Disney putting the screws to theaters (and Pixar) again with Turning Red

[Randy Stankey]

By the time your average digital photographer downloads his photos to the computer, catalogues them and begins to make adjustments, you can have two rolls of film developed and hanging up to dry. You should have your proof sheet and your first set of draft prints by the end of an evening.

If you can run a projection booth you should be able to develop film. It's not that hard!

The discipline you learn is how to visualize your photographs before you even press the shutter button. Developing your film and your draft prints should be, pretty much, academic. The hardest part is figuring out how to make those drafts look like the image you had in your head when you first took the picture.

It's the same skill you need when shooting digitally and it's also the same thing you need when making 3D imagery. If you don't have a good plan before you start, you won't have jack shit when you finish.

The hardest part for the computer to do when rendering complex scenes with lots of characters/objects is doing the pre-calculations. The computer has to calculate all your bound-volume hierarchies, map the materials, locate the lights and camera(s). If your scene is particle heavy or has a lot of nested BVHs, your calculation time grows exponentially. Half the work of rendering is just ray tracing what's already been calculated. The pixel dimensions of your image and your oversampling effect render times more than anything else by the time you get this far.

I have Adobe CS but I'm moving away from it. Gradually migrating all my work away from Adobe or, at least, into something I can import into other programs.
The cost of Adobe software is bad enough but the subscription pricing is what killed it for me. No effin' way will I ever give anybody that kind of control over my computer or my files! I'd rather cut off my own arm!

GIMP does virtually everything Adobe can do. You just have to learn how to use it. If you don't know the basics, it doesn't matter what you use.

I was attending a lecture at a local photography club where they invited this guy who was supposed to be some kind of famous photographer. I don't even remember his name, to be honest. He was going through this big speil about how he works up his photos in Adobe and I was just face palming the whole time.
He was going on about how he uses the Histogram/Levels dialogue then he adjusts the contrast with the contrast filter...on and on...

After the lecture, I asked him why he didn't use the Curves dialogue. He answered, "Oh, that's too complicated!" When I said that the Curves dialogue can do everything that the Levels dialogue AND the Contrast filters can do in one tenth the time, everybody else started saying, "But, you're the FILM guy! You don't know how to use Photoshop!" So I pulled out my laptop, loaded up a picture in Photoshop and proceeded to adjust a picture using Curves in all of thirty seconds.

I asked a cogent question but got a BS answer. I restated the question but got bullied in response. Finally, I demonstrated my point and, still, nobody understood but, instead, looked at me like I had three heads.

There was another lecture by a guy from Eastman Kodak where some guy stopped the lecture to ask what an F-stop was!

If you don't know your basics, it doesn't matter whether you use film or a computer. You'll be stuck no matter if you use GIMP or Photoshop.

Probably, the number one thing that anybody should do, whether they've been shooting pictures for decades or if they're just starting out is to buy a good book, pour a cup of coffee then sit down and read.

[Bobby Henderson]

I have Adobe CS but I'm moving away from it. Gradually migrating all my work away from Adobe or, at least, into something I can import into other programs. The cost of Adobe software is bad enough but the subscription pricing is what killed it for me. No effin' way will I ever give anybody that kind of control over my computer or my files! I'd rather cut off my own arm!

For the kinds of work that I do Adobe is only growing more and more dominant. We have to handle a lot of corporate branding assets. Those assets must be reproduced accurately. Nearly all those files are created using Adobe applications like Illustrator or InDesign. Some files can be exported accurately to other non-Adobe graphics applications. Plenty of others cannot due to certain Adobe-dependent features and effects being baked into the artwork. Even simple things like gradient fills can get thrown off when imported into rival applications. Currently I have four different vector drawing applications installed on my desktop and notebook PCs: Adobe Illustrator CC 2022, CorelDRAW 2021.5, Affinity Designer 1.10.4 and Inkscape 1.1.1 (I also have some Adobe and non-Adobe apps on my iPad). None of these applications have full feature overlap with each other which is why I have all four installed. It's easier to trouble-shoot customer provided files in their native environment. I'll often get CorelDRAW CDR files from other sign companies. It's rare for me to get any vector files created in Affinity Designer or Inkscape. Adobe Illustrator is the de facto choice for actual pros doing corporate branding work.

A couple weeks ago I did a sign project for an Aflac insurance office. The current Aflac logo is all vector-based, but the duck within the logo is literally made using a series of gradient meshes and vector blends in Adobe Illustrator. These effects reproduce just fine in Photoshop or InDesign. But the effects fall apart in rival vector applications. I'm not going to waste hours trying to re-build or re-create that logo in CorelDRAW only to end up with something that still isn't 100% accurate. It's just a lot easier, faster and better to get the work done using Illustrator.

