[HN Gopher] The 'Toy Story' You Remember
___________________________________________________________________
The 'Toy Story' You Remember
Author : ani_obsessive
Score : 1086 points
Date : 2025-11-11 03:17 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (animationobsessive.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (animationobsessive.substack.com)
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Excellent article really enjoyed it.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Yeah, this is the kind of thing that makes me really enjoy the
| internet.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The texture of the film grain makes Mulan and Aladdin really look
| better. The large simple filled sections look like they have so
| much more to them.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.
| saghm wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm just young enough to be on the other side
| of this despite seeing all three of those Disney movies as a
| millennial kid (Lion King and Aladdin were VHS mainstays in
| my house, and I remember seeing Mulan in theaters), but I
| honestly don't find the film grain to look better at all and
| think all three of those bottom images are much more
| appealing. For the Toy Story ones, I think I'm mostly
| indifferent; I can see why some people might prefer the upper
| film images but don't really think I'd notice which one I was
| watching. I'd definitely think I'd notice the difference in
| the 2D animation though and would find the film grain
| extremely distracting.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| opello wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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 crystal clear
| images with unrealistic colors, they wanted atmosphere and
| for things to look realistic.
|
| Film grain and dust can be excessive and distracting. It's
| a good thing when artifacts added due to dirt/age gets
| cleaned up for transfers so we can have clear images, but
| the result of that clean up should still show what the
| artists originally intended and that's where disney's
| digital versions really miss the mark.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| > 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If that were true, why didn't they draw the crowd thicker
| in the half that is not as washed out.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| It does, but much more important to me is the color grading.
| The white point in the film versions is infinitely better.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Which is of course highly subjective; you could argue that film
| grain is an unwanted but unavoidable side-effect from the
| medium used, just like other artifacts from film - vertical
| alignment issues, colour shifting from "film breath", 24 frames
| per second, or the weird sped-up look from really old films.
|
| I don't believe these were part of the filmmaker's vision at
| the time, but unavoidable. Nowadays they are added again to
| films (and video games) on purpose to create a certain
| (nostalgic) effect.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think this comment demonstrates an understanding of
| the argument. An unavoidable side-effect of the medium is
| part of the medium. You will consider unavoidable side-
| effects when you are building something for a particular
| medium, unless you are stupid. If that unavoidable side-
| effect _were not_ part of the medium, you would have made
| different choices.
|
| Colorizing a black-and-white film, for example, is not ever
| restoring the original intention or vision, even
| "subjectively." If the makers of a black-and-white film had
| been making a color film, they would have made different
| choices.
|
| This does not mean that you should not colorize black-and-
| white films, you should do whatever makes you happy. I
| honestly can't wait until AI is recreating missing scenes or
| soundtracks from partially lost films, or even "re"creating
| entire lost films from scripts or contemporary reviews and
| cast lists, and expanding films to widescreen by inventing
| contents on the edges. But this will not be restoring a
| vision, this will be original work.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Those comparisons were strangely jarring. It's odd to see (on the
| internet awash with "Mandela Effect" joke conspiracies) direct
| photo/video evidence that things we remember from our childhood
| have _indeed_ been changed; sometimes for the worse!
| hekkle wrote:
| 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.
| etempleton wrote:
| They could, but it would require some work to get it right.
| This is very similar to conversations that happen regularly in
| the retro game scene regarding CRT monitors vs modern monitors
| for games of a certain era. The analog process was absolutely
| factored in when the art was being made, so if you want a
| similar visuals on a modern screen you will need some level of
| thoughtful post processing.
| philistine wrote:
| And ultimately, what you need to achieve acceptable CRT
| effects is resolution. Only now, with 4K and above, can we
| start to portray the complex interactions between the
| electron beam and the produced image by your console. But the
| colour banding that caused the hearts of _The Legend of
| Zelda_ to show a golden sheen is still unreachable.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Reminded me of this article about some retro games on crt
| vs lcd-
|
| https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-
| tvs-a...
| Torn wrote:
| Disney 100% has access to colorists and best in class colour
| grading software. It must have been a business (cost cutting)
| decision?
| etempleton wrote:
| 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?
| cyode wrote:
| To speak nothing of the global audience for these films.
| I'm guessing most people's first experience seeing these
| movies was off a VHS or DVD, so the nostalgia factor is
| only relevant to small percentage of viewers, and only a
| small percentage of that percentage notices.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| VHS resolution is total crap... yet: it's not uncommon
| for the _colors_ and contrast on VHS (and some early DVD)
| to be much better than what is available for streaming
| today.
|
| This is totally bonkers, because the VHS format is
| crippled, also color wise. Many modern transfers are just
| crap.
| phantasmish wrote:
| It's really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to
| be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it's true.
|
| An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show.
| The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the
| film source, which is good, but... that meant losing the
| color grading and digital effects, because the final show
| wasn't _printed_ to film. Not only did they get lazy
| recreating the effects, they don't seem to have done
| scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically
| alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms
| the _legibility_ of the show, because lots of scenes were
| shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just
| look like they're daytime, so it's often hard to tell
| when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which
| matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters
| in one with _fucking vampires_.
|
| The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is
| arguably far superior to the blu ray _for its colors_ ,
| which is an astounding level of failure.
|
| (There are other problems with things like some kind of
| ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied
| and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing
| context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes
| confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a
| poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better
| just on those grounds)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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.
| Affric wrote:
| It's really been the driving force of modern life for
| centuries at this point.
| sph wrote:
| Centuries is stretching it. It's central to
| industrialisation, Taylor, Ford, etc. The relentless
| pursuit of efficiency and technique. Its anti-thesis is
| art for art's sake.
|
| In modern tech circles, the utilitarian mindset is going
| strong, now that the hacker ethos is dead and it's all
| about being corporate friendly and hireable.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as
| 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they
| found it an artistically fulfilling place.
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| You can't do that since besides time you also need
| knowledge/skill. So the final difference could be between
| "an extra 1% of the budget" at a corporate level vs "and
| extra 10% of your life to become a professional and fix a
| video, and also break the law in the process". Pretty
| easy to see how it's not just "an excuse", but a bit more
| fundamental issue
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I'm this particular instance though it's not really about
| time, it's studios not wanting to pay what I imagine
| would be a relatively small amount to do the conversion.
| It's not going to be a frame-by-frame laborious process.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame
| and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many
| people happy.
|
| You can't, at least not if you want an acceptable result.
|
| In photography, if you have a JPEG photo only, you can't
| do post-facto adjustments of the white balance, for that
| you need RAW - too much information has been lost during
| compression.
|
| For movies it's just the same. To achieve something that
| actually looks good with a LUT (that's the fancy way for
| re-coloring, aka color grading), you need access to the
| uncompressed scans, as early in the processing pipeline
| as you can get (i.e. before any kind of filter is
| applied).
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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."
|
| Honestly, by weakening copyright protections. People who
| love the works will do the work to protect them when they
| don't have to fear being sued into bankruptcy for trying
| to preserve their own culture.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Just dialing down the red and blue channels a bit makes it
| much closer for several of the early '90s releases (look at
| that _Aladdin_ example from TFA)
| afavour wrote:
| 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 Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that'll
| buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much.
| Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any
| individual movie any more.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| 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.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Steve Jobs' type attitude vs Bill Gates type attitude (in
| the 90s). Or, Apple vs Microsoft.
|
| The Disney of yesterday might have been a bit more Jobs
| than Gates, compared to the Disney of today.
| autoexec wrote:
| > With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base
| that'll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so
| much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even
| buying any individual movie any more.
|
| I agree it was likely Disney being cheap, but there are
| tons of people who'll buy up disney movies on physical
| media in the age of streaming. Not only are there disney
| fans who'd rival the obsessiveness of star wars fans, but
| like Lucas Disney just can't leave shit alone. They go
| back and censor stuff all the time and you can't get the
| uncensored versions on their streaming platform. Aladdin
| is even an example where they've made changes. It's not
| even a new thing for Disney. The lyrics to one of the
| songs in Aladdin were changed long before Disney+
| existed.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Disney do pay for industry leading colorists. They chose to
| favour a more saturated look for Aladdin et al. It is
| reasonable to prefer either. I can't imaging what happened
| to the greens in the Toy Story examples if they are
| accurate.
| energy123 wrote:
| They could reduce the saturation with 1 mouse click if they
| wanted, but they didn't. They must have intentionally
| decided that high saturation is desirable.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| They care very deeply about this and devoted a lot of
| resources to (re)grading the digital versions that you see
| today on Disney+. The versions you see are intentional and
| not the result of cost cutting. (I was not directly privy
| to this work but I worked on Disney+ before its launch and
| I sat in on some tech talks and other internal information
| about the digital workflows that led to the final result on
| the small screen and there was a lot of attention on this
| at the time)
|
| I think there's a discussion to be had about art,
| perception and devotion to the "original" or "authentic"
| version of something that can't be resolved completely but
| what I don't think is correct is the perception that this
| was overlooked or a mistake.
| belZaah wrote:
| It is doable and you can get presets designed to mimic the look
| of legendary photography film stock like Velvia. But what they
| did back then was very much an analog process and thus also
| inherently unstable. Small details start to matter in terms of
| exposure times, projectors used etc. There's so many frames and
| it took so much time, that it's almost guaranteed there'd be
| noticeable differences due to process fluctuations.
| mer_mer wrote:
| 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.
| happymellon wrote:
| > Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film
| stock, so the image we have on the monitor
|
| Except, as they say, the high grade monitors were calibrated
| to emulate the characteristics of film.
|
| If we can show that D+ doesn't look like the film, then we
| can point out that it probably doesn't look like the
| calibrated monitors either. Those army men are not that shade
| of slime green in real life, and you'll have a hard time
| convincing me that after all the thought and effort went in
| to the animation they allowed that putrid pea shade to go
| through.
| Asooka wrote:
| The best option for me would be to release it in whatever
| format preserves the most of the original colour data without
| modification, then let the viewer application apply colour
| grading. Give me the raw renders in a linear 16bpc colour
| space with no changes. Sadly, I don't think we have digital
| movie formats that can handle that.
