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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#181

Post by raudette »

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 would love to try both side-by-side to see if I could pick out the difference in latency/responsiveness.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#182

Post by 4gotunameagain »

tomcam wrote: post #134
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 did you dust bust it? Wipe it by hand with a microfiber cloth or something?

In optics & film usually blowing air is employed, as wiping runs the risk of further scratches in the case of an abrasive particle (e.g. sand)

There are handheld tools (google hand blower bulb), but I would imagine film scanning uses something less manual

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#183

Post by thaumasiotes »

pbronez wrote: post #155
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…

Eventually you'll run into a decision that was made for one set of reasons but succeeded for completely different reasons. A decision document can't help there; it can only tell you why the decision was made.

That is the nature of evolutionary processes and it's the reason people (and animals; you can find plenty of work on e.g. "superstition in chickens") are reluctant to change working systems.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#185

Post by bityard »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #112
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats wrong with terminator 2? Are there like multiple digital releases, one with better colour than the other?

There's a 4K version out that does interesting things with colour grading, here's a post I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/Terminator/comments/d65pbi/terminat... . The one on the left is the remaster. There was similar outrage (if that's the right word) about a Matrix remaster that either added or removed a green color filter, and there's several other examples where they did a Thing with colour grading / filtering i…

To me, that just looks like what happens when I try to play HDR content on a system that doesn't know about HDR. (It looks like you're watching it through sunglasses.)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#186

Post by eleveriven »

It's wild to realize that the version of the movie most of us remember emotionally is not the one that's currently streaming. There's something bittersweet about that... like your memory has a certain warmth and texture that modern restorations just can't quite recreate.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#187

Post by piperswe »

squigz wrote: post #47
qingcharles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions. These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain.…

> I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram. Someone tell this community to share over BT. Aint nobody got time to keep up with which platform/server everyone is on and which links are expired and yuck.

I would be surprised if they didn't end up on the prestigious private trackers

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#188

Post by tsunamifury »

quuxplusone wrote: post #173
vodou wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Motion blur. 24fps. Grain. Practically everything we call cinematic

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#189

Post by VikingCoder »

I've grown very fond of having shaders available for my retro games.

I suspect having shader plugins for TV and movie watching will become a thing.

"The input is supposed to be 24 FPS, so please find those frames from the input signal. Use AI to try to remove compression artifacts. Regrade digital for Kodak 35mm film. Then, flash each frame twice, with blackness in-between to emulate how movie theaters would project each frame twice. Moderate denoise. Add film grain."

I don't actually know what kind of filters I'd want, but I expect some people will have very strong opinions about the best way to watch given movies. I imagine browsing settings, like browsing user-contributed Controller settings on Steam Deck...

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#190

Post by lysace »

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…

They probably can't.
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