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Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When classic animated films undergo digital restoration, key features can get lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the process meant to smooth over scratches and dirt specks on old film "can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak." "
here's a non-registration-required before-and-after example.
you're still going to be turned on by Buggs Bunny dressed in drag.
They're doing a half-assed job of the restoration. Not that I care about these particular cartoons, but some people do.
Restoration... apparently that word does not mean what I think it means.
- MreX
But the process can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak.
This problem isn't limited to cartoons - I hear that they're running into to similar problems during the restoration of early Ron Jeremy videos.
"for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak."
Or making one character seem to fire their blaster first when you were sure that the other fired first last time your watched it.
Walt Disney Co. has largely avoided criticism of its cartoon restorations. For most of its projects, Disney doesn't use digital noise reduction, relying instead on artists to inspect each frame of film and remove defects either manually or with proprietary software. "If you just take a film and throw it through a noise-reduction system, you're never going to get the same standard of quality," says Jeff Miller, president for world-wide post-production and operations.
Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.
Clearly, those responsible have no excuse for it. Again, FTFA:
Craig Hoffman, a spokesman for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., which released the Looney Tunes DVDs last fall, declines to comment on the complaints about the restored cartoons. "There's a wide audience: children, collectors, people who grew up loving them," he adds.
What exactly does a wide audience, or people who grew up loving [Looney Tunes] have to do with your quality control? Is passing a shoddy product off to some members of that wide audience acceptable? I can understand that young kids may not know the difference, but if you're targeting a wide audience, you gotta account for more than young kids.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Why are they complaining about the tools when it's apparent that it's the workmanship that's at fault?
For an excellent counter example, check out the beautiful work that Animeigo did restoring the original Macross series when they released it on DVD a few years ago. The cleaned up print makes the series look like it was ten years newer.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
it is always pretty amazing to me to see the strong sterotypes given off in old cartoons. the things they could do way back when
Of course.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Am I the only one who starts to get paranoid about the changing of history?
Star Wars IV-VI, Disney cartoons, now these.
Where does it end?
Where did I leave my tinfoil hat?
I'm not sure if this is practical, but how hard is it to actually manually add the missing information after the restoration is done ? Just put back the "Missing Vine" and your done :-D
... any of these restorations until I saw the remastered special edition of Warner Bros' "Hare Trigger", which introduced Yosemite Sam for the first time...
... Bugs Shot First!
Got to the climatic showdown where he Sam confronts Bugs Bunny in a saloon bar in Nevada and
I feel like my childhood has been ruined.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Sure we can digitally process it, but in the next decade the digital reprocessing will evolve, probably along the lines of the neural network, so that it can make better distinctions between fine lines and scratches. If they have to make some money on the technology, let them enhance products like Media Cleaner and improve digital video for a while. Remember Ted Turner's colorized classics? It was a big thing that never really went anywhere, because in the end it just didn't look right. Don't rush it, not with the classics. Human beings spent hours on every frame of those films. It was a labor of love. Digitally detracting from that level of commitment just because they can is a poor excuse abusing and disrespecting the art.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Not only the things they said, but the violence. Tom and Jerry were extremely violent. Most of the Bugs Bunny cartoons included someone being blown up or shot.
Somehow we all managed to watch them and not turn out to be homicidal maniacs. Today, if a cuddly teddy bear trips and lands on his butt that might get banned for promoting the dangerous act of falling on ones rump.
/. ++
The linked-to images are not before and after examples.
They are examples of artifacts that appear and then disappear in the post-restoration material.
The artifacts do look bad, but there are no "before" images to judge how much good, if any, the restoration is doing.
What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.
Just re-draw every single cell.
A number of the old cartoons are kept in a closet of dirty secrets because they had racist themes in them. They're no longer being broadcast, which I suppose is fine as no one should have to put up with watching them, but the flipside of this is that they're being flushed down the memory hole, enabling us to sanitize our memory and pretend that we've always been a right and just society. I'd much rather lose a line or two in a digital restoration than to have these hideous examples lost to history.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Anyway, I just think the clarity of the cartoon never mattered. There's this theory that says that the closer the look gets to humans the lesser the real human-ness we feel. Which could explain why most of the cartoons involve talking animals :)
But I don't think Picasson should've used finer brushes either... It's Original - it's the way it should be.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Different process, but similar concepts. Lots of old music recordings get "destroyed" by digital remastering.
In a case like this (with both the cartoons and the music), i would personally put up with hiss, scratches, dirt and pops until they've got the remastering tools perfected.