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's not just about slapping on some grain and calling it a
| day; it's about honoring a whole set of artistic decisions that
| were made with that specific medium in mind
| sja wrote:
| Neat! The Youtube channel Noodle recently did a related deep dive
| into the differences in the releases of The Matrix [0]. The back
| half of the video also touches on the art of transferring from
| film/video to digital.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk
| larusso wrote:
| I always felt the old matrix had a more colder blue. And it
| changed drastically when the second and third hit cinemas. At
| least that was my memory because I watched a double feature
| when the second one hit the theatre's and complained then that
| the Matrix somehow looked weird. But it could also be my memory
| since I also own the blue ray release.
|
| Another movie with the same / similar problem is the DVD
| release of the Lord of the Rings Extended editions. Both Blu-
| ray and 4K version. As far as I remember is that they fixed it
| for the theatrical version in 4K but not extended.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| At least they messed around with the green.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0YBqhMtcg
| timenotwasted wrote:
| 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.
| behringer wrote:
| Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the
| high seas.
| squigz wrote:
| What sort of terms might one search for?
| behringer wrote:
| "toy story film scan" on Kagi led me to a reddit page that
| may or may not contain links that might help you, but don't
| dawdle those links may not work forever.
|
| Another one that's been hard to find is the 4k matrix
| original color grading release. Ping me if you have it!
| (Not the 1080p release)
| dmonitor wrote:
| Would be annoying, but I suppose you could also recalibrate
| your display to turn down the greens?
| behringer wrote:
| VLC has a lot of image manipulation options.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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. I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and
| Telegram.
| squigz wrote:
| > I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and
| Telegram.
|
| Someone tell this community to share over BT. Aint nobody
| got time to keep up with which platform/server everyone is
| on and which links are expired and yuck.
| sersi wrote:
| The main reason they are not shared as widely is that
| there's a bit of conflict within the community between
| those that really want to stay under the radar and not
| risk being targeted by copyright owners (and so try to
| keep things very much private between the donors who
| funded the 600-900 usd cost of the scans) and those who
| want to open up a bit more and so use telegram, reddit
| and upload to private trackers.
| piperswe wrote:
| I would be surprised if they didn't end up on the
| prestigious private trackers
| eviks wrote:
| > 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?
| behringer wrote:
| This grain looks extremely fake.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Because one is genuine physics and another is a fake
| crap?
| eviks wrote:
| the calculations and the photons sent to your eyes are
| all genuine physics
| phantasmish wrote:
| One's an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
|
| The other's fake noise.
|
| One's a real photo from 1890. The other's an old-timey
| instagram filter.
|
| It makes sense that some folks might care about the
| difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would
| not want a scanned version of those to have the "noise"
| removed for compression's sake. If that had been done,
| I'd have limited interest in adding fake noise back to
| them. By far my favorite version to have would be the
| originals, without the "noise" smoothed out at all.
|
| Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked
| grain isn't what they're after, at all. It's practically
| unrelated to what they're looking for.
| eviks wrote:
| > One's an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
|
| > The other's fake noise
|
| But since there is no such thing as _the_ real thing, it
| could just as well match one of the many real noise
| patterns in one of the many real things floating around,
| or a real thing at a different point in time with more
| /less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the
| difference, thus...
|
| > It makes sense that some folks might care about the
| difference
|
| Not really, it doesn't make sense to care about identical
| noise you can't tell apart. Of course, plenty people care
| about all kind of nonsense, so that won't stop those
| folks, but let's not pretentd there is some 'real
| physics' involved
| phantasmish wrote:
| But... of course there is? A record of a real thing is
| different from a statistical simulation of it.
| eviks wrote:
| I think you missed the "a" vs " the", you can encode
| different sources that would have different grains, or
| the same source would have different grain at different
| times.
|
| But also a simulation called compression of a real thing
| is different from that real thing, so that purity test
| had already been failed
| phantasmish wrote:
| I just feed AI the IMDB summary and let it re-create the
| movie for me. Just as "pure" as high-bitrate h.265, after
| all.
| eviks wrote:
| You've chosen your argumentative perch very well, it's
| indeed right down there with the AI slop where you can't
| see any difference in reality
| phantasmish wrote:
| Well film grain doesn't matter because compression
| exists, apparently, and may as well be simulated because
| it's already failed the "purity test" and may as well be
| algo-noise. That holds for everything else! May as well
| maximize the compression and simulate all of it then.
|
| [EDIT] My point is "film grain's not more-real than algo
| noise" is simply not true, at all. An attempt to
| represent something with fidelity is not the same thing
| as giving up and faking it entirely based on a guess with
| zero connection to the real thing--its being _a
| representation_ and not the actual-real-thing doesn 't
| render it equally as "impure" as a noise-adding filter.
| eviks wrote:
| You're still dancing there in the slop, hallucinating the
| arguments thinking it's a pretty dress!
|
| It may as well be stimulated because you won't see the
| difference! So now you've imagined some purity test which
| was never true, so you have nothing and start
| hallucinating some hyperbolic AI thing
| phantasmish wrote:
| > But also a simulation called compression of a real
| thing is different from that real thing, so that purity
| test had already been failed
|
| Quoted: the introduction of "purity test" to the
| conversation, from _not one of my posts_.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Akshually
|
| One is the real deal and another one is a simulation. End
| of story.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| You can't trust corporations to respect or protect art. You
| can't even buy or screen the original theatrical release of
| Star Wars. The only option is as you say. There are many more
| examples of the owners of IP altering it in subsequence
| editions/iterations. This still seems so insane to me that
| it's not even for sale anywhere...
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. So many
| beautiful things have been lost to perpetual IP, e.g. old
| games that could be easily ported by volunteers given
| source code, which can never be monetised again.
|
| Sometimes people create things that surpass them, and I
| think it is totally fair for them to belong to humanity
| after the people that created them generated enough money
| for their efforts.
| haunter wrote:
| > You can't even buy or screen the original theatrical
| release of Star Wars
|
| You can actually, the 2006 Limited Edition DVD is a double
| disc version one being the original version.
|
| However they are not DVD quality because they were
| transferred from LaserDisc and not the original film stock
| phantasmish wrote:
| Even those aren't accurate to the 1977 film.
|
| To pick an arguably-minor but very easy to see point: the
| title's different.
| phantasmish wrote:
| 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. The source should predate the replacement of Latin
| script with made-up letters (not conceived until ROTJ
| then retrofitted on some releases of SW and Empire) so
| that'll be intact unless they "fixed" it.
|
| Still stuck with sub-ordinary-dvd-quality picture, as far
| as official releases go, so that's too bad. Oh well, fan
| 35mm scan projects solved that problem.
| haunter wrote:
| I have these DVDs and you are right. But still the
| closest thing to the OG theatrical version officially
| available.
| phantasmish wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| When it comes to Star Wars, people are _literally_ spotting
| them in Photoshop frame by frame. :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| phantasmish wrote:
| The ignited sabers used spinning sticks with reflective
| tape covering them, and some rotoscoping applied in post
| to get the final effect. There are spots in the un-
| retouched Star Wars where the effect is missed, or
| something, and you can indeed see the raw stick.
| Something similar's also behind that one weird shot where
| Obi Wan's saber seems to almost fizzle out (the tip is
| pointed too much toward the camera, and messes up the
| effect)
|
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| And it's for things like this that people just don't
| understand the value of a healthy alternative way to archive
| things.
|
| A true fan who wants to preserve and be faithful on its scan
| is going to dedicate their life to get it just right, while a
| mega corp will just open the original, click "Export as..."
| and call it a day.
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's kind of sad that what felt like a defining aesthetic at
| the time is now basically an accidental casualty of progress
| spott wrote:
| Man, this makes me want to watch original 35mm releases of all
| these films. It is unfortunate that they are so hard to get your
| hands on these days.
| esperent wrote:
| This thread has a download link for toy story 35mm. Not sure if
| it works but maybe worth trying.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/toystory/comments/1hhfuiq/does_anyo...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It's fascinating to me how many of these discussions boil down to
| dialing in dynamic range for the medium in question.
|
| As the _Aladdin_ still shows with its wildly altered colors
| clearly other aspects matter /are at play. But the analog/digital
| discussions always seem, at least to me, to hinge heavily on DR.
| It's just so interesting to me.
|
| Many of us remember the leap from SD->HD. Many of us also can
| point out how 4K is nice and even noticeably better than FHD, but
| man...getting a 4K OLED TV with (and this is the important part)
| nice DR was borderline another SD->HD jump to me. Especially with
| video games and older films shot and displayed on film stock from
| start to finish. The difference is incredibly striking.
| GenericDev wrote:
| Damn. I wish we could get the release of the 35mm colors in the
| way they look in the comparisons. The Aladdin one specifically
| looks so good! It makes me feel like we're missing out on so much
| from the era it was released.
| jtolmar wrote:
| Is it possible to replicate the digital->film transition with
| tone mapping? (I assume the answer is yes, but what is the actual
| mapping?)
| shrinks99 wrote:
| Generally yes, but we're still working on it all these years
| later! This article by Chris Brejon offers a very in-depth look
| into the differences brought about by different display
| transforms: https://chrisbrejon.com/articles/ocio-display-
| transforms-and...
|
| The "best" right now, in my opinion, is AgX, which at this
| point has various "flavours" that operate slightly differently.
| You can find a nice comparison of OCIO configs here:
| https://liamcollod.xyz/picture-lab-lxm/CAlc-D8T-dragon
| jesse__ wrote:
| Wow, those links are a goldmine, thanks!
|
| I went down the tonemapping rabbit hole for a hobby game
| engine project a while ago and was surprised at how complex
| the state-of-the-art is.
| wilg wrote:
| If you're interested in these 35mm film scans, I recommend
| watching this excellent YouTube video "SE7EN & How 35mm Scans Lie
| to You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwQRFLFDd8 for some more
| background on how this works, and especially how these
| comparisons can sometimes be misleading and prey on your
| nostalgia a bit.
|
| If you're interested in making digital footage look exactly like
| film in every possible way, I'll shill our product Filmbox:
| https://videovillage.com/filmbox/
| squigz wrote:
| Wow. Based on those comparisons they really do feel completely
| different. Really remarkable how such relatively simple changes
| in lighting and whatnot can drastically change the mood.
|
| And here I was thinking of re-watching some old Disney/Pixar
| movies soon :(
| vinhnx wrote:
| What an excellent piece! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, brought
| my childhood memories flooding back. I have so many fond
| recollections of that 90s era, including "A Bug's Life." I
| remember gathering with my cousins at my grandmother's house to
| watch these films on VHS. Time flies.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| _Beauty and the Beast_ on Bluray looks completely different from
| what I remember; I had assumed that they had just regraded it,
| but given that it was developed with CAPS, maybe this is part of
| the effect?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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?
| phantasmish wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Hollywood does store original prints in underground salt mines
| (at least I am aware of a place in Kansas where they do this).
| Of course who knows where the frames we are being shown from
| the 35mm film version are coming from. Likely not these copies
| that are probably still in _halite storage_.
| bpiroman wrote:
| wtf happened to Simpsons on Disney+? looks like it's zoomed in.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| The simpsons was originally made in 4:3. Many people don't like
| watching with large black bars to the right and left, so they
| show a cropped 16:9 version. People complained because this is
| occasionally a problem and ruins a joke, so I believe you can
| opt into either.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| A similar crime against taste as the pan-and-scan
| "fullscreen" DVDs of the early 2000s. If I want to pay to
| watch something, don't crop out a chunk of what the
| cinematographer wanted me to see...
