I agree with you, but "better" is subjective, and this change was ON PURPOSE because most consumers would disagree with us.
It's why they all have "motion smoothing" turned on all their TV's too. Yes, it's animation, but the Blu-rays look "higher resolution", and look "smoother" and less "noisy".
All the artistic benefits you and I see are lost on most watchers.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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 :(
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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...")
73 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 74.4 ms ] threadIt's why they all have "motion smoothing" turned on all their TV's too. Yes, it's animation, but the Blu-rays look "higher resolution", and look "smoother" and less "noisy".
All the artistic benefits you and I see are lost on most watchers.
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk
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.
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/
And here I was thinking of re-watching some old Disney/Pixar movies soon :(
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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...")