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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#61

Post by phantasmish »

behringer wrote: post #16
timenotwasted wrote: post #10

This makes so much more sense now. After having kids I've been watching my fair share of Pixar and I just never recalled how flat and bland everything looked but I would always chalk it up to my brain not recalling how it looked at the time. Good to know I guess that it wasn't just entirely nostalgia but sad that we continue to lose some of this history and so soon.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

Yeah I clicked this link going “oh god it’s because they printed to film, I bet, and man do I hope it looks worse so I don’t have to hunt down a bunch of giant 35mm scans of even more movies that can’t be seen properly any other way”

But no, of course it looks between slightly and way better in every case. Goddamnit. Pour one out for my overworked disk array.

And here I was thinking it was just my imagination that several of these look kinda shitty on Blu-ray and stream rips. Nope, they really are worse.

Piracy: saving our childhoods one frame at a time.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#62

Post by globular-toast »

I find a lot of the stuff I remember from decades ago looks worse now. Toy Story in particular I watched when I got a projector after I'd seen Toy Story 4 and it looked bad, almost to the point I wish I hadn't tarnished my memory of it. Similar things have happened with N64 games that I cherished when I was little.

I don't buy that it's a real degradation due to different presentation methods. I'm sorry, but no matter what film stock you lovingly transfer Toy Story to, it's never going to look like it does in your memory. Same with CRTs. Sure, it's a different look, but my memory still looks better.

It's like our memories get automatically upgraded when we see newer stuff. It's jarring to go back and realise it didn't actually look like that in the 90s. I think this is just the unfortunate truth of CGI. So far it hasn't reached the point of producing something timeless. I can watch a real film from the 80s and it will look just as "good" as one from today. Of course the colours will be different depending on the transfer, but what are we hoping for? To get the exact colours the director saw in his mind's eye? That kind of thing has never really interested me.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#63

Post by dehrmann »

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…

This reminds me of how pre-LCD console games don't look as intended on modern displays, or how vinyl sounds different from CDs because mixing and mastering targeted physical media with limitations.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#64

Post by opello »

> 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] in which very early (1964) computer animation was discussed alongside the SC4020 microfilm printer that used a Charactron CRT which could display text for exposure to film or plot lines.

[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-88-beflix-early...

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#65

Post by phantasmish »

bee_rider wrote: post #36

How well does 35mm hold up over time? Could these movies be said to “no longer exist” in some sense, if the scans have decayed noticeably?

Playing them, handling them, and poor storage all degrade them. Most original prints will have been played many times, and often haven’t been consistently stored well.

The 4k77 et c. fan scans of the original Star Wars trilogy, which aimed to get as close as possible to what one would have seen in a theater the year of release, used multiple prints to fill in e.g. bad frames, used references like (I think) magazine prints of stills and well-preserved fragments or individual frames to fix the (always faded, sometimes badly) color grading and contrast and such, and had to extensively hand-correct things like scratches, with some reels or parts of reels requiring a lot more of that kind of work than others. Even Jedi required a lot of that sort of work, and those reels would have been only something like 30-35 years old when they started working on them.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#66

Post by Ekaros »

dehrmann wrote: post #63
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…

This reminds me of how pre-LCD console games don't look as intended on modern displays, or how vinyl sounds different from CDs because mixing and mastering targeted physical media with limitations.

Wasn't CD more so cheapening out? Doing work one time and mostly for radio where perceived listening scenario was car or background and thus less dynamic range allowed it be louder on average.

CD itself can replicate same dynamic range and more, but well that doesn't sell extra copies.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#67

Post by toast0 »

opello wrote: post #48
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.

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.

In 1994-1995, all the pieces for digital cinema were there, but they weren't integrated, and there were no installed projectors. The Phantom Menance was shown digitally.... on two screens. By the end of 2000, there were 31 digital cinema screens in theaters.

Digital cinema went with Motion JPEG2000 with high quality settings, which leads to very large files, but also much better fidelity than likely with a contemporary video codec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#68

Post by beAbU »

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 a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical

Same applies for people buying modern vinyl records believing them to be more authentic than a CD or (god-forbid) online streaming.

Everything comes from a digital master, and arguably the vinyl copy adds artefacts and colour to the sound that is not part of the original recording. Additionally, the vinyl is not catching more overtones because it's analogue, there is no true analogue path in modern music any more.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#69

Post by eviks »

qingcharles wrote: post #41
behringer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

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.…

> with low compression to keep things like grain.

But you have algorithmic grain in modern codecs, so no need to waste so much space for noise?

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#70

Post by pavlov »

Film weave could also be worth mentioning.

Movies projected on film look different not only because of the color and texture, but also a constant spatial jitter over time. When the film moves through the projector, each frame locks into a slightly different position vertically. That creates a wobble that's called "film weave."

(If you want to create truly authentic-looking titles for a 1980s B-grade sci-fi movie, don't forget to add that vertical wobble to your Eurostile Extended Bold layout that reads: "THE YEAR IS 2025...")

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