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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#321

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

im3w1l wrote: post #310
munificent wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment. 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 dir…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he says the music track can have hard panning, and it's the headphone playback system that should do some compensatory processing so that it sounds as if it was played on two speakers in a room. Don't ask me how it works but I know gaming headsets try to emulate a surround setup.

Yes, these sorts of compensation features have become common on higher end headphones.

One example:

> The crossfeed feature is great for classic tracks with hard-panned mixes. It takes instruments concentrated on one channel and balances them out, creating a much more natural listening experience — like hearing the track on a full stereo system.

https://us.sennheiser-hearing.com/products/hdb-630

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#322

Post by janeway »

diskzero wrote: post #305
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…

I worked at DreamWorks Animation on the pipeline, lighting and animation tools for almost ten years. All of this information is captured in our pipeline process tools, although I am sure there are edits and modifications that are done that escape documentation. We were able to pull complete shows out of deep storage, render scenes using the toolchain the produced them and produce the same output. If the renders weren…

Amazing. Your final point seems to make most sense - not the original team itself having any problems.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#323

Post by krick »

That's weird. If the color difference is caused entirely by some peculiar chemical properties of the film, it should be trivial to calculate the filter that you need to apply to the digital source material so you get the "authentic" colors. So why not just do that and distribute the movie as it was designed? Or, heck, even 2 versions if you insist that some audience likes that new more vibrant look.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#324

Post by xattt »

KaiserPro wrote: post #297
xattt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the colour change is also dependent on the film printer and also film scanner/telecine? It just seems like there’s a lot of variability in each step to end up with an unintended colour, that will taken as the artist’s intent.

> is also dependent on the film printer The printers deffo make a difference to colour, but I came from VFX world where we put a macbeth chart in for each shot so we could adjust the colour afterwards. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker ) We'd have a whole team working on making sure that colour was accurate. The scanners we used (northlight) were calibrated a lot so my understanding is that if you scanned…

Thank you! I would love to know the process of the colour guy. Like how much of it is the same as a chef tasting a dish and realizing it needs x ingredient in the spot.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#325

Post by opello »

Kye wrote: post #267
opello wrote: post #64

> He [David DiFrancesco] broke ground in film printing — specifically, in putting digital images on analog film. > Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story ’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie. While I have no doubt that this hadn't been done at the scale and resolution, it struck me that I'd heard about this concept in a podcast episode [1]…

For Flight of the Navigator (1986) they sent renders of the ship directly to film because the system could only hold one frame at a time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8

That was excellent, thanks for sharing it! I enjoyed the appearance of the Cray X-MP.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#326

Post by mcdeltat »

krick wrote: post #323

That's weird. If the color difference is caused entirely by some peculiar chemical properties of the film, it should be trivial to calculate the filter that you need to apply to the digital source material so you get the "authentic" colors. So why not just do that and distribute the movie as it was designed? Or, heck, even 2 versions if you insist that some audience likes that new more vibrant look.

Yeah I also had this thought. Despite popular belief, the film look is not magic. Especially since the article mentions they already had monitors calibrated for the film look during development. Why couldn't they replicate that for the digital release? The digital release it so blazingly different, I have a hard time believing that is the best they can do with modern colour pipelines. I mean the colour grading is completely different! Surely either it was intentional or a fairly simple case of poor colour management.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#327

Post by boulos »

xattt wrote: post #324
KaiserPro wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is also dependent on the film printer The printers deffo make a difference to colour, but I came from VFX world where we put a macbeth chart in for each shot so we could adjust the colour afterwards. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker ) We'd have a whole team working on making sure that colour was accurate. The scanners we used (northlight) were calibrated a lot so my understanding is that if you scanned…

Thank you! I would love to know the process of the colour guy. Like how much of it is the same as a chef tasting a dish and realizing it needs x ingredient in the spot.

I recommend interviews with Roger Deakins, like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w56rFxPyZno

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#328

Post by boulos »

rootbear wrote: post #240
left-struck wrote: post #212

“So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality.“ I would love to know what qualifies as extremely high resolution for computer monitors circa 1995

I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.

Yes, there have been a couple re-render the whole thing. There was a good write up somewhere that I cannot find now where there was a discussion of keeping RenderMan bug compatible with the original or not. They also upped the shading rate and a few other quality knobs.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#329

Post by exidy »

jedberg wrote: post #215

There is a solution for Toy Story specifically -- the Laserdisc version. If I'm not mistaken, the laserdisc was digitized from the 35mm print. Toy Story is the only Pixar movie ever released on Laserdisc (along with all their shorts, in the same box set). Disney also released a lot of their 90s animation on Laserdisc. So if you're a true cinephile, seek out the Laserdisc versions.

It's a niggle in any other context, but for this thread it's worth highlighting that LaserDisc is not a digital video format, but rather analogue, and composite analogue at that. So it would be more accurate to say it was scanned rather than digitised.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#330

Post by boulos »

bityard wrote: post #185
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That is precisely what this one was. The OP posted a follow-up comment at https://www.reddit.com/r/Terminator/comments/d65pbi/comment/...:

> I have an updated, I found out that T2 4K is an HDR movie that needs to be played with MadVR and enable HDR on the TV itself, now the colors are correct and I took a new screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/KTOn3Bw.jpg

> However when the TV is in HDR mode the 4K looks 100% correct, but when seeing the screenshot with HDR off then the screenshot looks still a bit wrong, here is a screenshot with correct colors: https://i.imgur.com/KTOn3Bw.jpg

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