My $0.02 + 5.5% tax
do() || do_not();
We all watched the cartoons, with their dirt and specks and the occasional hair. I never felt there was anything wrong with that stuff. It was just part of the animation and broadcast processes. It doesn't detract from the cartoons. Going back and "fixing" these minor defects would be like filling in the cracks in the paint on the Mona Lisa. It was art before it was perfect. Now, I'm not so sure.
This space for rent.
Tom and Jerry were extremely violent.
I wonder what you would say about Itchy and Scratchy!
In Soviet Russia digital restoration smooths over scratches and dirt specks on YOU.
That has changed over the past 5-6 years. At first I thought it was just me outgrowing the charm of cartoons (I'm 27). But then I realized it wasn't me or my tastes that were changing. It was the quality of the new productions that was sadly deteriorating.
This applies to most of the cartoons produced by the major animation houses in Hollywood - WB, Disney, etc. The new Tom and Jerry cartoons are a joke compared to their witty and charming predecessors. It seems that most of the focus now is on better animation and special effects through computer animation, and less focus on the *wit* and everyday humor that made them so popular in the first place.
Take any old Tom and Jerry cartoon (directed by Fred Quimby) - you'll see it based on a cat and mouse chase in the familiar settings of a house or backyard. Fastforward to their newer counterparts (incidentally directed by Chuck Jones) and you'll see a sophisticated setting like a Spaceship or France, with better graphics, but almost *no* wit or simple but *clever* plots that were common in the episodes of old.
The same holds for the Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse and other classics. The trend seems to be towards slicker animation, with little or *no* emphasis to creative wit/humor. The newer cartoons are all rehashes or remakes of the successful plots with smaller "Tiny Toon" versions of the characters.
I prefer completely new (and independently produced, I think) cartoons like Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc better to these incredibly non-creative rehased versions of the classics, that the studios seem to want to cash in on.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
half assed restoration'. But no, gotta blame the Digits. Where's the personal responsibility. The Digits had nothing to do with this. I think what happened is they took a stab at restoring Popeye in the Land of the Goons and are now being, for all intents and purposes, blackballed. It was thought that all copies had been destroyed. Cultural sensitivity trumps culture, you know. Can't portray cargo cult and head hunters in a negative light.
If anyone has a pointer to a copy of 'Popeye in the Land of the Goons', I have been looking for years...
Some characters have dissapeared completely anyways.
I wonder what you would say about Itchy and Scratchy!
:)
I would say that they are a parody of how violent Tom and Jerry were.
/. ++
Don't worry too much, they still have the original. When the tech comes along they'll do it right and be happy to sell them again. After a little more time they will repackage the first version again as 'classic cut version, the original footing'
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Here is David Mackenzie's website (mentioned in the WSJ article, but not linked), which shows a lot of examples:
http://lyris-lite.net/dnr.htmlYou realize of course that if a fan did this on their own they'd end up being sued under the DMCA? Good thing only the owners can legally damage history.
"no one should have to put up with watching them"
No one has to 'put up with watching'.
This is what the effing knobs are for.
What's next, BOOKS because no one should have to put up with READING them?
After that, thoughts, because no one should have to worry that you might be thinking them.
Censors should be made to eat their gonads. It's necessary if we are to evolve into something more meaningful...
Not only the things they said, but the violence. Tom and Jerry were extremely violent. Most of the Bugs Bunny cartoons included someone being blown up or shot.
Somehow we all managed to watch them and not turn out to be homicidal maniacs. Today, if a cuddly teddy bear trips and lands on his butt that might get banned for promoting the dangerous act of falling on ones rump.
Don't forget Bugs Bunny (repeatedly) dressing up in womans clothing and kissing Elmer Fud. Or the many explosive failures of Wiley E. Coyote.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Good point. One WB cartoon I haven't seen in decades is arguably the funniest. Can't find it anywhere:
In one (very recursive) scene, we find ourselves inside a movie theater, with a carefully illustrated scene of Bogart and Bacall playing on the screen. The "movie", of course, is the weird take of Jones, Freleng, et al. on live action: for example, Bogie casually tosses a flame-thrower to Bacall, instead of a Zippo, when she asks for a light.
At one point, something explodes in Bogie's face (hey, WB cartoon, gotta have at least one explosion). With his soot-covered face, "Bogie" suddenly does an impersonation of Rochester, Jack Benny's long-suffering man-servant.
Now, we can argue back and forth about the racism involved, but the sad fact is that it was a very funny short that fell well within even the most progressive norms of its day. (I honestly don't think any kids today would even get the Rochester joke -- if yours can, dear reader, you have some darn erudite children, I must say.)
