tape.

true - but are you implying audio engineers are now leaning into heavy compression for artistic reasons?

Not necessarily heavy (except sometimes as an effect), but some compression almost all the time for artistic reasons, yes.

Most people would barely notice it as it's waaaay more subtle than your distorted guitar example. But it's there.

Part of the likeable sound of albums made on tape is the particular combination of old-time compressors used to make sure enough level gets to the tape, plus the way tape compresses the signal again on recording by it's nature.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#297

Post by KaiserPro »

xattt wrote: post #138
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…

How much of the colour change is also dependent on the film printer and also film scanner/telecine? 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.

> is also dependent on the film printer

The printers deffo make a difference to colour, but I came from VFX world where we put a macbeth chart in for each shot so we could adjust the colour afterwards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker) We'd have a whole team working on making sure that colour was accurate.

The scanners we used (northlight) were calibrated a lot so my understanding is that if you scanned the same film twice it was meant to be pixel perfect (We did rescans for various reasons and it supposedly matched up enough to do effects work. but that might have been proxies, ie low resolution scans that were done for speed)

Also the printers should, if they are good match it properly, thats what you're paying them for. I know that we did have a person that calibrated film projectors for colour, but I never asked them _how_ they did it.

For toy story its a bit harder because you are digitising a whole finished movie, you don't have the colour chart in every shot to keep the colour consistent. I know for adverts the telecine people did loads of fiddling to make the colour consistent, but I assumed that was because the spirit 4k was a bit shit.

I never dealt with actual finished prints, because the colourist/DI people sent the finished graded off to someone like Deluxe to print out

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#298

Post by KaiserPro »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #198
pinebox wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm a colorist and it absolutely does effect color. Every telecine is different and will create a different looking scan. Telecine operators will do a one light pass to try and compensate but any scan needs to be adjusted to achieve what the artist's original vision was.

> Every telecine is different and will create a different looking scan.

I mean they should be calibrated, so they have a different feel, but they shouldn't be wildly different like the screen shots.

I know the spirit operators did magic, but they were in the advertising team, and I was in film so I was never allowed to visit the sexy telecine room.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#299

Post by sroussey »

ilamont wrote: post #168
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…

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if yo…

A voice on the radio sounded better with vibrato, so that’s what they did before even recordings were made. Same when violins played.

These versions were for radio only and thought of as cheap when done in person.

Later this was recorded, and being the only versions recorded, later generations thought that this is how the masters of the time did things, when really they would be booed off stage (so to speak).

It’s a bit of family history that passed this info on due to being multiple generations of playing the violin.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#300

Post by mwcz »

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…

In some projects I work on I've added a WHY.md at the root that explains what's scaffolding and what's load bearing, essentially. I can't say it's been effective at preventing the problem you outlined, but at least it's cathartic.
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