On top of that, Onyx Thrive and RasterLink Pro, the two large format RIP applications we use with our two HP Latex printers and Mimaki flatbed printer, are very Adobe-centric. Their PDF engines are Adobe-certified and continually updated. So when a unique new Illustrator feature, like free-form gradients or gradients on line strokes is introduced the RIPs will be able to output the effects accurately.

Affinity Designer is gaining in popularity. I'll sometimes recommend it to people who want to be able to create vector graphics relatively easy in an application with a fairly polished user interface yet not have to spend hundreds of dollars on the software. Still there is a LOT missing from Affinity Designer. It still doesn't support Variable Fonts. Inkscape does, but the application is so damn clunky. Using it is like going back to the 1990's. I'll do a lot of technical drawing work in CorelDRAW; I've used that app for, God, over 30 years now. But Corel is struggling. They're not keeping pace with Adobe and can't even fix some bugs that have existed over multiple release cycles. If Corel's higher ups at KKR don't give Corel the manpower and resources it needs to keep CorelDRAW properly updated it will disappear.

After the lecture, I asked him why he didn't use the Curves dialogue. He answered, "Oh, that's too complicated!" When I said that the Curves dialogue can do everything that the Levels dialogue AND the Contrast filters can do in one tenth the time, everybody else started saying, "But, you're the FILM guy! You don't know how to use Photoshop!" So I pulled out my laptop, loaded up a picture in Photoshop and proceeded to adjust a picture using Curves in all of thirty seconds.

There are so many kinds of bad practices present across all fields of creative work it's very hard not to get really angry and disillusioned by it. Laziness is at the core of the problem. So many people are self-taught, with little if any formal training at all. They think they know everything; so they don't want to make the effort to learn the cerebral parts of the process. It's all just about knowing how to click around in an app. Then sometimes the problem is compounded because someone did take a class but the "instructor" fed the student a bunch of bullshit.

Lots of tasks within Photoshop can be completed using two or more different methods, such as using Levels, Curves or the Contrast filter to adjust contrast in an image. Too many people gravitate to what ever is more simple rather than an approach provides more control and delivers a better result. So they just pull up that Contrast filter and go. I could mention adjusting curves, maybe doing so in individual color channels, or maybe working in L*a*b color space and maybe bringing the image into Photoshop with 16-bits per channel as opposed to 8. Or what about working in Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom? "Um, no to all of that." They're just going to use that Photoshop Contrast filter on that RGB-8 image.

It's like the crap I see all the time with people creating their company "logo" in Photoshop (or a similar app) with the final product being a funky, medium to low resolution JPEG image they can stick on Facebook. There are people passing themselves off as "professional graphic designers," charging customers money and still doing this shit. I'll ask them why they aren't using a vector graphics application to do that work. Their answer is they're used to using Photoshop.

[Randy Stankey]

Probably the biggest secret about the way Photoshop works, under the hood, is that almost all of your "regular" filters like Levels and Gaussian blur all work via the Curves and the Convolution dialogues. If you use Levels, you ARE using Curves. The computer is just translating your inputs to the Curves panel while you're not looking. If you use blur, you ARE using Convolution. The computer is just inputting the convolution kernel for you. I use the Gaussian filter only because I can't remember all the numbers to put into the boxes but I virtually always use Curves instead of Levels/Contrast.

If you really want to break somebody's brain, show them how to import a JPEG through the Camera RAW dialogue, adjust it with the RAW controls then touch up the brightness, contrast and color balance using Curves. If you want to make smoke come out of their ears, show them how to do split contrast adjustments using a vector mask. (How to make the clouds in your sky look nice without messing up the contrast/brightness of your foreground.)

Right about this point is where I usually draw a simple drawing with Illustrator and blow it up to 1,000% and show people how smooth the lines are. Then I export that same image to Photoshop and show them how you can't blow it up more an 200% or 300% before it starts to look like it was made out of Lego bricks.

That's when you tell people that the program is called "Illustrator" because it's for making ILLUSTRATIONS! Photoshop is called "Photoshop" because it's for working on PHOTO-graphs!

The last time I had a discussion like this, they all started saying things like, "You only use FILM! How do you know how to do all this?"

My answer was, "While you were sitting in the back of the classroom, drawing dicks in your textbook, other people, like me paid attention!"

Seriously! Just pay attention! Read the manual. Get a book on the subject. Look it up on Wikipedia!