Now, if this cartoon was produced today, it would be deemed offensive, and rightfully so. But shouldn't we be allowed to see these older shorts.. while not removing them from the context of their times?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
"Thus the only real excuse is 'we don't want to spend the time or money'."
This is a case where the job just screams "outsource me!". Give a few dozen Indian artisans some training and then let them go at it, cell by cell. They'd do a better job than any machine and I doubt they'd break the bank.
It makes me think, are current digital media that we used today need to be "restored" in next 50 years? Who knows what kind of storage technology we use then...
They removed the "mammy" voice from the black maid in at least one Tom & Jerry and replaced it with a generic white woman's. Only her legs (black) are shown when she is talking to them. Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.
No news there. What they could do, but are probably too lazy to do, is get two or more copies of the film and work from that since the original artwork would be common and the scratches wouldn't.
My God, I never realised!
I'll never drink puppies again!
This may be out of topic, but this is the perfect change to find the answer to a question I've been having a long time.
Does anybody know the title for the episode in which Tom goes to hell?
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Walter Lantz was an awful animator.
Hanna and Barbera can both kiss my ass.
Seriously, have you ever laughed once at any of the cartoons these people produced?
I love Chuck Jones's Warner Brothers' cartoons. But his rendition of Tom & Jerry just didn't have the life or quality of the older MGM productions. One gets the impression that his heart just wasn't in it.
Something that often gets forgotten with regards to older cartoons is that most of them were released theatrically first, and were shot in a widescreen format.
Converting those to the scrunched 4:3 aspect of TV, most of them simply lopped off the edges and zoomed in on a certain part of the actual cartoon.
If you watch old Tom and Jerry or Droopy cartoons on Cartoon Network, many times it is hard to even tell what is going on, because much of the character action takes place just off screen. Other times, people's faces and heads are awkwardly chopped off at the sides.
It may be the case that the theatrical reels have been lost forever, but to me that is far more disappointing than some of the digital hazing that inevitably comes with shoddy, speed-oriented transfers.
Everyone loves a log.
Best Slashdot Co
I also have a DVD of Metropolis (1926), restored as best as modern technology will allow. But that's a lost cause, in this instance, since all the movie destruction was accomplished by its 1927 release in the US, and all the present resoration can do is add 15 minutes to the US release, which means there are still 45 minutes missing somewhere, presumed never to be seen. The modern soundtrack uses the original orchestration.
It's too easy to say that modern resorations get it wrong. The problem is, modern CHEAP restorations don't do as good a job as modern EXPENSIVE restorations, and at that point we have to consider whether the restoration costs will ever be recovered. I don't know if the restoration of Snow White made a profit, but perhaps from Disney's perspective it was more important to have a high-quality modern digital conversion. Although Metropolis is a movie that should be preserved for eternity (750 minor roles plus 30,000 crowd scenes for what ultimately proved to be a gigantic leap beyond Birth of a Nation, a mere decade before; contrast with our modern ability to discuss minor plot and tech improvements over 3 decades between the various Star Wars episodes), it's unlikely that anyone attempting a definitive preservation will ever actually recover the costs involved.
At the dawn of cinematography, they used the best technology that was available year-by-year. In the late 1960's, much of the film industry moved away from that concept to filming on what is basically consumer-grade Ektachrome, with the Technicolor equipment having been sold off to China. So we have two or more decades of movies that will simply vanish unless we start protecting them now. The problem is, we need to protect the junk as well as the good stuff, in case future generations modify our values. Mre recently, the situation has improved because stock is more likely to be on digital media.
But when we think we're failing to preserve old movies, we shouldn't necessarily blame ourselves. In recent decades, the original movie makers made that decision for us.
has the "old scratched film effect" Talk about messing with future people's heads. Then again, if the "old scratched film effect" was digitally added, then simply knowing the algorithm, one can then remove it as well? Will they come out with a "fucked up and old" VHS tape effect? Analog forever! Ah... the memories of a Nth generation copy Debbie Does Dallas VHS tape... Has that been remastered yet? (that last one was rhetorical, I'm no longer interested)
fail to see why you need to digital restore Rocket Robin Hood and the like...
I am sure most of you have seen Disney's Fantasia. Well, I have seen it, back in the days of my childhood, at a private projection (therefore, from an old reel). Even though it was very long ago, I have a very vivid memory of that event, because I have always loved classical music, and I thought that Fantasia had some of the best, most inspired and heartfelt, interpretations.
Then, about 4 years ago we purchased Fantasia on DVD, and as wewatched, I had the strange feeling that "this is just not right". I could not put my finger on it, but the music sounded devoid of excitement.
