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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#331

Post by strix_varius »

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 They originally made those movies the way they did intentionally because what they wanted wasn't…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.

...I guess you didn't read the article? Because the entire article is about how the artists intentionally skewed the digital colors so that they'd look as intended on film (and wrong / exaggerated on digital displays)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#332

Post by estebank »

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.

You're forgetting about the shutter angle. A large shutter angle will have a lot of motion blur and feel fluid even at a low frame rate, while a small shutter angle will make movement feel stilted but every frame will be fully legible, very useful for caothic scenes. Saving private Ryan, for example, used a small shutter angle. And until digital, you were restricted to a shutter angle of 180, which meant that very fast moving elements would still jump from frame to frame in between exposures.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#333

Post by avadodin »

the_af wrote: post #224
quuxplusone wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Another example: pixel art in games. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of pixel art and retro games. But this reminds me of when people complained that the latest Monkey Island didn't use pixel art, and Ron Gilbert had to explain the original "The Curse of Monkey Island" wasn't "a pixel art game" either, it was a "state of the art game (for that time)", and it was never his intention to make retro games. Many classi…

I don't think anyone would have complained if the art had been more detailed but in the same style as the original or even using real digitized actors.

Monkey Island II's art was slightly more comic-like than say The Last Crusade but still with realistic proportions and movements so that was the expectation before CoMI.

The art style changing to silly-comic is what got people riled up.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#334

Post by vanderZwan »

jorvi wrote: post #312
vanderZwan wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 brough…

> Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it.

Interesting, I did not know this! I'm not doubting you, but I'm a little confused and curious about how the physics of that works out. Wouldn't being brickwalled mean the volume stays pretty constant, meaning there's less work for the needle? Or is there some kind of limit to how many overlapping waveforms a needle can pick up at once?

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#335

Post by not_that_d »

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…

As an ex audio engineer, I would say that the war ended and loudness won.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#336

Post by causality0 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #249
causality0 wrote: post #230

Ever since raytracing graphics cards came out I've wondered why no game studio has ever tried to recreate the look and feel of Toy Story. There's something about the combination of detailed lighting, high-poly models, but low-eyes textures and primitive animations that really appeals to me.

I don't think Toy Story used raytracing. I agree it's a great look though.

Yes, but you'd need raytracing to accurately replicate the lighting in real time.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#337

Post by jorvi »

vanderZwan wrote: post #334
jorvi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 brough…

> Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it. Interesting, I did not know this! I'm not doubting you, but I'm a little confused and curious about how the physics of that works out. Wouldn't being brickwalled mean the volume stays pretty constant, meaning there's less work for the needle? Or is there some kind of limit to how many overlapping waveforms a needle can pick up at once?

Bit of a lesson incoming, skip to the vinyl bit if you don't care for that:

"Dynamic range compression" is a bit of a misleading term because it sounds like you're taking an audio signal and and squeezing it.

What you're really doing is two things: reducing (compressing) the difference between the quiet (valleys) and loudest (peaks) parts, and then pushing the volume of the peaks up to or past 0dB. Technically, that second step isn't dynamic range compression, but in practice it is / was always done. The reason they do this is because for human ears, louder sounds better. However, you lose dynamism. Imagine if you watched a movie, and a whisper during a military night raid would sound as loud as the shouty conversation they had in the planning room.

Past 0dB, a signal will 'clip'[0], which means the loudest parts of the signal cannot be expressed properly and will be cut off, leading to signal loss. Basically, 0dB is the loudest you can get.

These days, in practice, music tracks get mastered so that the average value is -14dB because streaming sites will 'normalize' tracks so that the average dB is -14dB. Here[1] you can see why that makes brickwalling bad. If your track goes full tilt and has almost no valleys, the average dB per second is rather high, so your entire track gets squeezed to average out to -14dB. But if you have lots of valleys, you can have more peaks and the average will still be -14dB!

RE: vinyl? Well, too much and / or too intense motion in the groove (the groove is effectively a physical waveform) makes the needle slightly skip out of the groove. "Too much" happens with brickwalling, "too intense" happens with very deep bass. Try to imagine the upcoming links I'm referring to as a physical groove a needle has to track, instead of a digital waveform.

Here[2] is one Death Magnetic track waveform of the brickwalled original vs. fixed remastered release. It's not too bad. But then there is this[3] insanity.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXptusF7Puo / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7AbmhOsrPs

[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0970/0050/files/46eacedf-c...

[2] https://happyhipster.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/0...

[3] https://happyhipster.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/0...

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#338

Post by the_af »

avadodin wrote: post #333
the_af wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example: pixel art in games. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of pixel art and retro games. But this reminds me of when people complained that the latest Monkey Island didn't use pixel art, and Ron Gilbert had to explain the original "The Curse of Monkey Island" wasn't "a pixel art game" either, it was a "state of the art game (for that time)", and it was never his intention to make retro games. Many classi…

I don't think anyone would have complained if the art had been more detailed but in the same style as the original or even using real digitized actors. Monkey Island II's art was slightly more comic-like than say The Last Crusade but still with realistic proportions and movements so that was the expectation before CoMI. The art style changing to silly-comic is what got people riled up.

Hard disagree.

(Also a correction: by original I meant "Secret of" but mistyped "Curse of").

I meant Return to Monkey Island (2022), which was no more abrupt a change than say, "The Curse of Monkey Island" (1997).

Monkey Island was always "silly comic", it's its sine qua non.

People whined because they wanted a retro game, they wanted "the same style" (pixels) as the original "Secret", but Ron Gilbert was pretty explicit about this: "Secret" looked what it looked like due to limitations of the time, he wasn't "going for that style", it was just the style that they managed with pixel art. Monkey Island was a state-of-the-art game for its time.

So my example is fully within the terms of the concept we're describing: people growing attached to technical limitations, or in the original words:

> [...] examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations"

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#339

Post by erincandescent »

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.

On the contrary, an object moving across your field of vision will produce a level of motion blur in your eyes. The same object recorded at 24fps and then projected or displayed in front of your eyes will produce a different level of motion blur, because the object is no longer moving continuously across your vision but instead moving in discrete steps. The exact character of this motion blur can be influenced by controlling what fraction of that 1/24th of a second the image is exposed for (vs. having the screen black)

The most natural level of motion blur for a moving picture to exhibit is not that traditionally exhibited by 24fps film, but it is equally not none (unless your motion picture is recorded at such high frame rate that it substantially exceeds the reaction time of your eyes, which is rather infeasible)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#340

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

Reminds me of how pixel-perfect emulation of pixel art on a modern screen is often ugly, compared to the game played on a CRT.
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