[Bobby Henderson]

At least once or more times a week at my workplace we have to explain vector-based graphics to a customer trying to email some kind of pixel-based file that isn't going to work for their project. Some get kind of pissed about it, as if we're being snobby and difficult for no good reason. "It's a computer file. You should be able to use it. Maybe if you guys really knew what you were doing you would be able to use the file I'm sending." Yeah, it goes something like that.

Many of these exchanges happen over the phone. Sometimes I get to show them the difference on a computer monitor. The zoom demonstration on pixel vs vector objects is one good example. Another is turning on wireframe/outline view and selecting some of the vector objects so they can see the anchor points and Bezier curve handles become visible. That's way different than pixels.

Any sign project where graphical elements have to be cut with a vinyl plotter blade or a computer routing table bit require vector-based shapes. Plotter blades and router bits do not "see" pixels at all. They only understand mathematically defined paths and shapes. Whether it's some white store hours lettering to stick on a glass door or some 3 foot tall LED-lighted channel letters installed on a building, both require vector graphics for production.

We do have to do a lot of work where raster/pixel-based elements or images and vector-based elements are combined together in the same design for large format print output. Vehicle wraps for businesses is one example. An element like a logo blown up great big still needs edges perfectly razor sharp. Raster-based images can be used in the background. You can even clip raster based textures and other effects into vector shapes.

With 3D work the marriage between pixels and vectors is taken to some different extremes.

In recent years some lines of separation between Illustrator and Photoshop have been getting further blurred. The latest release of Photoshop has new options for pasting vectors from Illustrator. Long ago I had to learn about using channels and paths in Photoshop out of necessity. Layers didn't get introduced until Photoshop 3. The masking and blending options between channels and/or layers can be powerful creative tools.

[Frank Cox]

Here's a silly question from a guy who knows nothing about graphics at all.

Since a jpg or png file looks "smooth" at smaller sizes, is there a program that will trace around it and create a vector-based file from it? Then once you have the tracing you're off to the races...

[Scott John]

I don't know .... there are very few "studio names" that will draw people into a movie. Disney is one; Pixar is another. Most of the "studio names" that will draw people in these days, are, (sadly), owned by Disney.

I mean, nobody ever says "It'll probably be good....it's a Paramount film!"

Yep... it is so tough. They have the money and marketing power.

We are a single screen (with a big chain multiplex in our zone). It is impossible for us to get most Disney movies as they won't even let us split them anyways and we would go broke just having a kids cartoon every screening for a couple weeks. It is a dumb rule they have for most of them, and if we could just play their bigger name matinees and play other movies in the evenings we could actually make a go of it.

I don't buy that they are doing it just to reduce churn on people cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions and that theatrical releases impact that side of things. There have always been good theatrical numbers and then added VOD, rentals, DVD, streaming numbers. My kids saw Frozen in the theatre, bought a digital copy on Itunes as well as a physical Blu ray... same with most Disney movies.

[Randy Stankey]

Adobe Illustrator does have a path tracing feature which can trace the edges of a raster image and give you vector shapes but it's far from automatic.

In this picture, from left to right, is the original image > vectorization in progress > final vectors.

Sully2.png
(Click to enlarge.)

You certainly could use this for some things but Bobby's vinyl cutting machine would blow a fuse!
You could spend all day optimizing your path tracing settings and options but, in the end, you'd probably be better off just redrawing by hand.

Path tracing usually works best if you are trying to grab the outline of some text or a simple logo.

There have been a lot of times when I just say, "Fuggeddaboudit!" and just redraw it, anyway.

[Bobby Henderson]

Yep... it is so tough. They have the money and marketing power.

The situation with Disney, as well as a couple other giant global media companies, borders on monopoly power. Our nation's anti-trust regulatory people have been snoozing in the guard tower for decades. It's either that or they've been willingly looking away. Wall Street likes monopolies. Stock traders don't care as much for real, free market, capitalist competition as much as they say in public.

Movie theaters get to be a casualty in this game. If the situation grows desperate enough companies like Disney will have the option to swoop in and buy theater chains for cheap as the chains are pushed to the brink of financial ruin. There is nothing legal to stop them from doing so anymore. I think the major studios are still waffling over the idea of just letting commercial theaters disappear. It's likely distributors like Disney know the ramifications of how a movie industry with no cinemas would look. But the bean counters just can't resist the lure of pushing content to home TV screens that much faster (where it can be forgotten that much faster). There's no telling what will happen. Nevertheless, cinemas are having a tough time with this crap.