Then I remembered an old friend from primary school who had Fantasia on a very old VHS tape, and watched it. The picture had imperfections, the color was not as stable as on the DVD, but nothing that would bother me. And the music - well, it was completely different.
I came to the conclusion that, during the digital remastering, they must have done some DSP magic to remove noise and stuff, and actually killed it. Yeah, it's kinda the same music, it just feels wooden, to me totally useless. Why are the MPAA companies doing this? Obviously, because they don't care. I imagine that the larger majority of the public would not notice the difference, except that "hey, there's less noise, it must be better, right?".
Sigged!
Indiscriminate usage of the blur filter actually blurs the images.
News at 11.
neither shalt thou count two, unless thou preceedest directly to three. Five is right out.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
In that 1952 Tex Avery classic, a character reaches into the edge of the frame to pluck a "hair" from the image. It would be sad to see this gag lost to digital restoration.
I am not a crackpot.
If you have it on DVD, I guarantee the artifacting of the compression process alone means you don't have anything close to "at least as good as the original". Try watching it on a large screen (say 92" or so) with a really good projector. You'll hurl.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
where the dog gets the job of watching the place while the bear hibernates, the bear can't stand noise, and keeps yelling it at every pin drop.
I love how it was so un-PC to have a black stereotype like Mammy but the fix was to make her a an Irish stereotype.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Well, they handle that by censoring away the whole cartoon or at least the two parts that are "culturaly sensitive" now. Those being the parts where the dog is squished and blackface and where he and the rabbits are some kind of south seas natives and chanting.
For cleanly inked cartons, like Loony Tunes and the Simpsons, SVG would be the ultimate restoration. You probably have to layer out the painted backgrounds though so classic cartoons would be dual layer bitmap and vector.
Not that anybody can be bother to do so of course but it should be that way. Then they would scale beyond HDTV, without having to ever buy a higher resolution version, so its never going to happen.
You just hit my nostalgia and I thought I'd share...
l fin.avi
i .hvost.avi
r abiteli.avi
. obedali.avi
. avi
a .kovboi.avi
y ary.avi
m pg
r asti.avi
a vi
If you like fgood cartoons you may appreciate some of soviet-era russian cartoons.
The fact that were not under for-profit pressure (even though they were under diffrerent kinds of pressure) allowed them to create many great pieces which are so unlike disney&co. There are quite a few with little or no words so you will have no trouble understanding them without subtitles.
They used many different techniques. Some cartoons are very primitive graphics-wise, but are cure and otherwise nice nevertheless.
There is a nice place where many of them are available for download at http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/ . (That place only allows downloading from outside of russia between 3pm and 9pm PST and the limit is only one connection at a time).
some of the things I can reccomend where language is not an issue:
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/varegka.avi
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/devochka.i.de
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/kontakt.avi
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/krylija.nogi.
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/obezyanki.i.g
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/kak.obezyanki
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/ograblenie.po
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/raz.kovboi.dv
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/tiap-liap.mal
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/filmfilmfilm.
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/shpionskie.st
http://multiki.arjlover.net/multiki/schelkunchik.
Check them out! Let me know if you like them!
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
"I thought widescreen came about in response to television?"
Yep. Other than a few experimental pictures, everything (including cartoons) up to 1952 was photographed in the Academy 1.37:1 ratio (changed from 1.33:1 in 1930 to accommodate the soundtrack).
Grandparent's complaint of stuff falling outside of the frame is probably due to excessive overscan on his television, but an improperly aligned film chain or bad lab work on the print that's being shown can cause the same problem.
Reporter: "What is your administration doing about the deficit?"
Republican: "A marriage consists of one man and one woman, it's in the Bible. It's 'one nation under God', not Allah or the angel Moroni. We must stop these activist judges from contaminating and impurifying our precious bodily fluids, and replace them with good old fashioned reactionary judges."
Reporter: "Uh...what are we doing to stabilize the situation in Iraq?"
Republican: "We must never forget the lessons of 9/11. We have Osama bin Laden pinned down in the vicinity of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once we figure out how to tell one raghead from another we'll be able to inspect everyone in the region and imprison anyone who isn't Osama. Then, the only guy left ducking into caverns will have to run from our bunker busting bombs and attack choppers. Bring it on!!!"
I guess parents think they are protecting their kids or sheltering them. I wonder if they contemplate violence on TV at night after dinner while they're watching their sex and violence shows? I'm sorry, I meant the cops, mystery, ER, law shows.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
Why is it necessary to "improve" old works of art at all? Can't we just appreciate the original? Trying to bring it up to "our standards" is selfish and disrespectful to the original artist(s).
This process could actually destroy a gag in a cartoon....
