Plus: newsbits.
Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is our slate:
1) Digital animation on film stock.
2) Animation newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
Toy Story used to look different. It’s a little tricky to explain.
Back in 1995, CG animation was the topic in the industry, and Pixar was central to the hype. The studio had already shifted Disney to computers and won the first Oscar for a CG short (Tin Toy). Giant movies like Jurassic Park incorporated Pixar’s software.
The next step was Toy Story, billed as the first animated feature to go all-CG. Even after Pixar’s successes, that was a risk. Would a fully digital movie sell tickets?
It clearly worked out. Toy Story appeared 30 years ago this month — and its popularity created the animation world that exists now. A new process took over the business.
But not entirely new — not at first. There was something old about Toy Story’s tech, too, back in 1995. Pixar made the thing with computers, but it still needed to screen in theaters. And computers couldn’t really do that yet. From its early years, Pixar had relied on physical film stock. According to authors Bill Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen:
[Pixar’s Ed] Catmull recognized that his studio’s pixels needed to merge with that world-standard distribution freeway, 35 mm film. Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures. It was axiomatic that for a filmgoing audience to be going to a film, it would be a... film.
Toy Story was a transitional project. Since Pixar couldn’t send digital data to theaters, every one of the movie’s frames was printed on analog film. When Toy Story originally hit home video, that 35 mm version was its source. Only years later, after technology advanced, did Pixar start doing digital transfers — cutting out the middleman. And Toy Story’s look changed with the era.
While making Toy Story, Pixar’s team knew that the grain, softness, colors and contrasts of analog film weren’t visible on its monitors. They were different mediums.
So, to get the right look, the studio had to keep that final, physical output in mind. The digital colors were tailored with an awareness that they would change after printing. “Greens go dark really fast, while the reds stay pretty true,” said Toy Story’s art director, Ralph Eggleston. “Blues have to be less saturated to look fully saturated on film, while the oranges look really bad on computer screens, but look really great on film.”
The team checked its work along the way. In the words of Pixar’s William Reeves:
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.
Behind the final images was a “painstaking transfer process,” according to the press. Leading it was David DiFrancesco, one of Pixar’s early MVPs, who began working with Ed Catmull before Pixar even existed. He broke ground in film printing — specifically, in putting digital images on analog film.
He and his team in Pixar’s photoscience department used their expertise here. Their tools were “commercial grade” film printers, DiFrancesco noted: modified Solitaire Cine II machines. He’d invented more advanced stuff, but it wasn’t viable for a project of Toy Story’s size. Using the best equipment would’ve taken “several terabytes of data,” he said.
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. “Since all film and video images are composed of combinations of red, green and blue light, the frame is separated into its discrete red, green and blue elements,” noted the studio. Exposures, filtered through each color, were layered to create each frame.
It reportedly took nine hours to print 30 seconds of Toy Story. But it had to be done: it was the only way to screen the film.
In 1999, Pixar made history again.
Its second feature, A Bug’s Life, reached theaters in 1998. Once more, the studio designed its visuals for analog film (see the trailer on 35 mm). Its people knew the ins-and-outs of this process, down to the amount of detail that film stock could accept and a projector could show. That’s partly how they got away with the movie’s tiny 2048×862 resolution, for example.
Still, the team struggled with one thing: the dip in image quality when film got converted to home video. That’s how Toy Story was released, but there had to be a better way.
For the home version of A Bug’s Life, Pixar devised a method of “go[ing] from our digital image within our system … straight to video,” John Lasseter said. He called it “a real pure version of our movie straight from our computers.” A Bug’s Life became the first digital-to-digital transfer on DVD. Compared to the theatrical release, the look had changed. It was sharp and grainless, and the colors were kind of different.
A digital transfer of Toy Story followed in the early 2000s. And it wasn’t quite the same movie that viewers had seen in the ‘90s. “The colors are vivid and lifelike, [and] not a hint of grain or artifacts can be found,” raved one reviewer. It was a crisp, blazingly bright, digital image now — totally different from the softness, texture and deep, muted warmth of physical film, on which Toy Story was created to be seen.