| toast0 wrote:
| Pan and scan wasn't a DVD innovation. Most VHS releases
| were pan and scan too; DVDs at least commonly had
| widescreen available (many early discs came with widescreen
| on one side and full screen on the other... good luck
| guessing if widescreen on the hub indicates the side you're
| reading is widescren or if the otherside is widescreen so
| you should have the widescreen label facing up in your
| player.
| opello wrote:
| David Simon talked about this for the HD release of The
| Wire:
|
| https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/
|
| It seems like the video examples are unfortunately now
| unavailable, but the discussion is still interesting and
| it's neat to see the creative trade-offs and constraints in
| the process. I think those nuances help evoke generosity in
| how one approaches re-releases or other versions or cuts of
| a piece of media.
| frou_dh wrote:
| There's a (much less severe) instance of that peeve with
| computer video player apps that have slightly rounded
| corners on the windows.
| sefrost wrote:
| I believe this is the best example of the problems that can
| be caused:
|
| https://x.com/TristanACooper/status/1194298167824650240
|
| Open both images and compare. The visual joke is completely
| ruined with the cropping.
| 6581 wrote:
| There's an option to switch back to the original 4:3 ratio.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| opello wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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
| opello wrote:
| > In 1994-1995, all the pieces for digital cinema were
| there, but they weren't integrated, and there were no
| installed projectors.
|
| I agree with that. The article's quote from Pixar's "Making
| The Cut at Pixar" book was that the technology wasn't there
| (computer chips fast enough, storage media large enough,
| compression sophisticated enough) and I--along with the
| comment I replied to--disagree with that conclusion.
| Theodores wrote:
| In period I was somewhat in charge of the render queue at a
| small animation company. I had to get rendered images onto
| tape, as in Sony Digibeta or better. Before that I had to use
| film.
|
| We had an incredible amount of fancy toys with no expense
| spared, including those SGI Onyx Infinite Reality boxes with
| the specialist video break out boards that did digital video
| or analogue with genloc. Disks were 2Gb SCSI and you needed a
| stack of them in RAID formations to play video. This wasn't
| even HD, it was 720 x 576 interlaced PAL.
|
| We also had to work within a larger post production process,
| which was aggressively analogue at the time with engineers
| and others allergic to digital. This meant tapes.
|
| Note that a lot of this was bad for tape machines. These cost
| PS40k upwards and advancing the tape by one frame to record
| it, then back again to reposition the tape for the next
| frame, for hours on end, that was a sure way to reck a tape
| machine, so we just hired them.
|
| Regarding 35mm film, I also babysat the telecine machines
| where the film bounces up and down on the sprockets, so the
| picture is never entirely stable. These practical realities
| of film just had to be worked with.
|
| The other fun aspect was moving the product around. This
| meant hopping on a train, plane or bicycle to get tapes to
| where they needed to be. There was none of this uploading
| malarkey although you could book satellite time and beam your
| video across continents that way, which happened.
|
| Elsewhere in broadcasting, there was some progress with
| glorified digital video recorders. These were used in the
| gallery and contained the programming that was coming up
| soon. These things had quite a lot of compression and their
| own babysitting demands. Windows NT was typically part of the
| problem.
|
| It was an extremely exciting time to be working in tech but
| we were a long way off being able to stream anything like
| cinema resolution at the time, even with the most expensive
| tech of the era.
|
| Pixar and a few other studios had money and bodies to throw
| at problems, however, there were definitely constraints at
| the time. The technical constraints are easy to understand
| but the cultural constraints, such as engineers allergic to
| anything digital, are hard to imagine today.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| opello wrote:
| I was thinking MPEG-1 until around 1996 when MPEG-2 adds
| interlaced and transport stream support, among other
| things. But you're right, MPEG bitrates for quality were
| too high for what I was thinking. More like QuickTime Video
| or Smacker, which were used in games like The Journeyman
| Project or Diablo 1.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Personally, I prefer film versions in every example listed.
| nappy wrote:
| 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 would look
| like on the screen. So yeah, if you digitize 35mm film today, it
| will look different, and different from how its ever been been
| displayed in a movie theater.
| johngossman wrote:
| 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
| jama211 wrote:
| 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.
| sersi wrote:
| And as someone who is part of those conservation communities
| that scan 35mm with donations to keep the existing look, a
| lot of the people doing those projects are aware of this.
| They do some color adjustment to compensate for print fading,
| for the type of bulb that were used in movie theatres back
| then (using a LUT), etc...
|
| I do find that often enough commercial releases like Aladdin
| or other movies like Terminator 2 are done lazily and have
| completely different colors than what was historically shown.
| I think part of this is the fact that studios don't
| necessarily recognise the importance of that legacy and don't
| want to spend money on it.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Whats wrong with terminator 2?
|
| Are there like multiple digital releases, one with better
| colour than the other?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's a 4K version out that does interesting things
| with colour grading, here's a post I found: https://www.r
| eddit.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 in
| a remaster.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| There's multiple versions of the Matrix on the trackers
| and the internet that I know of. The official release all
| look kinda different to each other:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mhZ-13HqLQ
|
| There's a 35mm scan floating around from a faded copy
| with really weird colors sometimes
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow1KDYc9XsE
|
| And there's an Open Matte Version, which I don't know the
| Origin of.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI
|
| For me, it's the Open Matte that I consider the ultimate
| best version.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.)
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I own the blu-ray of The Terminator 2, and briefly owned
| the 4k as well. The 4k looks like dogshit, with or
| without HDR enabled. This is largely due to the film
| using DNR to remove film grain, which they did for the 4k
| transfer was created for the 2017 3D release (film grain
| is bad in 3D I guess). The transfer is also much, much
| more blue.
| davidferguson wrote:
| See my top level comment for more info on this, but the
| Aladdin scan used in the article was from a 35mm trailer
| that's been scanned on an unknown scanner, and had unknown
| processing applied to it. It's not really possible to compare
| anything other than resolution and artefacts in the two
| images.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| The loudness war was a thing in all media. In the 80s most
| of us didn't have CD players but our vinyl and tapes of pop
| and rock were all recorded overly loud. Compared to the
| classical and jazz recordings, or perhaps the heyday of
| audiophile 70s rock, it was annoying and sad.
| beAbU wrote:
| > 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I don't know if this is still true, but I know that in the
| 2000s the vinyls usually were _mastered_ better than the CDs.
| There even was a website comparing CD vs vinyl releases,
| where the person hosting it was lamenting this fact because
| objectively CDs have a much higher dynamic range than vinyls,
| although I can 't find it now. CDs were a victim of the
| loudness war[0].
|
| Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough the best
| version to get (if you have the kind of hifi system that can
| make use of it) is an early 80s CD release, because it sits
| in a sweet spot of predating the loudness war where producers
| actually using the dynamic range of the CD.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
| jorvi wrote:
| The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s,
| because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod
| earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to
| sound good on those.
|
| Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering
| became dynamic again.
|
| This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which
| is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was
| fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all
| over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year
| anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then
| a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.
|
| [0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans
| extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and
| mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Right, that makes sense. And it also makes sense that
| vinyls didn't suffer from this because the people who
| would buy those would use them at home with better
| speakers. Or that classical music CDs throughout the
| entire period made great use of the dynamic range, since
| that also is more likely to be listened to on high
| quality speakers.
| jorvi wrote:
| Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle
| can't handle it. That's also why vinyl can't handle heavy
| bass, it'll make the needle vibrate out of the groove. It
| has nothing to do with the speakers.
|
| It was sort of a happy coincidence that vinyl's
| limitations forced more dynamic (but less bass-y)
| masters. Although if your artist didn't do vinyl releases
| -which really was a dying medium until hipsters brought
| it back in the 2010s- you were hosed.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I dunno about authentic but for a while (as another commenter
| pointed out) they didn't have the loudness maxed out and / or
| had better dynamic range. That said, music quality aside,
| vinyls have IMO better collectability value than CDs. They
| feel less fragile, much more space for artwork and extras,
| etc.
| postalcoder wrote:
| I think the entire premise of the article should be challenged.
| Not only is 35mm not meant to be canonical, but the 35mm scans
| the author presented are _not_ what we saw, at least for
| Aladdin.
|
| I've watched Aladdin more than any as a child and the Blu-ray
| screenshot is much more familiar to me than the 35mm scan.
| Aladdin _always_ had the velvia look.
|
| > Early home releases were based on those 35 mm versions.
|
| Here's the 35mm scan the author presents:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuhNnovKXLA
|
| Here's the VHS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpJB7YJEjD8
| sersi wrote:
| Famously CRT TVs didn't show as much magenta so in the 90s
| home VHS releases compensated by cranking up the magenta so
| that it would be shown correctly on the TVs of the time. It
| was a documented practice at the time.
|
| So, yes the VHS is expected to have more magenta.
|
| Anecdotally, I remember watching Aladdin at the movie theatre
| when it came out and later on TV multiple times and the VHS
| you saw doesn't correspond to my memories at all.
| postalcoder wrote:
| The author here is asserting that VHS were based on the
| 35mm scans, and that the oversaturation is a digital
| phenomena. Clearly, that's not true.
|
| I can't challenge the vividness of your memory. That's all
| in our heads. I remember it one way, and you remember it
| another.
| sersi wrote:
| For sure, the author simplified things for the article.
| Anyway, in the case of VHS, they were indeed based on the
| 35mm scan but then had additional magenta added (as well
| as pan and scan to change the aspect ratio).
|
| The author is not wrong that oversaturation is a source
| transfer phenomena (which will always be different unless
| special care is taken to compare with the source
| material).
|
| On most TVs that magenta wouldn't have shown as much as
| the youtube video shows because TVs tended to have weaker
| magentas. Of course, it's not like TVs were that
| uniformly calibrated back then and there were variations
| between TVs. So depending on the TV you had, it might
| have ended up having too much magenta but that would have
| usually been with more expensive and more accurate TVs.
|
| TLDR: Transfers are hard, any link in the chain can be
| not properly calibrated, historically some people in
| charge of transferring from one source to another
| compensated for perceived weak links in the chain.
| postalcoder wrote:
| The magenta thing is interesting. I learned something
| new. Reading the other comments, this is seems to be as
| much a tale of color calibration as much as anything.
|
| Regarding my memory, it becomes shakier the more I think
| about it. I do remember the purples but me having watched
| the cartoon could have affected that.
| emchammer wrote:
| NTSC: Never Twice the Same Color
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It sounds like in the case of Toy Story, the Pixar team were
| working toward a 35mm print as the final product, so that
| probably should be considered canonical: it's what the creative
| team set out to make.
