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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#51

Post by Affric »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #45
etempleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people will not care nor even notice. Some people will notice and say, hey, why is it "blurry." So do you spend a good chunk of time and money to make it look accurate or do you just dump the file onto the server and call it a day?

How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it." There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.

It’s really been the driving force of modern life for centuries at this point.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#52

Post by bsimpson »

Same is true of home video hardware:

If you plug a Nintendo system's RCA cables into a modern TV, it will look like garbage. Emulated games on LCDs look pixelated.

Those games were designed for a CRT's pixel grid. They don't look right on LCDs, and the upscalers in home theater equipment don't respect that. There are hardware upscalers and software shaders that are specifically designed to replicate a CRT's quirks, to let you better approximate how those games were designed to be played.

Related - someone recently built a CRT dock for his Switch, so he could play Nintendo Switch Online's emulated games as originally intended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcym2tHiWT4

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#53

Post by mer_mer »

hekkle wrote: post #6

I'm surprised they can't just put a filter on the digital versions to achieve a similar look and feel to the 35mm version. It is clear that the animators factored in the colour changes from the original media to 35mm, so it seems a disservice to them to re-release their works without honouring how they intended the films to be seen.

You can, that's what Pixar did while creating the film. From the article:

> During production, we’re working mostly from computer monitors. We’re rarely seeing the images on film. So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality. We put those in general work areas, so people can go and see how their work looks. Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor looks the same as what we’ll get on film.

But they didn't do a perfect job (the behavior of film is extremely complex), so there's a question- should the digital release reflect their intention as they were targeting these calibrated monitors or should it reflect what was actually released? Also, this wouldn't include other artifacts like film grain.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#54

Post by kridsdale3 »

afavour wrote: post #37
Torn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney 100% has access to colorists and best in class colour grading software. It must have been a business (cost cutting) decision?

I’m reminded of the beginning of the movie Elf, where the book publisher is informed that a printing error means their latest book is missing the final two pages. Should they pulp and reprint? He says, > You think a kid is going to notice two pages? All they do is look at the pictures. I’m quite sure bean counters look at Disney kids movies the exact same way, despite them being Disney’s bread and butter. With Star W…

I'm a 39 year old man who ground his VHS of Aladdin to dust in the 90s, and bought the Blu Ray because I can't say I can rely on streaming to always exist.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#55

Post by NewsGotHacked »

nappy wrote: post #50

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture w…

[flagged]

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#56

Post by findyoucef »

NewsGotHacked wrote: post #55
nappy wrote: post #50

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture w…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#57

Post by opello »

charcircuit wrote: post #42
kemayo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one frame they showed from the Lion King really stood out. The difference in how the background animals were washed out by the sunlight makes the film version look significantly better.

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.

This is an interesting take when you look at the gas station Toy Story example and consider the night sky. In the digital version the stars are very washed out but in the film version the sky is dark and it's easy to appreciate the stars. Perhaps it's unrealistic when you realize the setting is beneath a gas station canopy with fluorescent lights, but that detail, along with some of the very distinct coloring, stuck out to me.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#58

Post by johngossman »

nappy wrote: post #50

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture w…

Agreed. It's a fine article but leaves half the story on the table. It is supposedly comparing what these movies looked like in the theater to the modern streaming and bluray versions, but is actually comparing what a film scan (scanner settings unspecified) projected on a TV (or other unspecified screen) looks like compared to the digital versions on (presumably) the same screen. And then we can ask: how were the comparison images captured, rendered to jpeg for the web, before we the readers view them on our own screens? I'm not arguing Catmull and company didn't do a great job of rendering to film, but this comparison doesn't necessarily tell us anything.

Don't believe me? Download the comparison pictures in the article to your device and play with filters and settings. You can get almost anything you want and the same was true at every step in the render pipeline to your TV.

Ps - and don't get me started on how my 60-year old eyes see color to what they perceived when I saw this in the theater

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#59

Post by vasco »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #45
etempleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people will not care nor even notice. Some people will notice and say, hey, why is it "blurry." So do you spend a good chunk of time and money to make it look accurate or do you just dump the file onto the server and call it a day?

How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it." There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.

You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy. It won't be worth it monetarily but since you're annoyed it doesn't exist and money isn't a factor...

It's always easy to complain about others not being generous enough with their time, but we always have an excuse for why we won't do it ourselves.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#60

Post by jama211 »

nappy wrote: post #50

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture w…

It’s an interesting and valid point that the projectors from the time would mean current scans of 35mm will be different too. However, taking for example the Aladdin screenshot in particular, the sky is COMPLETELY the wrong colour in the modern digital edition, so it seems to me at least that these 35mm scans whilst not perfect to the 90’s are closer to correct than their digital counterparts.
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