Quickly, digital transfers became a standard thing. Among others by Pixar, The Incredibles puts off a very different vibe between its theatrical and later releases (see the 35 mm trailer for reference).
Pixar wasn’t the only studio to make the leap, either. Disney did as well.
Like Toy Story, the Disney renaissance work of the ‘90s was transitional. The Lion King, Mulan and the rest existed as files in computer systems — and the idea was always to record them on analog film at the end. Early home releases were based on those 35 mm versions. Later releases, like the ones Disney streams today, were direct transfers of the digital data.
At times, especially in the colors, they’re almost unrecognizable. And the images feel less cohesive — like something’s missing that was supposed to bring all the elements together. These aren’t quite the same films that ruled the ‘90s.
For a number of years, there’s been talk in film-preservation circles about Toy Story and the Disney renaissance. This work sits in an odd place. The world was still pretty analog when the computer animation boom arrived: out of necessity, these projects became hybrids of new and old. What’s the right way to see digital movies that were designed for 35 mm film?
The studios themselves haven’t quite figured it out. On Disney+, the colors of Toy Story feel a bit raw — searing greens that were meant to darken on film, for example. Meanwhile, the newer Toy Story Blu-ray shares more in common with the original colors, but it’s still an altered, colder look.
When digital transfers first showed up, people were thrilled, including at Pixar. Movies became “crisper, clearer and more stunning on home video systems” than in theaters, some claimed. 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. The same goes for many other movies from the transitional era.
The good news is that this conversation gets bigger all the time. In those film-preservation circles, a dedicated few are trying to save the old work. More and more comparison videos are popping up on YouTube. If you get the chance to see one of the old Disney or Pixar films on 35 mm, it’s always worthwhile.
These companies, ultimately, decide how Toy Story looks today. Still, for some, it’s nice to see the original version of the film again — the version Pixar originally intended to make. It’s evidence that the film did feel different back then. The memories were real.
I Am Frankelda continues its strong performance in Mexican theaters. Analyst Edgar Apanco reports that 658,000 people have gone to see it, surpassing the popular Chainsaw Man movie. Revenues are over $2.15 million and climbing — having fallen just 17% in week two, and an estimated 20% in week three.
In Japan, Goro Miyazaki revealed that his father is still going to Studio Ghibli to draw for a few hours each day.
An exhibition in Taiwan brought the films of Karel Zeman to the country, reportedly for the first time. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and Invention for Destruction are showing, among others.
In Nigeria, animator Gabriel Ugbodaga had a televised interview about his well-received film Vainglorious (watch) and the state of the country’s industry. “When it comes to 2D hand-drawn animation,” he said, “there’s a lot of talent in Nigeria.”
If you missed that Baahubali: The Eternal War teaser this week, see it here. It’s an Indian feature presented by S. S. Rajamouli (RRR).
In Germany, Werner Herzog’s animated film The Twilight World picked up “€100,000 for production preparation support,” reports Cineuropa.
Infinity Castle will reach China next weekend, and forecasters believe it could earn a billion yuan (over $140 million) and become the highest-grossing anime film in the country.
Also happening in China next weekend: the latest edition of Feinaki Beijing Animation Week. The festival posted 55 trailers for its selections this year.
The Japanese journalist Atsushi Matsumoto is raising concerns that the anime boom of the 2020s could be a bubble. (Meanwhile, despite huge industry profits, analysis suggests that studio closures are set to rise for the third year in a row.)
In America, for those in New York, there’s an interesting series of stop-motion screenings at the Eastman Museum this month — including The Wolf House.
Last of all: we wrote about a handful of recent, free films worth seeing.
Until next time!
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Comments
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?
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.
By janeway 2025-11-1123:06 Amazing. Your final point seems to make most sense - not the original team itself having any problems.
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.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1114:282 reply > 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.
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.
By munificent 2025-11-1118:521 reply 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.
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.
By rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2025-11-1122:58 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.
By bongodongobob 2025-11-1118:41 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.
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.
By nunez 2025-11-1120:30 Interesting!
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...
> 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.
By entropicdrifter 2025-11-1116:294 reply 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.