| davidferguson wrote:
| And it was made by a lab that made choices on processing and
| developing times, that can quite easily affect the resulting
| image. You hope that labs are reasonably standard across the
| board and calibrate frequently, but even processing two copies
| of the same material in a lab, one after the other will result
| in images that look different if projected side by side. This
| is why it's probably impossible to made new prints of 3-strip-
| cinerama films now, the knowledge and number of labs that can
| do this are near zero.
| eleveriven wrote:
| At the same time, I think the nostalgia people feel for those
| versions isn't necessarily about accuracy, it's about emotional
| fidelity
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Same with CRTs. Sure, it's a different look, but my memory
| still looks better.
|
| I don't have this issue and never have. For whatever reason
| I've never "upgraded" them in my mind, and they look today
| exactly as I remember them when played on period hardware.
| opello wrote:
| > 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...
| Kye wrote:
| 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
| pavlov wrote:
| 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...")
| eleveriven wrote:
| Film weave is such an underrated part of that analog feel
| rootbear wrote:
| Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is
| going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin
| registered camera must be used. These cameras have a precisely
| machined pin that centers the film stock in the gate after the
| pull down claw retracts. Later post processing stages also use
| pin registered movements, so each frame is in _exactly_ the
| same place every time it 's used. Otherwise, the separate
| elements would weave against each other and give away the
| effect.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Interesting, I think the film versions feel like they have more
| gravitas, especially the Lion king and Mulan scenes.
| d--b wrote:
| I just showed Toy Story to my kids. It looked really bad. Mostly
| textures and lighting.
|
| I wonder if artificial grain would actually make it look better.
|
| Like when the game Splinter Cell was released, there weee two
| additional 'views' simulating infrared and thermal cameras. Those
| had heavy noise added to them and felt so real compared to the
| main view.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Pixar did re-renders of Toy Story.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w4bzm6ewRQ
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Now there is the problem where many of my friends will take one
| look at a movie I started on the TV and say "ew, I don't like
| this movie, it's old" They don't realize they feel that way,
| viscerally, is because it's shot on film. How do I get people to
| watch film movies with me? They are far better anyway on average
| than many modern movies (from a storytelling, moviemaking pov, to
| say nothing about the picture quality).
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Show them a Tarantino movie
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Make them into a drinking game. We watched The Princess Bride
| the other day (never watched it), I think it's aged pretty well
| but then I'm old. But if they get bored, make it a game to have
| a drink or get a point or whatever for every sexual innuendo,
| lol.
|
| Some films didn't age well though.
|
| And finally, accept it and move on, ultimately it's their loss.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| That's a good one for my younger friends. Most people my age
| don't really drink anymore other than 1-2 a night
|
| Yes not only have the best movies aged well, but the old
| movies that you've never heard of (not the bad ones, there
| are plenty of those, but the good ones, which there are still
| plenty of) are BETTER than the new movies of today. It's
| unbelievable and it's creatively inspiring to me personally,
| even if it requires "time travel."
|
| It's like visiting a museum, or a grand old architectural
| building. If you abstract even a tiny bit from the viewer
| immersion (which is great), you can't help but think "What
| craftsmanship! We don't get stuff like this anymore" And of
| course you also start to pick up on where everything came
| from, such that even the new stuff you love looks like a
| slightly sleeker yet baser, cheaper copy of the old.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _These companies, ultimately, decide how Toy Story looks
| today._
|
| LOL, what? Anyone with a Blu-Ray rip file and FFmpeg can decide
| how it looks to them.
| wiseowise wrote:
| And how many people will have that? Eventually they'll just go
| "eat ze bug" and you'll have to eat shit they give you.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| It reminds me also of the 24 FPS discussion, which is still the
| standard as far as I know for cinema, even though 48 or 60 FPS
| are pretty standard for series, The 24 FPS give it a more
| cinematic feeling.
|
| https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/motion-smoothing-is-ruining-...
| https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking-film-24-frames-...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| To add, when it comes to video games sometimes people go "baww
| but 24 fps is enough for film". However, pause a film and
| you'll see a lot of smearing, not unlike cartoon animation
| frames I suppose, but in a video game every frame is discrete
| so low framerate becomes visually a lot more apparent.
|
| I think it was The Hobbit that had a 60 fps version, and people
| just... weren't having it. It's technologically superior I'm
| sure (as would higher frame rates be), but it just becomes too
| "real" then. IIRC they also had to really update their make-up
| game because on higher frame rates and / or resolutions people
| can see everything.
|
| Mind you, watching older TV shows nowadays is interesting; I
| think they were able to scan the original film for e.g. the X
| Files and make a HD or 4K version of it, and unlike back in the
| day, nowadays you can make out all the fine details of the
| actor's skin and the like. Part high definition, part watching
| it on a 4K screen instead of a CRT TV.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Regarding your first paragraph, the other thing worth
| mentioning is that in addition to smear/motion blur in film,
| it's also a passive medium. Video games are interactive.
| You're responding to and making decisions based on what
| you're seeing.
|
| In a FPS, trying to track movement at only 24 fps is pretty
| much impossible unless your target's movement is entirely
| predictable.
|
| In a flight simulator, trying to land a plane in gusty
| weather conditions is a lot harder with only 24 fps.
|
| Lower framerates don't just make motion choppy, it increases
| latency. At 24 fps, any change in movement could be up to 42
| ms behind. At 120 fps, that's down to 8.3 ms. And those
| numbers assume that you can notice the difference in only a
| single frame.
|
| I'm convinced that people claiming 24 fps is fine for games
| just because it's fine for film don't actually play games. At
| least, nothing that requires quick reaction times.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I call it the Newgrounds animation effect. Digital-to-digital
| always looked a bit unserious to me.
|
| I'm sure many young people feel the exact opposite.
| tobr wrote:
| The changes in the Aladdin and Lion King stills surely can't be
| accidental side effects? The Aladdin shot especially looks like
| they deliberately shifted it to a different time of day. Could
| there have been a continuity reason?
| OJFord wrote:
| I remember it grainier and with occasional 'VHS zebra stripes'(?)
| too, though.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > "Even so, it's a little disquieting to think that Toy Story,
| the film that built our current world, is barely available in the
| form that wowed audiences of the '90s."
|
| Load it up in DaVinci Resolve, knock the saturation and green
| curve down a bit, and boom, it looks like the film print.
|
| Or you could slap a film-look LUT on, but you don't need to go
| that far.
| coopierez wrote:
| I'm stunned so many people here can remember details as fine as
| the colour grading of a film. I couldn't remember specifics like
| that from 6 months ago, let alone 30 years ago when I was a child
| and wouldn't have had the thought to watch for cinematographic
| touches.
|
| Side node - I wonder if it's a millenial thing that our memories
| are worse due to modern technology, or perhaps we are more aware
| of false memories due to the sheer availability of information
| like this blog post.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Different people just remember different things. I bet most
| people don't remember either and only going "ah yes of course!"
| after reading this blogpost (which means they didn't remember
| at all).
| bspammer wrote:
| Anecdata here, but I played Zelda Ocarina of Time on CRT when
| I was a child, and have since replayed it many times via
| emulator. The game never looked quite as good as I remembered
| it, but of course I chalked it up to the fact that graphics
| have improved by several orders of magnitude since then.
|
| Then a few years ago I was throwing out my parent's old CRT
| and decided to plug in the N64 one last time. Holy crap was
| it like night and day. It looked exactly as I remembered it,
| so much more mysterious and properly blended than it does on
| an LCD screen.
|
| I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to films, sometimes
| our memories aren't false.
| Telaneo wrote:
| I doubt many people 'remember' this to any significant extent,
| but there are probably many cases of media giving the 'wrong'
| vibe with a new release, and you just assume it's because
| you've gotten older, but then when you get access to the
| original you experienced, the 'good' vibe is back, and you can
| easily compare between the two.
|
| Although some people do infact remember the differences, but
| I'd guess a lot of those incidents are caused by people
| experiencing them in fairly quick succession. It's one thing to
| remember the difference between a DVD 20 years ago and a blu-
| ray you only watched today, and another to watch a DVD 15 years
| ago and a blu-ray 14 years ago.
| raudette wrote:
| I am not a huge gamer - maybe a dozen hours a year. But I feel
| that, say, Mario responds differently to controls in an
| emulator than how I remember Mario responding on an NES with a
| CRT.
|
| But I was never very good, and it has been decades, so I don't
| know how much of this is just poor memory - I actually don't
| think I'm good enough/play enough that the latency of modern
| input/displays makes a difference at my level.
|
| I would love to try both side-by-side to see if I could pick
| out the difference in latency/responsiveness.
| phantasmish wrote:
| I've played Mario in emulators where I could play just fine,
| and others where I kept falling down holes and such on
| friggin' level 1, which at times I could probably have beaten
| _literally blindfolded_ , and had a hard time progressing at
| all. The latter might not (or, if extremely bad, might) be
| laggy enough for me to be able to tell you by looking, but
| plainly the feel is off enough to be a problem.
|
| I find a good test is Punch Out!!! If it's much trouble at
| all for me to reach at least Great Tiger, the latency is
| really bad (even if I couldn't tell you just by looking). If
| I can get to Great Tiger without much trouble but struggle to
| do much damage to him before getting taken out, the latency's
| still unacceptably high for some games, but not totally
| awful.
|
| Another good one's High Speed. If I can't land the final
| multi ball shot at least a decent percentage of the time (the
| game pauses the ball a couple times while police chatter
| plays, when you're set up for a multi ball, and after the
| last pause you can land the shot to initiate multi ball
| immediately and skip all the flashing-lights-and-sirens crap
| if you're _very_ precise with your timing, it 's like very-
| small number of milliseconds after the ball resumes its
| motion) then the latency is high enough to affect gameplay.
|
| If I _can_ land that shot at least 60-70% of the time, and if
| I can reach Bald Bull in Punch Out!!!, then probably any
| trouble I have in other games is my own damn fault :-)
|
| I suppose as I age further these tests will become kinda
| useless for me, because my reflexes will be too shot for me
| to _ever_ do well at these no matter how many hours of
| practice I 've had over the decades :-(
|
| Anyway, even in the best case you're always going to have
| worse display and input latency on a digital screen with a
| digital video pipeline and USB controllers than an early
| console hooked up over composite or component to a CRT. I've
| found it's low enough (even on mediocre TVs, provided they
| have a "game mode", and those are a ton worse than most PC
| monitors) for me not to mind much _if_ the emulation itself
| is extremely snappy and is adding practically no extra
| latency, and there are no severe problems with the software
| side of the video & input pipelines, but otherwise... it can
| make some already-tough games unplayably hard in a hurry.
|
| I do wonder about the experience of people who try these
| games for the first time in an emulator. They'll come to the
| game with no built-in way to tell if they keep slipping off
| ledges because the latency's like six frames instead of the ~
| _one_ it was originally, or because they just suck at it.
| lysace wrote:
| They probably can't.
| Izkata wrote:
| At least for me it's not so much details like color grading
| over the entire film, it's more like a specific scene got
| burned into memory. Movie looks pretty much fine until reaching
| that scene and it's so different it's like something got shaken
| loose and you start to see the larger issues.
|
| For an example people here might be more familiar with, it's
| like how you can't even see bad kerning until you learn what it
| is, then start to notice it a lot more.
| afiori wrote:
| Happy to have set my television to less than half saturation
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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/northlight/overview_nl...
| which will collect both colour and infrared. This can help
| automate dust and scratch removal.
|
| If you're unluckly you'll use a telecine machine,
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283479247780 which runs much faster,
| but has less time to dustbust and properly register the film (so
| it'll warp more)
|
| However! that doesnt affect the colour. Those colour changes are
| deliberate and are a result of grading. Ie, a colourist has gone
| through and made changes to make each scene feel more effective.
| Ideally they'd alter the colour for emotion, but that depends on
| who's making the decision.
|
| the mechanics are written out here:
| https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/film/digital-intermediary/
| tomcam wrote:
| How did you dust bust it? Wipe it by hand with a microfiber
| cloth or something?
