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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#151

Post by phantasmish »

actionfromafar wrote: post #109
cyode wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To speak nothing of the global audience for these films. I'm guessing most people's first experience seeing these movies was off a VHS or DVD, so the nostalgia factor is only relevant to small percentage of viewers, and only a small percentage of that percentage notices.

VHS resolution is total crap... yet: it's not uncommon for the colors and contrast on VHS (and some early DVD) to be much better than what is available for streaming today. This is totally bonkers, because the VHS format is crippled, also color wise. Many modern transfers are just crap.

It’s really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it’s true.

An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show. The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the film source, which is good, but… that meant losing the color grading and digital effects, because the final show wasn’t printed to film. Not only did they get lazy recreating the effects, they don’t seem to have done scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms the legibility of the show, because lots of scenes were shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just look like they’re daytime, so it’s often hard to tell when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters in one with fucking vampires.

The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is arguably far superior to the blu ray for its colors, which is an astounding level of failure.

(There are other problems with things like some kind of ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better just on those grounds)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#152

Post by CodeArtisan »

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…

Final Fantasy Tactics on Game Boy Advance had a color mode for television.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F29nlIz_tWo

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#153

Post by RedNifre »

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…

"Cargo cult"? As in, "Looks like the genius artists at Pixar made everything extra green, so let's continue doing this, since it's surely genius."

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#154

Post by phantasmish »

eviks wrote: post #148
phantasmish wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked. > The other’s fake noise But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus... > It makes sense that some folks might care about…

But… of course there is? A record of a real thing is different from a statistical simulation of it.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#155

Post by pbronez »

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…

That’s a great observation. I’m hitting the same thing… yesterday’s hacks are today’s gospel.

My solution is decision documents. I write down the business problem, background on how we got here, my recommended solution, alternative solutions with discussion about their relative strengths and weaknesses, and finally and executive summary that states the whole affirmative recommendation in half a page.

Then I send that doc to the business owners to review and critique. I meet with them and chase down ground truth. Yes it works like this NOW but what SHOULD it be?

We iterate until everyone is excited about the revision, then we implement.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#157

Post by vodou »

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…

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

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#158

Post by eviks »

phantasmish wrote: post #154
eviks wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked. > The other’s fake noise But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus... > It makes sense that some folks might care about…

But… of course there is? A record of a real thing is different from a statistical simulation of it.

I think you missed the "a" vs " the", you can encode different sources that would have different grains, or the same source would have different grain at different times.

But also a simulation called compression of a real thing is different from that real thing, so that purity test had already been failed

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#159

Post by phantasmish »

eviks wrote: post #158
phantasmish wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But… of course there is? A record of a real thing is different from a statistical simulation of it.

I think you missed the "a" vs " the", you can encode different sources that would have different grains, or the same source would have different grain at different times. But also a simulation called compression of a real thing is different from that real thing, so that purity test had already been failed

I just feed AI the IMDB summary and let it re-create the movie for me. Just as “pure” as high-bitrate h.265, after all.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#160

Post by Gravityloss »

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…

Theory: Everything is built on barely functioning ruins with each successive generation or layer mostly unaware of the proper ways to use anything produced previously. Ten steps forward and nine steps back. All progress has always been like this.
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