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"...
By mywittyname 2025-11-1119:161 reply > 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.
By ilamont 2025-11-1121:59 > 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.
By samdafi 2025-11-1117:57 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.
By not_that_d 2025-11-1214:08 As an ex audio engineer, I would say that the war ended and loudness won.
By tyrust 2025-11-1117:29 That makes sense, thanks for the reply!
By mrob 2025-11-1119:19 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:
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.
By a4isms 2025-11-1115:32 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.
> decent German and Japanese components
Whoa there! Audio components were about the only thing the British still excelled at by that time.
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.
By robotresearcher 2025-11-1116:47 Wharfedale (1920s) and Cambridge Audio (1960s) were there, and are still making great home hifi.
By robotresearcher 2025-11-1116:29 British music of the 60s and 70s was pretty great to listen to on that hifi.
I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s. Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.
By hackerdood 2025-11-1117:07 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.
By dboreham 2025-11-1115:38 Because it's mono?
By petralithic 2025-11-1115:27 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.
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"
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.
By dsr_ 2025-11-1117:43 Culture changes under the impact of technology, but culture also changes when people deliberately teach practices.
(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.
By diskzero 2025-11-1120:14 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.
> 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?
By gowld 2025-11-1119:10 But the compensation for film should be a cheap 2-D color filter pass, not an expensive 3-D renering pass.
By gwbas1c 2025-11-1121:55 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.
By _bent 2025-11-1112:50 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
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.
By randallsquared 2025-11-1113:34 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.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1114:35 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.
By Gravityloss 2025-11-1113:111 reply 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.
By pbh101 2025-11-1115:08 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.
Do you have some concrete or specific examples of intentional compensation or purposeful scaffolding in mind (outside the topic of the article)?
By quuxplusone 2025-11-1114:174 reply 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
By MBCook 2025-11-1118:33 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.
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.
I don't think anyone would have complained if the art had been more detailed but in the same style as the original or even using real digitized actors.
Monkey Island II's art was slightly more comic-like than say The Last Crusade but still with realistic proportions and movements so that was the expectation before CoMI.
The art style changing to silly-comic is what got people riled up.
By the_af 2025-11-1214:41 Hard disagree.
(Also a correction: by original I meant "Secret of" but mistyped "Curse of").
I meant Return to Monkey Island (2022), which was no more abrupt a change than say, "The Curse of Monkey Island" (1997).
Monkey Island was always "silly comic", it's its sine qua non.
People whined because they wanted a retro game, they wanted "the same style" (pixels) as the original "Secret", but Ron Gilbert was pretty explicit about this: "Secret" looked what it looked like due to limitations of the time, he wasn't "going for that style", it was just the style that they managed with pixel art. Monkey Island was a state-of-the-art game for its time.
So my example is fully within the terms of the concept we're describing: people growing attached to technical limitations, or in the original words:
> [...] examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations"
By tsunamifury 2025-11-1114:411 reply Motion blur. 24fps. Grain. Practically everything we call cinematic
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.
>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.
By erincandescent 2025-11-1215:17 On the contrary, an object moving across your field of vision will produce a level of motion blur in your eyes. The same object recorded at 24fps and then projected or displayed in front of your eyes will produce a different level of motion blur, because the object is no longer moving continuously across your vision but instead moving in discrete steps. The exact character of this motion blur can be influenced by controlling what fraction of that 1/24th of a second the image is exposed for (vs. having the screen black)
The most natural level of motion blur for a moving picture to exhibit is not that traditionally exhibited by 24fps film, but it is equally not none (unless your motion picture is recorded at such high frame rate that it substantially exceeds the reaction time of your eyes, which is rather infeasible)
By the_af 2025-11-1121:11 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.
By estebank 2025-11-123:20 You're forgetting about the shutter angle. A large shutter angle will have a lot of motion blur and feel fluid even at a low frame rate, while a small shutter angle will make movement feel stilted but every frame will be fully legible, very useful for caothic scenes. Saving private Ryan, for example, used a small shutter angle. And until digital, you were restricted to a shutter angle of 180, which meant that very fast moving elements would still jump from frame to frame in between exposures.
