281–290 of 348 posts
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Great examples. My mind jumps straight to audio: - the pops and hiss of analog vinyl records, deliberately added by digital hip-hop artists - electric guitar distortion pedals designed to mimic the sound of overheated tube amps or speaker cones torn from being blown out
- Audio compression was/is necessary to get good SNR on mag tape.
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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…
> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places. But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's…
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When it comes to Star Wars, people are literally spotting them in Photoshop frame by frame. :)
I recently watched the despecialized edition. During the lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, there are moments where Obi-Wan's lightsaber has no glow and looks more like a very thick metal antenna, or like he's play-dueling with a short curtain rod. I can't figure out how to determine if that's intentional.
The careful eye may also notice they almost never strike the sabers against one another in that scene... because it'd break the spinning sticks. Apparent contact is usually gently done, or a trick of perspective.
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
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> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places. But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's…
That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.
If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is.
But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.
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…
(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…
Could it be the case that generating each digital master required thousands of render hours?
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.
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Even those aren’t accurate to the 1977 film. To pick an arguably-minor but very easy to see point: the title’s different.
Self-reply because I’m outside the edit window: the dvd “original” releases are based on the laserdisc, but supposedly they modify it to restore the pre-1981-re-release title, so I’m actually wrong! I can’t find out if they fix the 3% speed-up from the laser disc. The audio mix, at any rate, will be a combination of the three (stereo, mono, 70mm) original mixes, like on the laser disc, so identical to none of them. T…
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I bumped on this too, since 1994-1995 was about the time when multi-gigabyte hard drives were readily available and multiple full motion video codecs were being used in games, albeit for cut scenes. Theater projector compatibility makes complete sense.
> and multiple full motion video codecs were being used in games, albeit for cut scenes Yeah, but we were still using MPEG-2 back then, weren't we? They would have looked like utter garbage. Bitrates would have had to be so high that I'm not sure we would have actually had enough storage. I guess we could have shipped TWO hard drives.
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(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?