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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#311

Post by the_af »

mrob wrote: post #276
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…

>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.

In principle, I agree.

In practice, I think the kind of blur that happens when you're looking at a physical object vs an object projected on a crisp, lit screen, with postprocessing/color grading/light meant for the screen, is different. I'm also not sure whatever is captured by a camera looks the same in motion than what you see with your eyes; in effect even the best camera is always introducing a distortion, so it has to be corrected somehow. The camera is "faking" movement, it's just that it's more convincing than a simple cartoon as a sequence of static drawings. (Note I'm speaking from intuition, I'm not making a formal claim!).

That's why (IMO) you don't need "motion blur" effects for live theater, but you do for cinema and TV shows: real physical objects and people vs whatever exists on a flat surface that emits light.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#312

Post by jorvi »

vanderZwan wrote: post #307
jorvi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it. That's also why vinyl can't handle heavy bass, it'll make the needle vibrate out of the groove. It has nothing to do with the speakers.

It was sort of a happy coincidence that vinyl's limitations forced more dynamic (but less bass-y) masters. Although if your artist didn't do vinyl releases -which really was a dying medium until hipsters brought it back in the 2010s- you were hosed.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#313

Post by the_af »

phantasmish wrote: post #277
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.

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. moder…

> (which one may or may not find intolerably awful).

"Motion smoothing" on TVs is the first thing I disable, I really hate it.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#314

Post by phantasmish »

raudette wrote: post #181
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…

I am not a huge gamer - maybe a dozen hours a year. But I feel that, say, Mario responds differently to controls in an emulator than how I remember Mario responding on an NES with a CRT. But I was never very good, and it has been decades, so I don't know how much of this is just poor memory - I actually don't think I'm good enough/play enough that the latency of modern input/displays makes a difference at my level. I…

I've played Mario in emulators where I could play just fine, and others where I kept falling down holes and such on friggin' level 1, which at times I could probably have beaten literally blindfolded, and had a hard time progressing at all. The latter might not (or, if extremely bad, might) be laggy enough for me to be able to tell you by looking, but plainly the feel is off enough to be a problem.

I find a good test is Punch Out!!! If it's much trouble at all for me to reach at least Great Tiger, the latency is really bad (even if I couldn't tell you just by looking). If I can get to Great Tiger without much trouble but struggle to do much damage to him before getting taken out, the latency's still unacceptably high for some games, but not totally awful.

Another good one's High Speed. If I can't land the final multi ball shot at least a decent percentage of the time (the game pauses the ball a couple times while police chatter plays, when you're set up for a multi ball, and after the last pause you can land the shot to initiate multi ball immediately and skip all the flashing-lights-and-sirens crap if you're very precise with your timing, it's like very-small number of milliseconds after the ball resumes its motion) then the latency is high enough to affect gameplay.

If I can land that shot at least 60-70% of the time, and if I can reach Bald Bull in Punch Out!!!, then probably any trouble I have in other games is my own damn fault :-)

I suppose as I age further these tests will become kinda useless for me, because my reflexes will be too shot for me to ever do well at these no matter how many hours of practice I've had over the decades :-(

Anyway, even in the best case you're always going to have worse display and input latency on a digital screen with a digital video pipeline and USB controllers than an early console hooked up over composite or component to a CRT. I've found it's low enough (even on mediocre TVs, provided they have a "game mode", and those are a ton worse than most PC monitors) for me not to mind much if the emulation itself is extremely snappy and is adding practically no extra latency, and there are no severe problems with the software side of the video & input pipelines, but otherwise... it can make some already-tough games unplayably hard in a hurry.

I do wonder about the experience of people who try these games for the first time in an emulator. They'll come to the game with no built-in way to tell if they keep slipping off ledges because the latency's like six frames instead of the ~ one it was originally, or because they just suck at it.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#315

Post by davidalayachew »

chrisweekly wrote: post #174
davidalayachew wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the entire point of "reinventing the wheel" to address this exact problem? This is one of the tradeoffs of maintaining backwards compatibility and stewardship -- you are required to keep track of each "cause" of that backwards compatibility. And since the number of "causes" can quickly become enumerable, that's usually what prompts people to reinvent the wheel. And when I say reinvent the wheel, I am NOT descri…

enumerable -> innumerable (opposite meaning)

Thanks, you are right. Wish I could edit it.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#316

Post by taejavu »

biofox wrote: post #221
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…

The most egregious example is old CGA games that were written to work on composite monitors. Without the composite display, they appear monochrome or cyan and magenta. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7229541/215890834-... It blew my mind when I finally learnt this, as I spent years of my childhood playing games that looked like the examples on the left, not realising the colours were due to the RGB monitor…

Oh you’re blowing my mind right now, played lots of CGA games with neon colours as a kid. What did they look like on a composite monitor?

Also, are you able to tell me the name of the game in the second row in that screenshot?

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#317

Post by phantasmish »

left-struck wrote: post #212

“So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality.“ I would love to know what qualifies as extremely high resolution for computer monitors circa 1995

I dunno if it was manufactured as early as 1995 (though it couldn't have been more than four years later, absolute max) but some time around 2002 I picked up a pair of used 19" (IIRC) IBM flat-screen (that is, the screen itself was flat, not flat-panel) CRT monitors in a flea market that had both more total pixels and greater pixel density than any screen in my house until I started picking up devices with Apple Retina displays. I believe the short side of the 4x3 on that thing maxed out at 1920.

My boring, 17" consumer Trinitron monitor in 1995 could do 1600x1200 IIRC.

Max resolution and pixel density (plus, for a long time, color gamut, contrast/depth-of-black, latency, et c) on typical monitors took a huge dive when LCDs replaced CRTs. "High res" in 1995 would probably qualify as fairly high-res today, too, if not quite top-of-the-heap. Only expensive, relatively recent displays in the consumer space really beat those '90s CRTs overall to a degree where it's not at least a close call (though they may still be a little worse in some ways)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#318

Post by gwbas1c »

xnx wrote: post #286
gwbas1c wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> In Toy Story's case, the digital master should have had "correct" colors Could it be the case that generating each digital master required thousands of render hours?

That's an invalid argument: Digitally tweaking color when printing film has nothing to do with how long it takes to render 3d.

They had a custom built film printer and could make adjustments there.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#319

Post by ilamont »

mywittyname wrote: post #294
chiph wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dri…

> Korn

It wasn't the bass, but rather the guitar.

The bass player tuned the strings down a full step to be quite loose, and turned the treble up which gave it this really clicky tone that sounded like a bunch of tictacs being thrown down an empty concrete stairwell.

He wanted it to be percussive to cut through the monster lows of the guitar.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#320

Post by phantasmish »

the_af wrote: post #313
phantasmish wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. moder…

> (which one may or may not find intolerably awful). "Motion smoothing" on TVs is the first thing I disable, I really hate it.

Me at every AirBnB: turn on TV "OH MY GOD WTF MY EYES ARE BLEEDING where is the settings button?" go turn off noise reduction, upscaling, motion smoothing.

I think I've seen like one out of a couple dozen where the motion smoothing was already off.

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