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My favourite memory of Cinepaint was being at a SIGGRAPH exhibition booth (Silicon Grail's I presume) and seeing how they were using GIMP/Cinepaint for wire rem

My favourite memory of Cinepaint was being at a SIGGRAPH exhibition booth (Silicon Grail's I presume) and seeing how they were using GIMP/Cinepaint for wire removal in the X-Files movie. I asked Yosh how the layers dialog looked and he popped it up. It started loading all of the full-def movie frames to make thumbnails, then the machine ran out of memory and IRIX crashed!

chrisseaton 5y ago
What was considered full definition for digital work on a film in 1998? Toy Story was less than modern HD, yet you can pay extra to stream it in 4K from Apple! Not sure how that works!
- ollifi 5y ago
  Cineon 2K was 2048x1556
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  ISTR that the early Pixar movie were simply rerendered at higher resolution from the original assets?
  - e1ghtSpace 5y ago
    Correct
  - Maxious 5y ago
    > In 15 years, we'd get 10 doublings, which would make modern computers 1000x faster. Our original Toy Story frames were averaging four hours, which is 240 minutes, so we might naively expect that we could render frames in just 15 seconds. We didn't really achieve that: our average render times were probably on the order of 2-4 minutes per frame (the original productions weren't instrumented to keep accurate statistics on rendertime, and we never bothered to really reinstrument them to do so.) The renders were fast enough that most of Toy Story was rerendered in "render farm white space", we never had any sizeable backlog of work queued on the farm. https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-Toy-Story-in-2011-compared-to-how-long-it-took-in-1995?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  What's confusing? They can re-render the scenes from the original source. At some point in the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray, they may have even done a "remastered" re-release (hiring staff to touch up textures and so on), and if so, they could make use of that work, too.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > they may have even done a "remastered" re-release Are you just guessing?
    - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
      Not guessing anything, because I didn't say it even happened. Whether it happened or not doesn't change that even if the original theatrical version was 1536×922, re-rendering for higher resolutions is trivial.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        Rerendeirng old cinema cg is anything but trivial. Production pipelines are incredibly complex and are a fast moving target. Getting something going again is a very complex and tedious task of software archeology against projects that often only had a single company using them. Many dependencies will be unavailable or incompatible with current systems. When old content that doesn't have a high resolution film or digital master copy is remastered to HD, it's done using super resolution tools that do their best to infer extra detail based on the existing data.
        Sesse__ 5y ago
        Also, often special effects are done as manual one-offs on top of what comes out of the renderer (with whatever software package and techniques that happened to fit the bill for that particular effect); it's not like you can just type “make” and out comes the movie. It's certainly _easier_ to do a higher-res version of an animated movie than a live-action one, but it's still a lot of work.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- Razengan 5y ago
  Didn’t Apple upgrade all existing purchases to 4K for free?
- amyjess 5y ago
  Upscaling is a thing. Technically you upscale whenever you full-screen the video player on your computer (unless the video is already at your monitor's native resolution), but upscaling algorithms that don't have to be fast enough to run in real time can do very impressive things to the video if the encoder knows what they're doing (and it can do really bad things if they don't). Also, "4K" is generally a shorthand for the UHD format, which also brings in HDR. Lots of movies that weren't shot in 4K or were shot on a film stock that you just can't extract 4K worth of information out of can still massively benefit from the wide gamut offered by HDR. 24-bit color isn't enough to accurately represent a lot of content. Of course this means you have to have a monitor that can do HDR, and not just that, do it properly. A lot of cheaper 4K monitors claim to support HDR, but the display can only output SDR: in this case "supporting" HDR just means the firmware can understand HDR signals and tonemap HDR to SDR so you don't have to have your player software do the tonemapping.

chrisseaton 5y ago

What was considered full definition for digital work on a film in 1998? Toy Story was less than modern HD, yet you can pay extra to stream it in 4K from Apple! Not sure how that works!

ollifi 5y ago
Cineon 2K was 2048x1556
setpatchaddress 5y ago
ISTR that the early Pixar movie were simply rerendered at higher resolution from the original assets?
- e1ghtSpace 5y ago
  Correct
- Maxious 5y ago
  > In 15 years, we'd get 10 doublings, which would make modern computers 1000x faster. Our original Toy Story frames were averaging four hours, which is 240 minutes, so we might naively expect that we could render frames in just 15 seconds. We didn't really achieve that: our average render times were probably on the order of 2-4 minutes per frame (the original productions weren't instrumented to keep accurate statistics on rendertime, and we never bothered to really reinstrument them to do so.) The renders were fast enough that most of Toy Story was rerendered in "render farm white space", we never had any sizeable backlog of work queued on the farm. https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-Toy-Story-in-2011-compared-to-how-long-it-took-in-1995?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
What's confusing? They can re-render the scenes from the original source. At some point in the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray, they may have even done a "remastered" re-release (hiring staff to touch up textures and so on), and if so, they could make use of that work, too.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > they may have even done a "remastered" re-release Are you just guessing?
  - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
    Not guessing anything, because I didn't say it even happened. Whether it happened or not doesn't change that even if the original theatrical version was 1536×922, re-rendering for higher resolutions is trivial.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      Rerendeirng old cinema cg is anything but trivial. Production pipelines are incredibly complex and are a fast moving target. Getting something going again is a very complex and tedious task of software archeology against projects that often only had a single company using them. Many dependencies will be unavailable or incompatible with current systems. When old content that doesn't have a high resolution film or digital master copy is remastered to HD, it's done using super resolution tools that do their best to infer extra detail based on the existing data.
      - Sesse__ 5y ago
        Also, often special effects are done as manual one-offs on top of what comes out of the renderer (with whatever software package and techniques that happened to fit the bill for that particular effect); it's not like you can just type “make” and out comes the movie. It's certainly _easier_ to do a higher-res version of an animated movie than a live-action one, but it's still a lot of work.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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Razengan 5y ago
Didn’t Apple upgrade all existing purchases to 4K for free?
amyjess 5y ago
Upscaling is a thing. Technically you upscale whenever you full-screen the video player on your computer (unless the video is already at your monitor's native resolution), but upscaling algorithms that don't have to be fast enough to run in real time can do very impressive things to the video if the encoder knows what they're doing (and it can do really bad things if they don't). Also, "4K" is generally a shorthand for the UHD format, which also brings in HDR. Lots of movies that weren't shot in 4K or were shot on a film stock that you just can't extract 4K worth of information out of can still massively benefit from the wide gamut offered by HDR. 24-bit color isn't enough to accurately represent a lot of content. Of course this means you have to have a monitor that can do HDR, and not just that, do it properly. A lot of cheaper 4K monitors claim to support HDR, but the display can only output SDR: in this case "supporting" HDR just means the firmware can understand HDR signals and tonemap HDR to SDR so you don't have to have your player software do the tonemapping.