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| In optics & film usually blowing air is employed, as wiping
| runs the risk of further scratches in the case of an abrasive
| particle (e.g. sand)
|
| There are handheld tools (google hand blower bulb), but I
| would imagine film scanning uses something less manual
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| dmbche wrote:
| Any digitizing is done before color grading.
|
| All steps before try to not affect the color and keep as much
| dynamic range as possible to give as much leeway as possible
| for the colorist.
|
| Realistically, for Pixar and Disney (not people with limitwd
| funds, say), the color grade is much much more relevant to
| the final color than the specifics of digitizing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > 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 the same film twice it
| was meant to be pixel perfect (We did rescans for various
| reasons and it supposedly matched up enough to do effects
| work. but that might have been proxies, ie low resolution
| scans that were done for speed)
|
| Also the printers should, if they are good match it properly,
| thats what you're paying them for. I know that we did have a
| person that calibrated film projectors for colour, but I
| never asked them _how_ they did it.
|
| For toy story its a bit harder because you are digitising a
| whole finished movie, you don't have the colour chart in
| every shot to keep the colour consistent. I know for adverts
| the telecine people did loads of fiddling to make the colour
| consistent, but I assumed that was because the spirit 4k was
| a bit shit.
|
| I never dealt with actual finished prints, because the
| colourist/DI people sent the finished graded off to someone
| like Deluxe to print out
| pinebox wrote:
| > However! that doesnt affect the colour.
|
| That has been something I've wondered about since seeing frame
| comparisons of (probably) telecine'ed prints of The Matrix vs.
| the myriad home video releases.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| I'm a colorist and it absolutely does effect color. Every
| telecine is different and will create a different looking
| scan. Telecine operators will do a one light pass to try and
| compensate but any scan needs to be adjusted to achieve what
| the artist's original vision was.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Every telecine is different and will create a different
| looking scan.
|
| I mean they should be calibrated, so they have a different
| feel, but they shouldn't be wildly different like the
| screen shots.
|
| I know the spirit operators did magic, but they were in the
| advertising team, and I was in film so I was never allowed
| to visit the sexy telecine room.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I was going to mention the Noodle video on that
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk
|
| TL;DW, different physical rolls of film sent to different
| movie theaters can have slightly different coloring, if they
| were done by different people or different companies or even
| if someone just did their job differently that day. Film
| color was not an exact science and not always perfectly
| repeatable, and depended on chemistry.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Theres also a shit tone of dust, that needs to be physically
| or digitally removed, ie "busted"
|
| Is that because you're just leaving the film out in a big pile,
| or because it decays rapidly?
|
| I would have expected film to be stored in containers.
| eszed wrote:
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it builds a
| static charge as it runs through the projector and attracts
| dust. I say this because I remember holding my hand near
| moving film in our (home) movie projector, and as a kid
| enjoying feeling the hairs on my arm standing up from the
| static. Maybe professional gear protects against that
| somehow, but if not that'd be why.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Yep, most film (also photo) attracts dust like a magnet.
| Kodak made a Static Eliminator to mitigate that with high
| voltage to an extent:
|
| https://mcnygenealogy.com/book/kodak/static-eliminator.pdf
| KaiserPro wrote:
| It's normally stored in sealed boxes, but every time its
| taken out to be projected then the whole reel is unspooled
| and exposed to the environment. Most projectors are pretty
| good at not blowing unfiltered air on the film, but there is
| a surprising amount of dust that is just floating in the air.
|
| The room that the scanners used to be in were temperature and
| dust controlled, everyone was supposed to wear dust jackets
| when you enter.
| anikom15 wrote:
| Film is only 35 mm or 70 mm large, and the picture itself is
| slightly smaller than that. Even a tiny amount of dust adds a
| lot of noise.
| rokweom wrote:
| Doesn't wet scanning "automatically" get rid of the dust and
| scratches issue?
| alex-moon wrote:
| So it's fascinating reading this looking at the screengrabs of
| the "original" versions... not so much because they are "how I
| remember them" but indeed, because they have a certain nostalgic
| quality I can't quite name - they "look old". Presumably this is
| because, back in the day, when I was watching these films on VHS
| tapes, they had come to tape from 35mm film. I fear I will never
| again be able to look at "old looking" footage with the same
| nostalgia again, now that I understand why it looks that way -
| and, indeed, that it isn't supposed to look that way!
| davidferguson wrote:
| TL;DR: Linking to YouTube trailer scans as comparisons for colour
| is misleading and not accurate.
|
| ---
|
| > see the 35 mm trailer for reference
|
| The article makes heavy use of referring to scans of trailers to
| show what colours, grain, sharpness, etc. looked like. This is
| quite problematic, because you are replying on a scan done by
| someone on the Internet to accurately depict what something
| looked like in a commercial cinema. Now, I am not a colour
| scientist (far from it!), but I am a motion picture film hobbyist
| and so can speak a bit about some of the potential issues.
|
| When projected in a movie theatre, light is generated by a short-
| arc xenon lamp. This has a very particular output light spectrum,
| and the entire movie process is calibrated and designed to work
| with this. The reflectors (mirrors) in the lamphouse are tuned to
| it, the films are colour graded for it, and then the film
| recorders (cameras) are calibrated knowing that this will be how
| it is shown.
|
| When a film is scanned, it is not lit by a xenon short-arc lamp,
| instead various other illumination methods are used depending on
| the scanner. CRTs and LEDs are common. Commercial scanners are,
| on the whole, designed to scan negative film. It's where the
| money is - and so they are setup to work with that, which is very
| different to positive movie release film stock. Scanners
| therefore have different profiles to try and capture the
| different film stocks, but in general, today's workflow involves
| scanning something in, and then colour correcting post-scan, to
| meet an artist's expectations/desires.
|
| Scanning and accurately capturing what is on a piece of film is
| something that is really quite challenging, and not something
| that any commercial scanner today does, or claims to do.
|
| The YouTube channels referenced are FT Depot, and 35mm Movie
| Trailers Scans. FT Depot uses a Lasergraphics 6.5K HDR scanner,
| which is a quite high end one today. It does have profiles for
| individual film stocks, so you can set that and then get a good
| scan, but even the sales brochure of it says:
|
| > Many common negative film types are carefully characterized at
| Lasergraphics to allow our scanning software to compensate for
| variation. The result is more accurate color reproduction and
| less time spent color grading.
|
| Note that it says that _less_ time is spent colour grading - it
| is still not expected that it will accurately capture exactly
| what was on the film. It also specifies negative, I don 't know
| whether it has positive stock profiles as I am not lucky enough
| to have worked with one - for this, I will assume it does.
|
| The "scanner" used by 35mm Movie Trailers Scans is a DIY,
| homemade film scanner that (I think, at least the last time I
| spoke to them) uses an IMX-183 sensor. They have both a colour
| sensor and a monochrome sensor, I am not sure what was used to
| capture the scans linked in the video. Regardless of what was
| used, in such a scanner that doesn't have the benefit of film
| stock profiles, etc. there is no way to create a scan that
| accurately captures what was on the film, without some serious
| calibration and processing which isn't being done here. At best,
| you can make a scan, and then manually adjust it by eye
| afterwards to what you think looks good, or what you think the
| film looks like, but without doing this on a colour calibrated
| display with the original projected side-by-side for reference,
| this is not going to be that close to what it actually looked
| like.
|
| Now, I don't want to come off as bashing a DIY scanner - I have
| made one too, and they are great! I love seeing the scans from
| them, especially old adverts, logos, snipes, etc. that aren't
| available anywhere else. But, it is not controversial at all to
| say that this is not colour calibrated in any way, and in no way
| reflects what one actually saw in a cinema when that trailer was
| projected.
|
| All this is to say that statements like the following in the
| article are pretty misleading - as the differences may not be
| attributable to the direct-digital-release process at all, and
| could just be that a camera white balance was set wrong, or some
| post processing to what "looked good" came out different to the
| original:
|
| > At times, especially in the colors, they're almost
| unrecognizable
|
| > Compared to the theatrical release, the look had changed. It
| was sharp and grainless, and the colors were kind of different
|
| I don't disagree with the premise of the article - recording an
| image to film, and then scanning it in for a release _will_
| result in a different look to doing a direct-digital workflow.
| That's why major Hollywood films spend money recording and
| scanning film to get the "film look" (although that's another can
| of worms!). It's just not an accurate comparison to put two
| images side by side, when one is of a trailer scan of unknown
| accuracy.
| cbolton wrote:
| There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the
| screens on the original devices often had low color saturation,
| so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate.
| Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern
| screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's
| why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously
| bright colors. Thankfully now many emulators implement filters to
| reproduce colors closer to the original look.
|
| Some examples:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/bvqaec/why_and_how...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-aQMUXKPM
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Ah yes, we often get folks in the nesdev community bickering
| over which "NES Palette" (sourced from their favorite emulator)
| is the "best" one. The reality is extraordinarily complicated
| and I'm barely qualified to explain it:
|
| https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#2C02
|
| In addition to CRTs having variable properties, it turns out a
| lot of consoles (understandably!) cheat a little bit when
| generating a composite signal. The PPU's voltages are slightly
| out of spec, its timing is weird to work around a color
| artifact issue, and it generates a square wave for the chroma
| carrier rather than an ideal sine wave, which produces even
| more fun problems near the edges. So we've got all of _that_
| going on, and then the varying properties of how each TV
| chooses to interpret the signal. Then we throw electrons at
| phosphors and the pesky real world and human perception gets
| involved... it 's a real mess!