Magical Maestro - 1952 - Tex Avery
"One of the most famous Tex Avery gags is his use of a (possibly Rotoscoped) hair in Magical Maestro (MGM, 1952) that acts like a hair caught in the gate of a projector, until Spike plucks it out."
If DNR removes the hair, the entire gag is lost...
On both of these screensavers, what was interesting was that the creator simulates very realistic "analog" effects - the twitching of NTSC, the "snow", the waveyness (like a filter cap is blown or something), the rolling, the fading in/out of an image, ghosting, etc. The Apple IIe saver looks like it is on an old TV - the topmost 40 column line is "bent" to the left of the image, and "wavers", like the signal, etc - is just out of tune.
For both screensavers, it is simultaneously hilarious, nostalgic (for those of us who have grown up on 8 bit machines connected to TVs), and interesting (from the point of view of simulating all of this so accurately on a "perfect" monitor) - both to watch and appreciate just how far we have come, in so short of time...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You need to remeber that Orwell wrote 1984 because he was scared of The Left.
It was 1948 and the fascism of the right had been defeated. They were no longer to be feared.
However the Communisim of The Left was going strong. Orwell, pro-union and anti-fascist, had hung out with some one the English Communists and had come to hate and fear them.
It is no mistake that Big Brother looks like "Uncle Joe" Stalin, or that the Party, IngSoc, is short for English Socialism.
No one who lived through the era of the USSR and reads 1984 has any doubt about the real target of the book.
How the Left managed to use 1984 as a tool for blaiming the Right is beyond me.
Even now you can see The Left commiting the sins described in 1984.
"Hate Crime" is nothing more that ThoughtCrime.
Politically Correct terms are littl emore than NewSpeak. A deliberate attempt to make certain ideas impossibel by making them untinkable and unexpressable.
The revision of history (an easy way to get a PhD) is no different from Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
This is a huge problem for flat color animation in general. Kind of like applying low quality JPEG compression to line-art. It just doesn't work.
They need to start branching the digital standard a bit and create a lossless compression algorithm specifically for animation. Something similar to how GIF compression works.
8==8 Bones 8==8
This is what happened to _Fantasia_. Around 1985 or 1986 in the dawn of the CD era, Disney decided to digitally re-record the entire soundtrack following the original score exactly with a new orchestra. The VHS tape you saw no doubt contains the new recordings. A lot of people felt that the re-recordings were inferior to the original soundtrack, which was conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski. Disney decided to restore the original soundtrack for the DVD. In fact, the digital re-recordings have been out of print for some years and to my knowledge the only soundtrack CD available is now the original recordings conducted by Stokowski. Since you don't like the DVD music, I'm sorry, but it is what the original film had and what you liked was the re-recordings. I don't criticize you for a question of taste, but I want you to realize that the vast majority of fans of this film prefer the original recordings in all its faulty, mono sound. So you see, the VHS tape you saw is arugably the worst of both worlds - inferior video (even you admit this) and a re-recorded soundtrack in place of the original one.
I mean, there's plenty of jokes about Greedo and Han Solo but no-one has mentioned anything about starfields.
When the remastered Star Wars trilogy came out, I was appalled by the hatchet job they'd performed. In any of the outer space scenes, when the camera panned, the stars changed size. It convinced me that digital remastering was worthless.
However, a few years later I did a module on Computer Graphics at uni and I worked out that the problem was simply that they use point sampling. (I'd already had a vague notion of what must be happening, but couldn't put it into words.)
Throughout the computer world, we use anti-aliasing to try to avoid such size issues and to get rid of jaggy lines; chemical film anti-aliased itself due to its natural area-sampling behaviour; surely it's only natural that when these two worlds meet, we anti-alias our video?
Seemingly not. Even today, "Definition" and "Clarity" are the goals or the digital remasterer (remastermaster?) against all past experience. I recently bought an Italian film on DVD. It had such beautiful scenery -- the cliffs and rock-pools of the Sicilian coast, the clear blue skies and the bone-white stone walls of the houses and fields. The complex motion of the waves on the surface, the shape of the rocks on the bottom and the eratic patterns of light were translated into seemingly random noise if the camera panned slowly across them. Hit the pause button, though, and the picture leapt out from the screen.
I think that's the problem -- the people making decisions on the technology have probably been given stills to compare; so the commercial products would have been designed to produce stunning stills that can be used to sell their products to the production companies, and video would have become a secondary consideration to the developers.
