Comment by nappy

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

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.

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.

At the same time, I think the nostalgia people feel for those versions isn't necessarily about accuracy, it's about emotional fidelity

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.

> 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.

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

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.

[flagged]