| chromehearts wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxKJeYSBmI
|
| This video is related to that issue
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP
| had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario
| ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their
| colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that
| the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the
| first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were
| lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the
| case. Lots of other games didn't do that.
|
| And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro,
| colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If
| anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get
| you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily
| desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier
| models.
| cubefox wrote:
| > With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA
| SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The
| Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated
| their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've
| heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was
| because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the
| colors were lightened to be more visible,
|
| That's certainly the case. The super low screen brightness of
| the first GBA was a major problem, because you often
| literally couldn't see things properly under less than
| perfect ambient light. So compensating for low brightness was
| more important than compensating for low color saturation,
| which is merely an aesthetic issue.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| Final Fantasy Tactics on Game Boy Advance had a color mode for
| television.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F29nlIz_tWo
| cbolton wrote:
| Nice, and two LCD modes to adapt to different GBA screens!
| (presumably the GBA and GBA SP first model, vs the GBA SP
| second model with backlight)
| biofox wrote:
| The most egregious example is old CGA games that were written
| to work on composite monitors. Without the composite display,
| they appear monochrome or cyan and magenta.
|
| https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7229541/215890834-...
|
| It blew my mind when I finally learnt this, as I spent years of
| my childhood playing games that looked like the examples on the
| left, not realising the colours were due to the RGB monitor I
| had.
| taejavu wrote:
| Oh you're blowing my mind right now, played lots of CGA games
| with neon colours as a kid. What did they look like on a
| composite monitor?
|
| Also, are you able to tell me the name of the game in the
| second row in that screenshot?
| janeway wrote:
| 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 creative ones.
|
| I run into this same failure mode often. We introduce purposeful
| scaffolding in the workflow that isn't meant to stand alone, but
| exists solely to ensure the final output behaves as intended.
| Months later, someone is pitching how we should "lean into the
| bold saturated greens," not realising the topic only exists
| because we specifically wanted neutral greens in the final
| output. The scaffold becomes the building.
|
| In our work this kind of nuance isn't optional, it is the
| project. If we lose track of which decisions are compensations
| and which are targets, outcomes drift badly and quietly, and
| everything built after is optimised for the wrong goal.
|
| I'd genuinely value advice on preventing this. Is there a good
| name or framework for this pattern? Something concise that
| distinguishes a process artefact from product intent, and helps
| teams course-correct early without sounding like a semantics
| debate?
| _bent wrote:
| I know you're looking for something more universal, but in
| modern video workflows you'd apply a chain of color
| transformations on top the final composited image to compensate
| the display you're working with.
|
| So I guess try separating your compensations from the original
| work and create a workflow that automatically applies them
| RedNifre wrote:
| "Cargo cult"? As in, "Looks like the genius artists at Pixar
| made everything extra green, so let's continue doing this,
| since it's surely genius."
| pbronez wrote:
| That's a great observation. I'm hitting the same thing...
| yesterday's hacks are today's gospel.
|
| My solution is decision documents. I write down the business
| problem, background on how we got here, my recommended
| solution, alternative solutions with discussion about their
| relative strengths and weaknesses, and finally and executive
| summary that states the whole affirmative recommendation in
| half a page.
|
| Then I send that doc to the business owners to review and
| critique. I meet with them and chase down ground truth. Yes it
| works like this NOW but what SHOULD it be?
|
| We iterate until everyone is excited about the revision, then
| we implement.
| randallsquared wrote:
| There are two observations I've seen in practice with
| decision documents: the first is that people want to consume
| the bare minimum before getting started, so such docs have to
| be very carefully written to surface the most important
| decision(s) early, or otherwise call them out for quick
| access. This often gets lost as word count grows and becomes
| a metric.
|
| The second is that excitement typically _falls_ with each
| iteration, even while everyone agrees that each is better
| than the previous. Excitement follows more strongly from
| newness than rightness.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Eventually you'll run into a decision that was _made_ for one
| set of reasons but _succeeded_ for completely different
| reasons. A decision document can 't help there; it can only
| tell you why the decision was made.
|
| That is the nature of evolutionary processes and it's the
| reason people (and animals; you can find plenty of work on
| e.g. "superstition in chickens") are reluctant to change
| working systems.
| vodou wrote:
| Do you have some concrete or specific examples of intentional
| compensation or purposeful scaffolding in mind (outside the
| topic of the article)?
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Not scaffolding in the same way, but, two examples of
| "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that
| the original artists might have considered undesirable
| degradations" are
|
| - the fashion for unpainted marble statues and architecture
|
| - the aesthetic of running film slightly too fast in the
| projector (or slightly too slow in the camera) for an old-
| timey effect
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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
| robotresearcher wrote:
| - Audio compression was/is necessary to get good SNR on
| mag tape.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| true - but are you implying audio engineers are now
| leaning into heavy compression for artistic reasons?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Not necessarily heavy (except sometimes as an effect),
| but some compression almost all the time for artistic
| reasons, yes.
|
| Most people would barely notice it as it's waaaay more
| subtle than your distorted guitar example. But it's
| there.
|
| Part of the likeable sound of albums made on tape is the
| particular combination of old-time compressors used to
| make sure enough level gets to the tape, plus the way
| tape compresses the signal again on recording by it's
| nature.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Motion blur. 24fps. Grain. Practically everything we call
| cinematic
| the_af wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "fetishizing" though; not all of them
| anyway.
|
| Motion blur happens with real vision, so anything without
| blur would look odd. There's cinematic exaggeration, of
| course.
|
| 24 FPS is indeed entirely artificial, but I wouldn't call
| it a fetish: if you've grown with 24 FPS movies, a higher
| frame rate will paradoxically look artificial! It's not a
| snobby thing, maybe it's an "uncanny valley" thing? To me
| higher frame rates (as in how The Hobbit was released)
| make the actors look fake, almost like automatons or
| puppets. I know it makes no objective sense, but at the
| same time it's not a fetishization. I also cannot get
| used to it, it doesn't go away as I get immersed in the
| movie (it doesn't help that The Hobbit is trash, of
| course, but that's a tangent).
|
| Grain, I'd argue, is the true fetish. There's no grain in
| real life (unless you have a visual impairment). You
| forget fast about the lack of grain if you're immersed in
| the movie. I like grain, but it's 100% an esthetic
| preference, i.e. a fetish.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I suspect 24fps is popular because it forces the
| videography to be more intentional with motion. Too
| blurry, and it becomes incomprehensible. That, and
| everything staying sharp at 60fps makes it look like
| TikTok slop.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I think the "real" problem is not matching shutter speed
| to frame rate. With 24fps you _have_ to make a strong
| choice - either the shutter speed is 1 /24s or 1/48s, or
| any panning movement is going to look like absolute
| garbage. But, with 60+fps, even if your shutter speed is
| incredible fast, motion will still look decent, because
| there's enough frames being shown that the motion isn't
| jerky - it looks unnatural, just harder to put your
| finger on why (whereas 24fps at 1/1000s looks unnatural
| for obvious reasons - the entire picture jerks when
| you're panning).
|
| The solution is 60fps at 1/60s. Panning looks pretty
| natural again, as does most other motion, _and_ you get
| clarity for fast-moving objects. You can play around with
| different framerates, but imo anything more than 1 /120s
| (180 degree shutter in film speak) will start severely
| degrading the watch experience.
|
| I've been doing a good bit of filming of cars at
| autocross and road course circuits the past two years,
| and I've received a number of compliments on the
| smoothness and clarity of the footage - "how does that
| video out of your dslr [note: it's a Lumix G9 mirrorless]
| look so good" is a common one. The answer is 60fps, 1/60s
| shutter, and lots of in-body and in-lens stabilization so
| my by-hand tracking shots aren't wildly swinging around.
| At 24/25/30fps everything either degrades into a blurry
| mess, or is too choppy to be enjoyable, but at 60fps and
| 1/500s or 1/1000s, it looks like a (crappy) video game.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Is getting something like this wrong why e.g. The Hobbit
| looked so damn weird? I didn't have a strong opinion on
| higher FPS films, and was even kinda excited about it,
| until I watched that in theaters. Not only did it have
| (to me, just a tiny bit of) the oft-complained-about
| "soap opera" effect due to the association of higher
| frame rates with cheap shot-on-video content--the main
| problem was that any time a character was moving it felt
| _wrong_ , like a manually-cranked silent film playing
| back at inconsistent speeds. Often it looked like
| characters were moving at speed-walking rates when their
| affect and gait were calm and casual. Totally bizarre and
| ruined any amount of enjoyment I may have gotten out of
| it (other quality issues aside). That's not something
| I've noticed in other higher FPS content (the "soap
| opera" effect, yes; things looking subtly sped-up or
| slowed-down, no).
|
| [EDIT] I mean, IIRC that was 48fps, not 60, so you'd
| _think_ they 'd get the shutter timing right, but man,
| _something_ was wrong with it.
| phantasmish wrote:
| 24fps looks a little different on a real film projector
| than on nearly all home screens, too. There's a little
| time between each frame when a full-frame black is
| projected (the light is blocked, that is) as the film
| advances (else you'd get a horrid and probably nausea-
| inducing smear as the film moved). This (oddly enough!)
| has the effect of apparently smoothing motion--though
| "motion smoothing" settings on e.g. modern TVs don't
| match that effect, unfortunately, but looks like
| something else entirely (which one may or may not find
| intolerably awful).
|
| Some of your fancier, brighter (because you lose some
| apparent brightness by cutting the light for fractions of
| a second) home digital projectors can convincingly mimic
| the effect, but otherwise, you'll never _quite_ get
| things like 24fps panning judder down to imperceptible
| levels, like a real film projector can.
| the_af wrote:
| > _(which one may or may not find intolerably awful)._
|
| "Motion smoothing" on TVs is the first thing I disable, I
| really hate it.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Me at every AirBnB: _turn on TV_ "OH MY GOD WTF MY EYES
| ARE BLEEDING where is the settings button?" _go turn off
| noise reduction, upscaling, motion smoothing_.
|
| I think I've seen like _one_ out of a couple dozen where
| the motion smoothing was already off.
| mrob wrote:
| >Motion blur happens with real vision, so anything
| without blur would look odd.
|
| You watch the video with your eyes so it's not possible
| to get "odd"-looking lack of blur. There's no need to add
| extra motion blur on top of the naturally occurring blur.
| the_af wrote:
| In principle, I agree.
|
| In practice, I think the kind of blur that happens when
| you're looking at a physical object vs an object
| projected on a crisp, lit screen, with
| postprocessing/color grading/light meant for the screen,
| is different. I'm also not sure whatever is captured by a
| camera looks _the same_ in motion than what you see with
| your eyes; in effect even the best camera is always
| introducing a distortion, so it has to be corrected
| somehow. The camera is "faking" movement, it's just that
| it's more convincing than a simple cartoon as a sequence
| of static drawings. (Note I'm speaking from intuition,
| I'm not making a formal claim!).
