6 ms·
This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master
by janeway 11mo ago
This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master because 35 mm film would darken and desaturate them. The aim was never neon greens on screen, it was colour calibration for a later step. Only later, when digital masters were reused without the film stage, did those compensating choices start to look like creative ones.
I run into this same failure mode often. We introduce purposeful scaffolding in the workflow that isn’t meant to stand alone, but exists solely to ensure the final output behaves as intended. Months later, someone is pitching how we should “lean into the bold saturated greens,” not realising the topic only exists because we specifically wanted neutral greens in the final output. The scaffold becomes the building.
In our work this kind of nuance isn’t optional, it is the project. If we lose track of which decisions are compensations and which are targets, outcomes drift badly and quietly, and everything built after is optimised for the wrong goal.
I’d genuinely value advice on preventing this. Is there a good name or framework for this pattern? Something concise that distinguishes a process artefact from product intent, and helps teams course-correct early without sounding like a semantics debate?
- _bent 11mo agoI know you're looking for something more universal, but in modern video workflows you'd apply a chain of color transformations on top the final composited image to compensate the display you're working with. So I guess try separating your compensations from the original work and create a workflow that automatically applies them
- RedNifre 11mo ago"Cargo cult"? As in, "Looks like the genius artists at Pixar made everything extra green, so let's continue doing this, since it's surely genius."
- pbronez 11mo agoThat’s a great observation. I’m hitting the same thing… yesterday’s hacks are today’s gospel. My solution is decision documents. I write down the business problem, background on how we got here, my recommended solution, alternative solutions with discussion about their relative strengths and weaknesses, and finally and executive summary that states the whole affirmative recommendation in half a page. Then I send that doc to the business owners to review and critique. I meet with them and chase down ground truth. Yes it works like this NOW but what SHOULD it be? We iterate until everyone is excited about the revision, then we implement.
- randallsquared 11mo agoThere are two observations I've seen in practice with decision documents: the first is that people want to consume the bare minimum before getting started, so such docs have to be very carefully written to surface the most important decision(s) early, or otherwise call them out for quick access. This often gets lost as word count grows and becomes a metric. The second is that excitement typically falls with each iteration, even while everyone agrees that each is better than the previous. Excitement follows more strongly from newness than rightness.
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoEventually you'll run into a decision that was made for one set of reasons but succeeded for completely different reasons. A decision document can't help there; it can only tell you why the decision was made. That is the nature of evolutionary processes and it's the reason people (and animals; you can find plenty of work on e.g. "superstition in chickens") are reluctant to change working systems.
- vodou 11mo agoDo you have some concrete or specific examples of intentional compensation or purposeful scaffolding in mind (outside the topic of the article)?
- quuxplusone 11mo agoNot scaffolding in the same way, but, two examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations" are - the fashion for unpainted marble statues and architecture - the aesthetic of running film slightly too fast in the projector (or slightly too slow in the camera) for an old-timey effect
- chrisweekly 11mo agoGreat examples. My mind jumps straight to audio: - the pops and hiss of analog vinyl records, deliberately added by digital hip-hop artists - electric guitar distortion pedals designed to mimic the sound of overheated tube amps or speaker cones torn from being blown out
- robotresearcher 11mo ago- Audio compression was/is necessary to get good SNR on mag tape.
- chrisweekly 11mo agotrue - but are you implying audio engineers are now leaning into heavy compression for artistic reasons?
- robotresearcher 11mo agoNot necessarily heavy (except sometimes as an effect), but some compression almost all the time for artistic reasons, yes. Most people would barely notice it as it's waaaay more subtle than your distorted guitar example. But it's there. Part of the likeable sound of albums made on tape is the particular combination of old-time compressors used to make sure enough level gets to the tape, plus the way tape compresses the signal again on recording by it's nature.
- Gravityloss 11mo agoTheory: Everything is built on barely functioning ruins with each successive generation or layer mostly unaware of the proper ways to use anything produced previously. Ten steps forward and nine steps back. All progress has always been like this.
- pbh101 11mo agoI’ve come to similar conclusions, and further realized that if you feel there’s a moment to catch your breath and finally have everything tidy and organized, possibly early sign of stagnation or decline in an area. Growth/progress is almost always urgent and overwhelming in the moment.
- snarfy 11mo agoIt seems pretty common in software - engineers not following the spec. Another thing that happens is the pivot. You realize the scaffolding is what everyone wants and sell that instead. The scaffold becomes the building and also product.