>sigh< ... market forces, eh?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
When I was in college, the local cable company's public access station stayed on the air every weekend by running, in a continuous loop, 6-hour tapes of "Cartoon Control Room with Sloucho Barx," basically an unmoving camera shot of a guy in an ill-fitting Groucho mask sitting at the switcher and cueing up tape after tape from his extensive cartoon collection.
One week, Sloucho ran an entire show with the theme of censored, racist, or otherwise inappropriate cartoons. There were some doozies - all of it WB and MGM stuff - but in its defence everything he aired was first shown on the big screen during Saturday matinees in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Moreover, between every cartoon he offered disclaimers and deprecations, stating the show was meant to illustrate the mindset of the past, neither he nor the cable company supported these views, if you're letting your kids watch this you'd better be talking to them about what they're seeing, I can't believe what an awful joke that was, etc. etc.
Of course the complaints poured in anyway, and needless to say it was Sloucho's last show.
Back to the main topic... aside from Sloucho's fondness for the early-30s WB cartoon "Freddy the Freshman," which he played on every one of his shows, he also clued me in on another obscure one, Chuck Jones' 1940 "The Dover Boys." In it, Jones experimented with a sort of visual shorthand, with fast swooshing movements punctuated by stylised poses. The characters move across the screen as colourful blurs, saving the animators from having to draw a complete figure with every frame. Nowadays it's a common thing - such as the Road Runner's spinning legs - but this was the cartoon where it all began.
"The Dover Boys" is included on WB's Looney Tunes Vol. 2, and I fear what they might have done to action frames that could be construed as being nothing but noise.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
Too bad that the people doing the animated restorations aren't the same folks at WB that have done such a good job of restoring old films like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. The Onion AV Club has a very interesting interview with the senior VP in charge of their classic catalog.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
any chance of the actual fans doing a high quality restoration?
Take a look at any classic 1 reel film such as Three Stooges, Little Rascals, etc and see how bad and how poorly they were transferred to dvd.
...-1, Pedantic Asshole
Wow. Thanks for bringing that up, I never even knew about that. Has there been a lawsuit? (Disney should get sued up the wazoo)
I only need one brain cell to watch cartoons and it's obscured with a canabis haze or I'm half asleep on saturday am anyway....
Rick B.
The linked-to images are not before and after examples.
The Betty Boop images are. The guy even lists where he got them -- the untouched Betty Boop Collector's Edition Volumes 1&2 laser-disc, and the "restored" Betty Boop: The Definitive Edition DVD. The restoration process has clearly erased part of Betty's eyes, and removed the shading on her skin so she know appears bright white.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
This is just like when CDs first came out and people were transfering older recordings without compensating for the new medium. Once restoration techniques become more established they will be less invasive. I'd rather have the vibrance of color and clear sound than some sense of nostalgia. The Looney Tunes restorations have been pretty damn good sa far.
Disney's lawyers can beat up anyone else's lawyers.
You only get as many rights as you can pay for.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Ironically, it's been the efforts of disney to extend copyright law into perpetuity that has caused any and all legal uproar at all... kimba the white lion was old, the original right holder had lost rights to the show etc etal... in a sane copyright system kimba the white lion would have been Public domain, and disney could have openly made lion king as a film remake...
There are enough differences between the kimba TV series and the disney movie that lawyers can easily protect disney.. it's like when you have two giant metoer crashing into the earth movies... the plots seem strikingly simalar, the special effects may even look alike, but they're different enough for lawyers to defend against plagurism suits.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.
Agreed. I've enjoyed watching my copy of "Mickey Mouse in Color (Vol. 1)" from Disney's Treasures collection, which includes a number of what I shall charitably call pre-enlightenment cartoon shorts, which today would be considered quite racist toward blacks, Asians and Native Americans.
Each one of these shorts includes a video statement from the producer of the DVD explaining why this was done at the time, and why it would never be done today. Those statements get kind of annoying by the fourth or fifth time, but since the shorts could be watched out of order it's worth doing anyway. The shorts themselves are presented in their original format and audio, unedited. The DVDs are furthermore priced and packaged in such a way that it's clear they're being sold for collectors, not children.
On the other hand, Disney still refuses to re-release "Song of the South" on VHS, let alone DVD, because of its potentially racist characterizations. Nobody's perfect, especially corporations.
re Kimba/Lion King: I recently saw a DVD of "Kimba the White Lion" at a local Walgreens, sold in a cardboard sheath the same way Disney's animated DVDs are, with a new logo clearly derived from "The Lion King"'s marketing.
Turnabout is fair play, I suppose. (Although to be equally fair, I can't find the same package for sale online anywhere, so it may well be a pirate version.)
