The 'toy Story' You Remember

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

At least they messed around with the green.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0YBqhMtcg

What sort of terms might one search for?

Would be annoying, but I suppose you could also recalibrate your display to turn down the greens?

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

> 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.

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 £40k 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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