Comment by Theodores

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.