DNR has been around for years and it's important to understand that the process isn't at fault here. It's all just math -- like a filter on a dial. You want more sensitivity or less, just crank that sucker one way or the other. I read a piece a number of years ago which quoted some folks who ran a small restoration house. I forget what movie the were working on -- I want to say that it was a WWII picture -- but they had to go back and redo a good portion of their work since the computer took all of the tiny specks out of one particular sequence. Turns out that those specks were a receding view of a parachute drop, which they'd just conveniently erased. Oops! It's amazing how many people -- including supposed industry experts -- just shrug this stuff off. When they restored Casablanca, they cleaned it to the point where they took the grain out of the bleedin' film. It's so bad (i.e. slick and glossy) that if you look at the DVD, it looks like they shot the movie on tile. What did the guy who owns the company Warner contracted to do the work have to say? "We're always learning and improving our process." That merits nothing but the finger from me. If these people can't do the work properly, they don't belong in business. And the people paying them (i.e. the studios) have no business releasing a substandard product. Problem is, all those people are idiots commanded by marketing types. It's all just revenue, and they have no incentive to get it right.
I believe the parent poster's post is wandering into off-topic territory and, therefore, my response is probably OT, too. However, I feel I must reply, if for no other reason than to offer counterpoint to his ideas for those who might not know much about high-end audio (and pro audio, for that matter).
No, they can't. The human ear is can't hear past 20 KHz and most people are lucky to get past 16.
You are correct in pointing out that human hearing, in general, is limited and these limits increase with age and other factors, such as exposure to certain environments, etc. However, audiophile dissatisfaction with CD audio is not all about frequency response, as you suggest in your next comment....
What these audiophiles are hearing are alias frequencies above 22.05 KHz that occasionally come out in the recorded sound as harmonic distortions. For example, a 24 KHz sound would likely come in as an occasional, faint boost at around 2 KHz.
This might be a problem, in some circumstances. I would point out that a 2 kHz distortion term will not be harmonic to the 24 kHz original (subharmonic, yes, but that's different); as a result, this form of distortion might be quite disharmonious.
This is all well and good until you consider in that any good A/D converter has a lowpass filter set to around 20 KHz so that all frequencies above 22.05 KHz are completely attenuated out of the sound before before it's converted to digital signal.
Anti-aliasing filters are difficult to design; there is a trade-off between cutoff rate, sonics, complexity, cost, etc. Brick-wall filters that cut off everything beyond the Nyquist frequency are quite difficult to produce; in fact, some undesired signal does get through. Hopefully, this is minimized in a good design (e.g., with Apogee A/Ds).
What does this mean? It means that "audiophiles" who say they can hear frequencies past 22 KHz on a professional recording are full of shit.
This is really the sentence that tripped me off. I won't argue that claims of ultra-high frequency sensitivity are suspect, but your apparent dismissal of audiophile criticisms of digital sound w.r.t. analog sound, in general, are typical of less-experienced (at listening, anyway) folks. I am not trying to insult you; rather, I'd like you to more fully consider your assumptions.
I will be the first to say that much audiophile literature needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, many audio pros have come to understand what many audiophiles have been saying for years: Red Book CD audio is not a particularly good format for satisfying audio listening. Yes, it is convenient; that is it's #1 advantage over LPs. Yes, digital workflows in the recording/post setting have many advantages. However, any pro worth his salt today will tell you that 96 kHz, 24-bit recordings sound significantly better. Analog tape sounds better still.
Why? Because audio quality is not just about a medium's dynamic range or supposed frequency response, as CD-advocates typically think. On the frequency front, higher sample rate formats allow more gradual anti-aliasing filters, which do less harm to the signal. Less ringing, fewer phase anomalies... whatever it is, they work better. More bit depth reduces quantization noise, which, in turn, allows superior playback of low-level information that is critical to ambience (read soundstage depth, width, focus, etc.). Of course, analog does all of these things even better than the best digital.
In case people don't know it, there is a renaissance going on today with regard to LP playback. Many people, even those who wouldn't regard themselves as "audiophiles", frustrated with many of the inadequacies of CD music quality, are rediscovering analog playback. Yes, much high-end audio equipment is extraordinarily expensive, but many bargains can be found, as well. For those willing to take time out to listen to a record or two in one sitting, on decent equipment, without being distracted by all the things that conspire to distract us day in and day out, magical moments can be had.
Please... open your mind.