|
| That's why (IMO) you don't need "motion blur" effects for
| live theater, but you do for cinema and TV shows: real
| physical objects and people vs whatever exists on a flat
| surface that emits light.
| the_af wrote:
| Another example: pixel art in games.
|
| Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of pixel art and retro
| games.
|
| But this reminds me of when people complained that the
| latest Monkey Island didn't use pixel art, and Ron Gilbert
| had to explain the original "The Curse of Monkey Island"
| wasn't "a pixel art game" either, it was a "state of the
| art game (for that time)", and it was never his intention
| to make retro games.
|
| Many classic games had pixel art by accident; it was the
| most feasible technology at the time.
| MBCook wrote:
| Isn't the frame rate of film something like that?
|
| The industry decided on 24 FPS as something of an average
| of the multiple existing company standards and it was fast
| enough to provide smooth motion, avoid flicker, and not use
| too much film ($$$).
|
| Overtime it became "the film look". One hundred-ish years
| later we still record TV shows and movies in it that we
| want to look "good" as opposed to "fake" like a soap opera.
|
| And it's all happenstance. The movie industry could've
| moved to something higher at any point other than inertia.
| With TV being 60i it would have made plenty of sense to go
| to 30p for film to allow them to show it on TV better once
| that became a thing.
|
| But by then it was enshrined.
| wanderingmoose wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Theory: Everything is built on barely functioning ruins with
| each successive generation or layer mostly unaware of the
| proper ways to use anything produced previously. Ten steps
| forward and nine steps back. All progress has always been like
| this.
| pbh101 wrote:
| I've come to similar conclusions, and further realized that
| if you feel there's a moment to catch your breath and finally
| have everything tidy and organized, possibly early sign of
| stagnation or decline in an area. Growth/progress is almost
| always urgent and overwhelming in the moment.
| snarfy wrote:
| It seems pretty common in software - engineers not following
| the spec. Another thing that happens is the pivot. You realize
| the scaffolding is what everyone wants and sell that instead.
| The scaffold becomes the building and also product.
| davidalayachew wrote:
| Isn't the entire point of "reinventing the wheel" to address
| this exact problem?
|
| This is one of the tradeoffs of maintaining backwards
| compatibility and stewardship -- you are required to keep track
| of each "cause" of that backwards compatibility. And since the
| number of "causes" can quickly become enumerable, that's
| usually what prompts people to reinvent the wheel.
|
| And when I say reinvent the wheel, I am NOT describing what is
| effectively a software port. I am talking about going back to
| ground zero, and building the framework from the ground up,
| considering ONLY the needs of the task at hand. It's the most
| effective way to prune these needless requirements.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| enumerable -> innumerable
|
| (opposite meaning)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > (opposite meaning)
|
| Funnily enough, _e-_ means "out" (more fundamentally
| "from") and _in-_ means "in(to)", so that's not an
| unexpected way to form opposite words.
|
| But in this case, _innumerable_ begins with a different
| _in-_ meaning "not". (Compare _inhabit_ or _immiserate_ ,
| though.)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yeah, English has so many quirks. As a software dev, the
| "enum" type cane to mind, making this one easier to spot.
| (shrug)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Yeah, English has so many quirks.
|
| Arguably true in general, but in this specific case
| everything I said was already true in Latin.
| davidalayachew wrote:
| Thanks, you are right. Wish I could edit it.
| layer8 wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence is a related notion.
| ilamont wrote:
| 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 you could afford decent German and
| Japanese components).
|
| Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end
| speakers and headphones, Hendrix's late 60s studio recordings
| don't hold a candle anything the Beatles did from _Revolver_
| on.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 very
| weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear
| while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.
| heeton wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| 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
| bongodongobob wrote:
| No, they just didn't put much time into stereo because it
| was new and most listeners didn't have that format. So
| they'd hard pan things for the novelty effect. This
| paradigm was over by the early 70s and they gave stereo
| mixes a more intentional treatment.
| chiph wrote:
| And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so
| highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of
| this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to
| listen to. And this makes what should have been a live
| recording with interesting sound into background noise.
| Example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
|
| If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good
| sound, try Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (which won the
| Best Engineered Album Grammy award in 2014). Or anything
| engineered by Alan Parsons (he's in this list many times)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Engineer.
| ..
| a4isms wrote:
| I was _obsessed_ with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I
| Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, Yes,
| ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums
| weren't better in an absolute musical sense, his production
| values were so obviously in a class of their own I still
| put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn
| and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record
| album engineering and production.
| tyrust wrote:
| > now
|
| Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly
| twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the
| advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made
| this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent
| examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that
| might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article
| lacks any examples from the last decade
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
|
| Thankfully there have been some remasters that have undone
| the damage. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Absolution
| come to mind.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or
| less ended over the last decade or so due to music
| streaming services using loudness normalization (they
| effectively measure what each recording's true average
| volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible
| volume knob to have the same average)
|
| Because of this it generally makes more sense these days
| to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic range
| for the content/intended usage. Some stuff still gets
| slammed with compression/limiters, but it's mostly club
| music from what I can tell.
| chiph wrote:
| This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the
| retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then
| the separate radio edit which had the compression that
| the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't
| have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on
| the leased line to the transmitter site.
|
| And of course it would have all the dirty words removed
| or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "funky kicks going
| down in the city" in _Jet Airliner_
|
| I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War
| was because of esthetics, or because of the studios
| wanting to save money and only pay for the radio edit.
| Possibly both - reduced production costs and not having
| to pay big-name engineers. "My sister's cousin has this
| plug-in for his laptop and all you do is click a
| button"...
| mywittyname wrote:
| > I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness
| War was because of esthetics,
|
| Upping the gain increases the relative "oomph" of the
| bass at the cost of some treble, right?
|
| As a 90s kid with a bumping system in my Honda, I can
| confidently say we were all about that bass long before
| Megan Trainor came around. Everyone had the CD they used
| to demo their system.
|
| Because of that, I think the loudness wars were driven by
| consumer tastes more than people will admit (because then
| we'd have to admit we all had poor taste). Young people
| really loved music with way too much bass. I remember my
| mom (a talented musician) complaining that my taste in
| music was all bass.
|
| Of course, hip hop and rap in the 90s were really bass
| heavy, but so was a lot of rock music. RHCP, Korn, Limp
| Bizkit, and Slipknot come to my mind as 90s rock bands
| that had tons of bass in their music.
|
| Freak on a Leash in particular is a song that I feel like
| doesn't "translate" well to modern sound system setups.
| Listening to it on a setup with a massive subwoofer just
| hits different.
| ilamont wrote:
| > Korn
|
| It wasn't the bass, but rather the guitar.
|
| The bass player tuned the strings down a full step to be
| quite loose, and turned the treble up which gave it this
| really clicky tone that sounded like a bunch of tictacs
| being thrown down an empty concrete stairwell.
|
| He wanted it to be percussive to cut through the monster
| lows of the guitar.
| tyrust wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks for the reply!
| samdafi wrote:
| Music, as tracked by Billboard, cross genre, is as loud
| as ever. Here's a survey of Billboard music:
|
| https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/mastering-
| trends?srsltid=Af...
|
| I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this
| topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have
| softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90's
| (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over
| exuberantly because of its newness) but the meat of the
| talk may be of interest anyway.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hj7PYid_tE
| mrob wrote:
| It's still a problem, although less consistently a
| problem than it used to be for the reason entropicdrifter
| explained.
|
| There's a crowdsourced database of dynamic range metrics
| for music at:
|
| https://dr.loudness-war.info/
|
| You can see some 2025 releases are good but many are
| still loudness war victims. Even though streaming
| services normalize loudness, dynamic range compression
| will make music sound better on phone speakers, so
| there's still reason to do it.
|
| IMO, music production peaked in the 80s, when essentially
| every mainstream release sounded good.
| nunez wrote:
| I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s.
| Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because it's mono?
| hackerdood wrote:
| 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.
| petralithic wrote:
| The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan
| are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he
| wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.
| dboreham wrote:
| > decent German and Japanese components
|
| Whoa there! Audio components were about the only thing the
| British still excelled at by that time.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| British music of the 60s and 70s was pretty great to listen
| to on that hifi.
| ilamont wrote:
| I wasn't aware of home hi-fi but British gear for musicians
| was widespread when I was growing up (Marshall, Vox, etc).
|
| I was specifically thinking of the components my father got
| through the Army PX in the 60s and the hi-fi gear I would
| see at some friends' houses in the decades that followed
| ... sometimes tech that never really took hold, such as
| reel-to-reel audio. Most of it was Japanese, and sometimes
| German.
|
| I still have a pair of his 1967 Sansui speakers in the
| basement (one with a blown woofer, unfortunately) and a
| working Yamaha natural sound receiver sitting next to my
| desk from about a decade later.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Wharfedale (1920s) and Cambridge Audio (1960s) were
| there, and are still making great home hifi.
| sroussey wrote:
| A voice on the radio sounded better with vibrato, so that's
| what they did before even recordings were made. Same when
| violins played.
|
| These versions were for radio only and thought of as cheap
| when done in person.
|
| Later this was recorded, and being the only versions
| recorded, later generations thought that this is how the
| masters of the time did things, when really they would be
| booed off stage (so to speak).
|
| It's a bit of family history that passed this info on due to
| being multiple generations of playing the violin.
| nunez wrote:
| Interesting!
| gwbas1c wrote:
| (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) always had to adjust colors
| slightly.
|
| ---
|
| I think the real issue is that _Disney should know enough to
| tweak the colors of the digital releases to match what the
| artists intended._
| xnx wrote:
| > 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?
| gowld wrote:
| But the compensation for film should be a cheap 2-D color
| filter pass, not an expensive 3-D renering pass.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That's an invalid argument: Digitally tweaking color when
| printing film has nothing to do with how long it takes to
| render 3d.
|
| They had a custom built film printer and could make
| adjustments there.
| diskzero wrote:
| Production methodolgies for animated films have progressed
| massively since 1995 and Pixar may have not found the ideal
| process for the color grading of the digital to film step.
| Heck, they may not have color graded at all! This has been
| suggested. I agree that someone should know better than to
| just take a render and push it out as a digital release
| without paying attention to the result.
| wpm wrote:
| I've always been a fan of repos that I come across with
| ARCHITECTURE.md files in them, but that's a pretty loose
| framework and some just describe the what and not the why.
|
| Otherwise, I wish I worked at a place like Oxide that does
| RFDs. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer Just a single place
| with artifacts of a formal process for _writing shit down_.
|
| In your example, writing down "The greens are oversaturated by
| X% because we will lose a lot of it in the transfer process to
| film" goes a long way in at least making people _aware_ of the
| decision and why it was made, at least then the "hey actually
| the boosted greens look kinda nice" can prompt a "yeah but we
| only did that because of the medium we were shipping on, it's
| wrong"
| halapro wrote:
| You're assuming people RTFM, which does not happen at all in
| my case. Documentation exists for you to link to when someone
| already lost days on something finally reaches out.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Culture changes under the impact of technology, but culture
| _also_ changes when people deliberately teach practices.
| mwcz wrote:
| In some projects I work on I've added a WHY.md at the root that
| explains what's scaffolding and what's load bearing,
| essentially. I can't say it's been effective at preventing the
| problem you outlined, but at least it's cathartic.
| diskzero wrote:
| 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't
| reproducable, madness would ensue.
|
| Even with complete attention to detail, the final renders would
| be color graded using Flame, or Inferno, or some other tool and
| all of those edits would also be stored and reproducible in the
| pipeline.
|
| Pixar must have a very similar system and maybe a Pixar
| engineer can comment. My somewhat educated assumption is that
| these DVD releases were created outside of the Pixar toolchain
| by grabbing some version of a render that was never intended as
| a direct to digital release. This may have happened as a result
| of ignorance, indifference, a lack of a proper budget or some
| other extenuating circumstance. It isn't likely John Lasseter
| or some other Pixar creative really wanted the final output to
| look like this.
| heldrida wrote:
| Film is magical. We should preserve and incentivise it.
| lowdownbutter wrote:
| Don't tell me what I remember.
