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chris-ronin t1_iuitzr3 wrote

most of it is simply the result of the analog production process, and the losses inherent to each step. so you basically overshoot with bold colors so that it still looks decent at the other end.

older cartoons were produced with cells and photographic film. in that process you are literally blocking or transmitting light through both the cells themselves and the film both at the time they’re photographed and reproduced and eventually transferred to whatever electronic signal, which back then was also analog and had its own transmission loss.

every part of that process will result in a loss of both detail and ‘dynamic range’ so to speak because trying to pass a light through something while also having it be opaque is a conflicting process.

add into it all the other hand production methods, cell paintings, the relative quality of transfer technologies at the time, and yes the fact that its end was to show up either on a low res tv screen or a movie screen, which although capable of high detail theoretically, between multiple showings, flicker, and reproduction also be degraded.

in addition each color beyond just a flat reference color requires more attention to detail to keep consistency between artists etc.

we really take for granted how much the digital process has opened up for art reproducibility in the last 30 years.

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FeliusSeptimus t1_iuj8bl1 wrote

> we really take for granted how much the digital process has opened up for art reproducibility in the last 30 years.

Yep. I worked on the digital team in a video production shop for a short time in mid-1990 and it was interesting watching the analog guys setting up to send video up to us for capture. They'd load up a tape and then fiddle around with half a dozen knobs while watching a little analog 'scope screen that plotted several indicator dots showing information about the image quality. The screen was marked with little boxes indicating the ideal value for each parameter, and each knob would affect some or all of the parameters. The guy running it would spend a minute or two going back and forth adjusting knobs to try to get as many of the indicator dots as close to the target boxes as he could. He said they could get it pretty close, but they'd never get them all into the boxes, and if you loaded up the same tape again next week to do it again the dots would be in different locations. He said that's why they called NTSC video 'Never Twice the Same Color'.

Today it would be interesting to take that old equipment and connect it to a machine learning system and see how well it could adjust the inputs to get it set up precisely.

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chris-ronin t1_iujbq3l wrote

honestly, it’s why i bristle at the nit picks of most modern tech reviews. the cheapest walmart android tablet has better color calibration and picture quality than the most expensive consumer sony crt of the 90s. across the board the quality and consistency of everything from the signal to the image is better than what i grew up watching and using.

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[deleted] t1_iujviji wrote

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chris-ronin t1_iujvzqv wrote

see my other comment. the point is more that you are accounting for the loss inherent in analog to analog transfer. cell to film. film to film. film to analog. analog to crt. even just correcting for exposure in the film process you’re playing chicken between contrast and detail. that’s why those settings on tvs exist. it was very messy.

have you ever had to juggle a v-hold dial?

that’s why i put ‘dynamic range’ in quotes because it’s really about corrections to your detail and contrast and what gets lost, rather than the absolute capability of the signal, but it was the broadest answer without talking about things like photoshop exposure levels.

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[deleted] t1_iuk5d3u wrote

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chris-ronin t1_iuk6d7c wrote

home viewers aren’t engineers. there will be a loss. at all steps. everywhere. expansion of the universe styles. even the top engineer within ranges will get maybe 90-99% and that’s at best case. now repeat that multiple times. it’s physics. when you re-record or retransmit something analog you lose. every time. in detail. in clarity, in absolute range. that’s a very long pipe from the cell to the analog tv set all steps included, and the art direction accounted for that.

and also, it’s way easier to instruct a girl in the paint department (how it was done then) to paint a solid color within the lines, from a specific color number, than to worry about how well they painted a subtle gradient. so yes, it was also partially so to the art production method as well.

so it’s an artistic decision driven by the technical limitations when even the BEST technician were working within an upper quality bound.

see the sister reply to yours in this thread. he was doing analog to digital with experts and they had to account for the fiddliness and that was a single step transfer.

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[deleted] t1_iuk6ud4 wrote

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lazydogjumper t1_iukagtd wrote

Its the contrast,and live action film requires a lot more color correction by using lighting and lenses. The reason it wasnt all shows is because not all shows COULD. It wasnt as easy as slapping a filter on it.

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