Even the Disney cartoons are digitally manipulated. Compare the first laserdisc of Pinocchio or Bambi to the restored ones. There is less dirt, but the colors are ENTIRELY different and the smooth lines have become oversharpened and crunchy. The people restoring these films think "sharper is better" and "brighter colors are more appealing". Frank Thomas, who animated on Snow White was asked what he thought of the colors on the restored version of Snow White. He replied, "They're nice colors... not the same ones we used back in 1937, but they're nice." Others of the Disney old timers weren't so polite. See ya Steve
Instead of averaging across frames, why not do median filtering or some such on each individual frame? That would eliminate the problem of losing lines due to fast motion, probably at the expense of a little more noise.
I'm sure these guys are keeping the originals (what kind of idiot wouldn't?), and since they're making tons of cash on this. Especially considering they can release this same content again in the future when substantially better technology is available, why shouldn't they release a DVD version now? They'll market the next release as AI-constructed HDTV compatible formats.
Those are both "after" images.
-- Boycott Shell
Seriously, the first season was almost as funny as The Simpsons. Later seasons would introduce a new theme song and new characters like Pebbles, Bam-Bam, and the Great Gazoo.
-- Boycott Shell
Changing from 24 fps of film to 30 fps of video, every 5th frame is doubled. Looks like they combined frames to help smooth the already jerky animated look. As noted this is less of a problem with films of real moving objects. Now we know why?
-- Boycott Shell
And your proof of that is ...? 'Cause the accompanying article says otherwise.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I am in the business of converting film to video and feel it should be noted this is quite an expensive undertaking. In addition to cartoons and classics, there are millions of film reels in archives in places such as the Smithsonian, The Library of Congress, your local university and historical societies. I attended the 2004 Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference and found most curators are focusing on preservation of originals, which is a good thing. However, I would love to gain access (video, maybe streaming) to the millions of other movies that will likely never make it out of the vaults due to cost and available funding. Frame by frame restoration may have its place, but I would prefer a scratched up copy (on video). Automated filters could help, here are some freebies (which I do not use) that you could try for yourself with avisynth and virtualdub (all open source projects). http://bag.hotmail.ru/ http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/ http://virtualdub.org/
Animation consists of still drawings that move. Each and every drawing is important to creating what some call "the illusion of life". Certain animators of the past were able to create incredibly lifelike animation where every frame was packed full of amazing personality and technical skill. I worked for the studio that produced Ren & Stimpy. We would have regular "theory nights" where we would gather together and analyze and study classic cartoons. We would still frame through great scenes and figure out what each pose was contributing to the action. One of the scenes we studied, and one of the greatest scenes ever animated, was Rod Scribner's animation of Daffy Duck doing a Danny Kaye scat in Book Revue. If you still frame through that scene, just about every drawing is funny on its own. At Spumco, we spent hours going over scenes like this. However, if you try to still frame through that scene on the most recent Warner Bros DVD, you'll find lines disappearing all over the place, and frames combining into a mush. The artifacting is clearly visible on the majority of the frames in the scene. One of the greatest bits of animation of all time is now completely messed up. There's no excuse for mangling a film as important as this. That executive at Warner Bros should be ashamed of that sorry excuse he gave for the lousy video transfer of this film. I don't care who the audience is for this DVD. Even kids deserve better than that. And I have news for the fella who produced the Rocky & Bullwinkle DVD... your transfer REALLY sucks. The digital restoration of Rocky & Bullwinkle is some of the most intrusive and ham handed work I've ever seen. If you haven't heard any complaints about it, you just plain haven't been listening. I produce animation for television. Every time I supervise a video edit session, the first thing I tell the engineer is to turn off all DVNR. They always say the same thing... "It's just a tool. I'm better than all of the other engineers. I know how to use it without any artifacting." That just isn't true. The engineers don't know what they're looking at. They proudly show me examples of their work, and I can clearly see artifacting even without touching the still frame. The studios depend on these guys to restore the films for them. The engineers set up filters that chew through the images, they master the DVDs and the studios send them off to be pressed by the millions WITHOUT EVEN LOOKING AT THEM. You and I get to do their quality control when we buy their shoddy goods and spot the obvious problems that flew right by the engineers and studio execs whose job it is to "restore" the films. The home video companies are asleep at the wheel. Write them and demand quality. That's the only way they are going to fix the problem. The fact that they refuse to comment when the Wall Street Journal calls them up shows that they just don't see it as a problem. Unless their customers raise a stink, it will only get worse. See ya Steve
FWIW, I wasn't talking about America.
Cretin.
You've missed the point. The point is that the process is being used when it's not needed and the results are poor.
Osamu Tezuka, who did Kimba, was a fan of Disney movies and had borrowed a thing or two from them to his own style, so he wasn't very keen on complaining about the whole deal. He didn't sue.
Lots of fans of Kimba are more than a bit peeved though, and I say for a good reason...