By BeFlatXIII 2025-11-1116:022 reply 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.
By phantasmish 2025-11-1118:152 reply 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.
By BeFlatXIII 2025-11-1216:01 Reminds me of how pixel-perfect emulation of pixel art on a modern screen is often ugly, compared to the game played on a CRT.
> (which one may or may not find intolerably awful).
"Motion smoothing" on TVs is the first thing I disable, I really hate it.
By phantasmish 2025-11-1122:34 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.
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.
By phantasmish 2025-11-1118:23 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.
By chrisweekly 2025-11-1114:261 reply 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
By robotresearcher 2025-11-1116:351 reply - Audio compression was/is necessary to get good SNR on mag tape.
By chrisweekly 2025-11-1118:341 reply true - but are you implying audio engineers are now leaning into heavy compression for artistic reasons?
By robotresearcher 2025-11-1119:23 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.
By wanderingmoose 2025-11-1117:10 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.
By mwcz 2025-11-1119:33 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.
By davidalayachew 2025-11-1113:271 reply 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.
By chrisweekly 2025-11-1114:202 reply enumerable -> innumerable
(opposite meaning)
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1114:301 reply > (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.)
By chrisweekly 2025-11-1115:311 reply Yeah, English has so many quirks. As a software dev, the "enum" type cane to mind, making this one easier to spot. (shrug)
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1119:411 reply > Yeah, English has so many quirks.
Arguably true in general, but in this specific case everything I said was already true in Latin.
By chrisweekly 2025-11-1413:12 Relevance? I'd say it's inarguable -- and the words being discussed are English.
By davidalayachew 2025-11-1121:31 Thanks, you are right. Wish I could edit it.
By layer8 2025-11-1113:30 Chesterton’s Fence is a related notion.
By snarfy 2025-11-1113:24 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.
By RedNifre 2025-11-1112:57 "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."
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/
How much of the colour change is also dependent on the film printer and also film scanner/telecine?
It just seems like there’s a lot of variability in each step to end up with an unintended colour, that will taken as the artist’s intent.
> is also dependent on the film printer
The printers deffo make a difference to colour, but I came from VFX world where we put a macbeth chart in for each shot so we could adjust the colour afterwards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker) We'd have a whole team working on making sure that colour was accurate.
The scanners we used (northlight) were calibrated a lot so my understanding is that if you scanned 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
Thank you! I would love to know the process of the colour guy. Like how much of it is the same as a chef tasting a dish and realizing it needs x ingredient in the spot.
By boulos 2025-11-122:12 I recommend interviews with Roger Deakins, like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w56rFxPyZno
By dmbche 2025-11-1116:26 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.
By rokweom 2025-11-1117:07 Doesn't wet scanning "automatically" get rid of the dust and scratches issue?
> 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.
By ancientworldnow 2025-11-1114:591 reply 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.
By KaiserPro 2025-11-1119:27 > 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.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-1117:31 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.
How did you dust bust it? Wipe it by hand with a microfiber cloth or something?
By 4gotunameagain 2025-11-1114:311 reply 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
By tomcam 2025-11-130:40 Agreed. That was just a starting point for the convo. Seems like any reasonably fast method would either result in damage from particles or would be incredibly slow. Sometimes a blower doesn't do a complete job.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1114:463 reply > 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.
By KaiserPro 2025-11-1116:12 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.
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.
By Joe_Cool 2025-11-1117:01 Yep, most film (also photo) attracts dust like a magnet. Kodak made a Static Eliminator to mitigate that with high voltage to an extent:
By anikom15 2025-11-1116:29 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.
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...
By forgotoldacc 2025-11-1112:431 reply 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.
By cubefox 2025-11-1115:13 > 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.
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.
By taejavu 2025-11-1121:32 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?
By zeta0134 2025-11-1112:09 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!
By CodeArtisan 2025-11-1112:551 reply Final Fantasy Tactics on Game Boy Advance had a color mode for television.
By cbolton 2025-11-1114:26 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)
By chromehearts 2025-11-1112:36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxKJeYSBmI
This video is related to that issue
