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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#301

Post by thaumasiotes »

chrisweekly wrote: post #213
thaumasiotes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (opposite meaning) Funnily enough, e- means "out" (more fundamentally "from") and in- means "in(to)", so that's not an unexpected way to form opposite words. But in this case, innumerable begins with a different in- meaning "not". (Compare inhabit or immiserate , though.)

Yeah, English has so many quirks. As a software dev, the "enum" type cane to mind, making this one easier to spot. (shrug)

> Yeah, English has so many quirks.

Arguably true in general, but in this specific case everything I said was already true in Latin.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#302

Post by naet »

bane wrote: post #248

This is shockingly almost exactly the same conversation that goes on in the retrogaming community regarding pre-HD consoles. "The artists meant for this art to be viewed on a CRT". The challenge is that everybody's memory is different, and sometime those memories are "I wish the graphics were rock sharp without the artifacts of the CRT". Other times our memories are of the crappy TV we were given as kids that was on…

I have always felt certain media just looks better (to my own personal tastes) on VHS and on CRTs. I know that technically it isn't the highest possible definition or quality and that both have significant drawbacks in terms of fidelity or whatever. But my taste likes what it likes. Just like how some people think vinyl records can sound more appealing and warmer than the equivalent digital media, even though the digital version has a higher bitrate and other advantages.

I do in fact still have Toy Story on VHS and recently watched a bit of it with my toddler. And while I'm sure the Blu-ray or streamed version is higher resolution, wide screen, and otherwise carries more overall video and audio data than our tape I personally got a bit of extra joy out of watching the tape version on our old TV.

I never considered the color differences pointed out in the article here, and I'm not sure how they appear on home VHS vs on 35mm. Maybe that is a small part of what makes the tape more appealing to me although I don't think it's the full reason. Some feelings are difficult to put into words. Tapes on a full aspect ratio CRT just give me a certain feeling or have a specific character that I still love to this day.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#303

Post by [deleted] »

charcircuit wrote: post #251
autoexec wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches. In the lion king example you weren't meant to see all of the detail the artists drew. In the Army men example the color on the digital version is nothing like the color of the actual toys. They originally made those movies the way they did intentionally because what they wanted wasn't…

To me this just sounds like cope over the poor process of transferring digital to film. Destroying detail and color since it couldn't be accurately captured is a deviation from what the artists produced. Even if you think it looks better to you, it was mistake. They would have tried to copy it the best they can, but it's not perfect and the colors can change overtime.

[deleted]

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#304

Post by xandrius »

behringer wrote: post #16
timenotwasted wrote: post #10

This makes so much more sense now. After having kids I've been watching my fair share of Pixar and I just never recalled how flat and bland everything looked but I would always chalk it up to my brain not recalling how it looked at the time. Good to know I guess that it wasn't just entirely nostalgia but sad that we continue to lose some of this history and so soon.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

And it's for things like this that people just don't understand the value of a healthy alternative way to archive things.

A true fan who wants to preserve and be faithful on its scan is going to dedicate their life to get it just right, while a mega corp will just open the original, click "Export as..." and call it a day.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#305

Post by diskzero »

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 worked at DreamWorks Animation on the pipeline, lighting and animation tools for almost ten years. All of this information is captured in our pipeline process tools, although I am sure there are edits and modifications that are done that escape documentation. We were able to pull complete shows out of deep storage, render scenes using the toolchain the produced them and produce the same output. If the renders weren't reproducable, madness would ensue.

Even with complete attention to detail, the final renders would be color graded using Flame, or Inferno, or some other tool and all of those edits would also be stored and reproducible in the pipeline.

Pixar must have a very similar system and maybe a Pixar engineer can comment. My somewhat educated assumption is that these DVD releases were created outside of the Pixar toolchain by grabbing some version of a render that was never intended as a direct to digital release. This may have happened as a result of ignorance, indifference, a lack of a proper budget or some other extenuating circumstance. It isn't likely John Lasseter or some other Pixar creative really wanted the final output to look like this.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#306

Post by diskzero »

gwbas1c wrote: post #191
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…

(Cough) Abstraction and separation of concerns. In Toy Story's case, the digital master should have had "correct" colors, and the tweaking done in the transfer to film step. It's the responsibility of the transfer process to make sure that the colors are right. Now, counter arguments could be that the animators needed to work with awareness of how film changes things; or that animators (in the hand-painted era) alway…

Production methodolgies for animated films have progressed massively since 1995 and Pixar may have not found the ideal process for the color grading of the digital to film step. Heck, they may not have color graded at all! This has been suggested. I agree that someone should know better than to just take a render and push it out as a digital release without paying attention to the result.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#307

Post by vanderZwan »

jorvi wrote: post #142
vanderZwan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].…

Right, that makes sense. And it also makes sense that vinyls didn't suffer from this because the people who would buy those would use them at home with better speakers. Or that classical music CDs throughout the entire period made great use of the dynamic range, since that also is more likely to be listened to on high quality speakers.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#308

Post by nunez »

sroussey wrote: post #299
ilamont wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting!

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#309

Post by p1necone »

bane wrote: post #248

This is shockingly almost exactly the same conversation that goes on in the retrogaming community regarding pre-HD consoles. "The artists meant for this art to be viewed on a CRT". The challenge is that everybody's memory is different, and sometime those memories are "I wish the graphics were rock sharp without the artifacts of the CRT". Other times our memories are of the crappy TV we were given as kids that was on…

Most 8/16 bit consoles I like the "clean RGB into a much better CRT than most people owned at the time" scanline look. NES has gotta be dirty composite into an average consumer CRT though otherwise it just aint right (and I didn't even grow up with a NES).

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#310

Post by im3w1l »

munificent wrote: post #285
heeton wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.

Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment. If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is. But if you're listening with a tiny speaker dir…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he says the music track can have hard panning, and it's the headphone playback system that should do some compensatory processing so that it sounds as if it was played on two speakers in a room.

Don't ask me how it works but I know gaming headsets try to emulate a surround setup.

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