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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#251

Post by charcircuit »

autoexec wrote: post #127
charcircuit wrote: post #42

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. Whenever I watch a film based movie my immersion always gets broken by all the little specs that show up. Digital is a much more immersive experience for me.

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 They originally made those movies the way they did intentionally because what they wanted wasn't…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

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#252

Post by charcircuit »

kemayo wrote: post #229
charcircuit wrote: post #42

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. Whenever I watch a film based movie my immersion always gets broken by all the little specs that show up. Digital is a much more immersive experience for me.

> You can't see all of the detail the artists drew That's the point in that Lion King frame, though. They drew it planning for it to get washed out by the sunlight effect, and when it's not it absolutely ruins the "vast crowd" effect they were going for because you can clearly see there's no more animals in the background and it's just 20 guys standing there.

If that were true, why didn't they draw the crowd thicker in the half that is not as washed out.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#253

Post by hackerdood »

nunez wrote: post #209
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…

I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s. Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.

That’s more due to mono being the dominant format at the time so the majority of time and money went to working on the mono mix. The stereo one was often an afterthought until stereo became more widespread and demand for good stereo mixes increased.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#254

Post by rokweom »

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…

Doesn't wet scanning "automatically" get rid of the dust and scratches issue?

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#255

Post by chollida1 »

The more I read about hte history of computer animation in movies the more i am amazed at George Lucas for being such a visionary.

To be the man responsible for the creation of Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker sound, LucasFilm games, THX, and Kerner Optical is a very impressive accomplishment for him and that's secondary to the main accomplishment he's known for in StarWars.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#256

Post by wanderingmoose »

vodou wrote: post #157
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)?

I work in vfx, and we had a lecture from one of the art designers that worked with some formula 1 teams on the color design for cars. It was really interesting on how much work goes into making the car look "iconic" but also highlight sponsors, etc.

But for your point, back during the pal/ntsc analog days, the physical color of the cars was set so when viewed on analog broadcast, the color would be correct (very similar to film scanning).

He worked for a different team but brought in a small piece of ferrari bodywork and it was more of a day-glo red-orange than the delicious red we all think of with ferrari.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#257

Post by jjmarr »

pornel wrote: post #193

It's even worse with The Matrix where nobody is even sure any more how it was supposed to look, except definitely not as green as the DVD release. Noodle made a charming video about going mad researching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk

I thought the "green" was symbolic of the computer world because of the green code rain motif. Like how yellow = Mexico.

This is shocking to say the least.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#258

Post by matthavener »

chollida1 wrote: post #255

The more I read about hte history of computer animation in movies the more i am amazed at George Lucas for being such a visionary. To be the man responsible for the creation of Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker sound, LucasFilm games, THX, and Kerner Optical is a very impressive accomplishment for him and that's secondary to the main accomplishment he's known for in StarWars.

Light and Magic is an amazing documentary that covers lots of this history

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#259

Post by robotresearcher »

charcircuit wrote: post #40

>Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures. This is not true at all. Being compatible with outdated, film based projectors was much more important for being able to show it in as many theaters as possible. If they wanted to do a digital screening it would have been technologically possible.

Right. Movies don’t fit onto a single 35mm film reel, and theatres deal with that as a matter of course.

It was possible, but much too expensive to get it into wide release that way.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#260

Post by snickerbockers »

alfonsodev wrote: post #207
VikingCoder wrote: post #189

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…

would it be posible today playing from computer using vlc or similar + plugins ?

It certainly should be possible but idk if its actually implemented; at the very least you should be able to implement it as a filter plugin for ffmpeg.

Some of the more advanced CRT shaders actually attempt to mathematically model how the video gets distorted by the CRT and even the component video. If the effects of converting to film are so well-understood that Pixar can adapt their film for the process then it out to be able to post-process the video in a way that reproduces those artifacts.

I don't think its possible for it ever to be exactly the same since the display technology of a monitor is fundamentally different from a film projector(or a CRT) but it should be possible to get it good enough that its indistinguishable from an photo of the film being displayed on a modern monitor (ie the colors aren't completely different like in the comparisons in the article.

BTW TFA didn't mention this but about 15 years ago they rerendered toy story and toy story 2 for a new theatrical run when those gimmicky 3d glasses were popular. If that's the version thats being distributed today on Disney plus and bluray (IDK but i feel like it probably is) then that could potentially be a more significant factor in ruining the color balance than not having been converted to film.

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