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's wild to realize that the version of the movie most of us
| remember emotionally is not the one that's currently streaming.
| There's something bittersweet about that... like your memory has
| a certain warmth and texture that modern restorations just can't
| quite recreate.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| 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 each frame twice. Moderate denoise. Add
| film grain."
|
| I don't actually know what kind of filters I'd want, but I expect
| some people will have very strong opinions about the best way to
| watch given movies. I imagine browsing settings, like browsing
| user-contributed Controller settings on Steam Deck...
| alfonsodev wrote:
| would it be posible today playing from computer using vlc or
| similar + plugins ?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| 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.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| ShaderGlass probably gets you pretty decently far down the
| path.
|
| https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass
| pornel wrote:
| 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
| kodt wrote:
| The Matrix is an interesting one because it really caught on
| with the DVD release. So that was most peoples first exposure
| to it, not the theatrical release. Even if incorrect, if that
| was the first way you saw it, it is likely how you consider it
| "should" look.
| wmeredith wrote:
| It's a bit disingenuous to imply The Matrix did not catch on
| until DVD release. The Matrix broke several (minor) box
| office records, was critically hailed, and an awards darling
| for the below the line technical awards.
|
| Having said all that. One of the most interesting aspects of
| conversations around the true version of films and such is
| that just because of the way time works the vast majority of
| people's first experience with any film will definitely NOT
| be a in a theater.
| jjmarr wrote:
| 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.
| phantasmish wrote:
| The original has a green tint to the matrix scenes, it's just
| relatively subtle and blends into a general coolness to the
| color temp. The heightened green from later home printings is
| _really_ , in-your-face green, to the point you don't really
| notice the coolness, just _greeeeen_.
| phantasmish wrote:
| The _original_ DVD was way, _way_ less green than later
| releases, which were changed to match the more-extreme greens
| used in the sequels. IDK if it was as subtle as in the theater
| (I did see it there, but most of my watches were the first-run
| DVD) but it was far subtler than later DVD printings, and all
| but IIRC one fairly recent blu-ray that finally dialed it back
| to something less eye-searing and at least close-ish to the
| original.
| akx wrote:
| You'd think there was a LUT you could apply to the digital copies
| during playback to make it look (more) like the original...
| johnbellone wrote:
| I prefer the 35mm version, at least when viewing the scene with
| the soldiers.
| left-struck wrote:
| "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
| dboreham wrote:
| 1280x1024
| jtmetcalfe wrote:
| I think it's important to remember it's not just the quantity
| of pixels but the quality of them that makes the difference
| between consumer and professional equipment
| rootbear wrote:
| 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.
| phantasmish wrote:
| I dunno if it was manufactured as early as 1995 (though it
| couldn't have been more than four years later, absolute max)
| but some time around 2002 I picked up a pair of used 19" (IIRC)
| IBM flat-screen (that is, the screen itself was flat, not flat-
| panel) CRT monitors in a flea market that had both more total
| pixels and greater pixel density than any screen in my house
| until I started picking up devices with Apple Retina displays.
| I believe the _short_ side of the 4x3 on that thing maxed out
| at 1920.
|
| My boring, 17" consumer Trinitron monitor in 1995 could do
| 1600x1200 IIRC.
|
| Max resolution and pixel density (plus, for a long time, color
| gamut, contrast/depth-of-black, latency, et c) on typical
| monitors took a _huge_ dive when LCDs replaced CRTs. "High
| res" in 1995 would probably qualify as fairly high-res today,
| too, if not quite top-of-the-heap. Only expensive, relatively
| recent displays in the consumer space really beat those '90s
| CRTs _overall_ to a degree where it 's not at least a close
| call (though they may still be a little worse in some ways)
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| loveofgrass wrote:
| hola
| mhh__ wrote:
| 35mm (and even more so with 70mm) looks so much better than
| digital IMO. The colour looks so much more alive and thorough.
|
| And I don't think I'm even being bitten by a nostalgia bug as per
| se because it was already a nostalgic fad long gone from any
| cinema near me when I grew up.
| causality0 wrote:
| Ever since raytracing graphics cards came out I've wondered why
| no game studio has ever tried to recreate the look and feel of
| Toy Story. There's something about the combination of detailed
| lighting, high-poly models, but low-eyes textures and primitive
| animations that really appeals to me.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I don't think Toy Story used raytracing. I agree it's a great
| look though.
| halapro wrote:
| This is insane to me. Hundreds of professionals work on these
| rereleases and nobody realized.
| underlipton wrote:
| Tangential thought, but I wonder if this had any affect on the
| Toy Story level in Kingdom Hearts 3. I suppose that would depend
| on the reference materials Square Enix received from
| Pixar/Disney.
| bane wrote:
| This is shockingly almost exactly the same conversation that goes
| on in the retrogaming community regarding pre-HD consoles. "The
| artists _meant_ for this art to be viewed on a CRT ".
|
| The challenge is that everybody's memory is different, and
| sometime those memories are "I wish the graphics were rock sharp
| without the artifacts of the CRT". Other times our memories are
| of the crappy TV we were given as kids that was on its last legs
| and went black & white and flickered a lot.
|
| The reality is that no matter what the intentions of the original
| animation teams were, the pipeline of artwork through film
| transfer to projection to reflection to the viewer's own eyeballs
| and brain has enough variety to it that it's simply too variable
| -- and too personal -- the really say what is correct.
|
| Anecdote: one of the local theaters I grew up with was extremely
| poorly maintained, had a patched rip on one of the several dirty
| screens, and had projectors that would barely get through an hour
| of film without needing a "bump" from the projectionist (allowing
| the audience to go out and get more refreshments halfway through
| most films). No amount of intentionality by the production
| companies of the _many_ films I saw there could have accounted
| for any of that. But I saw many of my favorite movies there.
|
| I've come down with the opinion that these things are like wine.
| A good wine is the one you enjoy. I have preferences for these
| things, but they sometimes change, and other people are allowed
| to enjoy things in their own way.
| naet wrote:
| I have always felt certain media just looks better (to my own
| personal tastes) on VHS and on CRTs. I know that technically it
| isn't the highest possible definition or quality and that both
| have significant drawbacks in terms of fidelity or whatever.
| But my taste likes what it likes. Just like how some people
| think vinyl records can sound more appealing and warmer than
| the equivalent digital media, even though the digital version
| has a higher bitrate and other advantages.
|
| I do in fact still have Toy Story on VHS and recently watched a
| bit of it with my toddler. And while I'm sure the Blu-ray or
| streamed version is higher resolution, wide screen, and
| otherwise carries more overall video and audio data than our
| tape I personally got a bit of extra joy out of watching the
| tape version on our old TV.
|
| I never considered the color differences pointed out in the
| article here, and I'm not sure how they appear on home VHS vs
| on 35mm. Maybe that is a small part of what makes the tape more
| appealing to me although I don't think it's the full reason.
| Some feelings are difficult to put into words. Tapes on a full
| aspect ratio CRT just give me a certain feeling or have a
| specific character that I still love to this day.
| p1necone wrote:
| Most 8/16 bit consoles I like the "clean RGB into a much better
| CRT than most people owned at the time" scanline look. NES has
| gotta be dirty composite into an average consumer CRT though
| otherwise it just aint right (and I didn't even grow up with a
| NES).
| chollida1 wrote:
| 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.
| matthavener wrote:
| Light and Magic is an amazing documentary that covers lots of
| this history
| shevy-java wrote:
| Hmmm. I saw the first three toy story; the fourth one I never
| saw, even though people said it is not bad, but to me Toy Story
| was over with the third one.
|
| Now, while I liked the first three, the first one always has a
| special place, because at the time it was really quite new-ish.
| Fully computer animated movies were quite rare. Pixar did several
| short videos before Toy Story, and I think there were some other
| movies too, give or take, but Toy Story kind of changed
| everything past that. Unfortunately many other computer-generated
| movies are absolute garbage nowadays. The big movie makers want
| money and don't care about anything else, so they ruin the
| interest of people who are not super-young anymore, because let's
| face it: older people are less likely to watch the latest marvel
| 3D animated zero-story movie that is a clone of prior clones.
|
| It would be nice if AI, despite it also sucking to no ends, could
| allow us to produce 3D movies with little effort. I have a
| fantasy game world my local pen and paper RPG group built. Would
| be interesting to feed it a ton of data (we have generated all
| that already over decades) and come up with an interesting movie
| that relates the story of a part of this. This is just one
| example of many more. Quality-wise I still like Toy Story - I
| find it historically important, and it was also good at the
| respective time (all first three actually, although the
| storylines got progressively weaker; I did like Ken and Barbie
| though, but too much of the story seemed to go into wanting to
| milk out more money selling toys rather than telling a story. Tim
| Allen as Buzz Lightyear was always great though.)
| babypuncher wrote:
| I have blu-rays for all the movies mentioned in the article.
| Today, there are some very powerful tools for processing digital
| images to make them look like film, going as far as letting you
| mimic specific film stocks.
|
| It might be a fun experiment to make custom rips of these movies
| that look more like their theatrical releases. I'm curious how
| close one can get without needing to source an actual 35mm print.
| krosaen wrote:
| This reminds me of the pains taken to reproduce original Game Boy
| Advance fidelity in the chromatic by mod retro
| https://modretro.com/blogs/blog/display-the-hard-way
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