- davidalayachew 11mo agoIsn't the entire point of "reinventing the wheel" to address this exact problem? This is one of the tradeoffs of maintaining backwards compatibility and stewardship -- you are required to keep track of each "cause" of that backwards compatibility. And since the number of "causes" can quickly become enumerable, that's usually what prompts people to reinvent the wheel. And when I say reinvent the wheel, I am NOT describing what is effectively a software port. I am talking about going back to ground zero, and building the framework from the ground up, considering ONLY the needs of the task at hand. It's the most effective way to prune these needless requirements.
- chrisweekly 11mo agoenumerable -> innumerable (opposite meaning)
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> (opposite meaning) Funnily enough, e- means "out" (more fundamentally "from") and in- means "in(to)", so that's not an unexpected way to form opposite words. But in this case, innumerable begins with a different in- meaning "not". (Compare inhabit or immiserate, though.)
- chrisweekly 11mo agoYeah, English has so many quirks. As a software dev, the "enum" type cane to mind, making this one easier to spot. (shrug)
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> Yeah, English has so many quirks. Arguably true in general, but in this specific case everything I said was already true in Latin.
- chrisweekly 11mo ago
- layer8 11mo agoChesterton’s Fence is a related notion.
- ilamont 11mo agoThere’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components). Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places. But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's very weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.
- heeton 11mo agoThat's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.
- munificent 11mo agoHard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment. If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is. But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.
- gwbas1c 11mo ago(Cough) Abstraction and separation of concerns. In Toy Story's case, the digital master should have had "correct" colors, and the tweaking done in the transfer to film step. It's the responsibility of the transfer process to make sure that the colors are right. Now, counter arguments could be that the animators needed to work with awareness of how film changes things; or that animators (in the hand-painted era) always had to adjust colors slightly. --- I think the real issue is that Disney should know enough to tweak the colors of the digital releases to match what the artists intended.
- xnx 11mo ago> In Toy Story's case, the digital master should have had "correct" colors Could it be the case that generating each digital master required thousands of render hours?
- gowld 11mo agoBut the compensation for film should be a cheap 2-D color filter pass, not an expensive 3-D renering pass.
- gwbas1c 11mo agoThat's an invalid argument: Digitally tweaking color when printing film has nothing to do with how long it takes to render 3d. They had a custom built film printer and could make adjustments there.
- diskzero 11mo agoProduction methodolgies for animated films have progressed massively since 1995 and Pixar may have not found the ideal process for the color grading of the digital to film step. Heck, they may not have color graded at all! This has been suggested. I agree that someone should know better than to just take a render and push it out as a digital release without paying attention to the result.
- wpm 11mo agoI've always been a fan of repos that I come across with ARCHITECTURE.md files in them, but that's a pretty loose framework and some just describe the what and not the why. Otherwise, I wish I worked at a place like Oxide that does RFDs. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer Just a single place with artifacts of a formal process for writing shit down. In your example, writing down "The greens are oversaturated by X% because we will lose a lot of it in the transfer process to film" goes a long way in at least making people aware of the decision and why it was made, at least then the "hey actually the boosted greens look kinda nice" can prompt a "yeah but we only did that because of the medium we were shipping on, it's wrong"
- halapro 11mo agoYou're assuming people RTFM, which does not happen at all in my case. Documentation exists for you to link to when someone already lost days on something finally reaches out.
- dsr_ 11mo agoCulture changes under the impact of technology, but culture also changes when people deliberately teach practices.
- mwcz 11mo agoIn some projects I work on I've added a WHY.md at the root that explains what's scaffolding and what's load bearing, essentially. I can't say it's been effective at preventing the problem you outlined, but at least it's cathartic.
- diskzero 11mo agoI worked at DreamWorks Animation on the pipeline, lighting and animation tools for almost ten years. All of this information is captured in our pipeline process tools, although I am sure there are edits and modifications that are done that escape documentation. We were able to pull complete shows out of deep storage, render scenes using the toolchain the produced them and produce the same output. If the renders weren't reproducable, madness would ensue. Even with complete attention to detail, the final renders would be color graded using Flame, or Inferno, or some other tool and all of those edits would also be stored and reproducible in the pipeline. Pixar must have a very similar system and maybe a Pixar engineer can comment. My somewhat educated assumption is that these DVD releases were created outside of the Pixar toolchain by grabbing some version of a render that was never intended as a direct to digital release. This may have happened as a result of ignorance, indifference, a lack of a proper budget or some other extenuating circumstance. It isn't likely John Lasseter or some other Pixar creative really wanted the final output to look like this.
- janeway 11mo agoAmazing. Your final point seems to make most sense - not the original team itself having any problems.