20+ years ago Pixar commanded a lot of attention, not just because most of their movies were brand new stories that were great dramatically. People expected each new Pixar movie to create new innovations in CG animation. Today there aren't many "firsts" remaining for 3D animation to conquer other than over-coming the uncanny valley with simulations of human characters. That's not really Pixar's thing. De-aging techniques are a big deal, but again that's outside of Pixar's wheel-house. The SideFX application Houdini has become very popular in visual effects studios for its ability to simulate smoke, fire, water, reflections and all sorts of other stuff with much greater levels of realism. It is getting harder for Pixar to stand out since other kinds of progress in CGI is happening in other places.

Since a jpg or png file looks "smooth" at smaller sizes, is there a program that will trace around it and create a vector-based file from it?

Vector auto-tracing has been around in different ways for over 30 years. In the early days of Adobe Illustrator such functions were in stand-alone applications like Adobe Streamline that came bundled with Illustrator. Today every leading vector graphics application has at least some built-in ability to convert pixel-based images into vectors. In Illustrator the Live Trace and Live Paint functions do all of what Streamline did and more.

I've never been a big fan of those raster>vector conversion filters. None of them produce "clean" production-ready artwork. That is unless the user wants a deliberately dirty, "stressed" or weathered look baked into the artwork. Some tools can recognize certain shapes in dirty form and replace them with clean geometric polygons. Astute Graphics has one tool that can replace outlined text that are only vector shapes with editable text in that same typeface (if the typeface is installed on the computer). That's going a bit above and beyond standard OCR functions.

You certainly could use this for some things but Bobby's vinyl cutting machine would blow a fuse!

One of the biggest problems with the auto-tracing conversion filters is their tendency to create a lot of open paths. Any vector shapes sent to a vinyl cutter (or routing table) need to be closed loop shapes. Squares, circles, letters, etc are all closed loop shapes. An open line segment is not. Very often if I had to auto-trace something I would often use Photoshop for this. I would generate a selection from the pixel-based image and then convert that selection into a path that could be exported in Illustrator format. The resulting paths would at least be all closed loops, unlike the conversion results I would get in Illustrator.

The really bad thing with "dirty" artwork: if the auto-traced shapes are pretty messy and have many hundreds or thousands of anchor points the plotter blade may end up chewing the vinyl all to hell as the blade twists and turns all over itself.

So, yeah, all too often if someone wanted to generate clean vector artwork from a pixel based image they might have no other choice than locking down that image on one layer and manually building new vector shapes over the top of it on another layer.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have about as much faith and interest in Dizney as I do in checking for a methane leak with a match...Apparently Dizney CEO Bob Chapek is not very well liked these days days. A lot of Dizney Fans and many Dizney employees would like to see him gone. "Though a 28-year Dizney veteran who most recently had overseen the theme parks and resorts, Chapek was an outsider in Hollywood. Known for cutting costs and raising prices, he was regarded by many with distrust if not outright hostility. ... Sources who attended the meeting say Chapek did not make such a bald declaration."

You can read the article full of BS here... https://deadline.com/2022/01/bob-cha...es-1234907554/

[Randy Stankey]

The really bad thing with "dirty" artwork: if the auto-traced shapes are pretty messy and have many hundreds or thousands of anchor points the plotter blade may end up chewing the vinyl all to hell as the blade twists and turns all over itself.

Yeah, I kind of figured that if not in so many words. I had this picture in my mind where, even if the machine could cut all those shapes, it would be an absolute horror show to put all those puzzle pieces back in place after the machine is done! Even if the decal was on a peel-off backing layer, you'd still never get multiple layers to line up properly.

I don't know what the hell Disney's problem is. They are an institution. They have a built-in cash flow just because they exist. They have spent decades building that business and creating a name for themselves.

It is a business's job to make money. I get it. No begrudging them, there. But, if Disney is a business that can make money practically just by existing in the first place, why don't they understand that it's better to make "some" money today but make "more" money down the road?

Why do they have to try to grab every last penny, every second of the day?

They only hurt themselves in the long run.

[Bobby Henderson]

Why do they have to try to grab every last penny, every second of the day? They only hurt themselves in the long run.

It's that Wall Street mindset, always be pushing to get as much money as quickly as possible. Longer term concerns be damned. Those are the guys who are really controlling Hollywood now. Even when faced with some very obvious consequences from theaters being closed and content being pushed straight to video they don't seem to be learning a damned thing. So they continue to screw over commercial cinemas in what seems is an ever-worsening manner.

One of the big truths about movies: a 2 hour feature that doesn't play in commercial cinemas is a TV show. TV shows, even great ones, have only so much value.

I had this picture in my mind where, even if the machine could cut all those shapes, it would be an absolute horror show to put all those puzzle pieces back in place after the machine is done! Even if the decal was on a peel-off backing layer, you'd still never get multiple layers to line up properly.

When it comes to cut vinyl graphics there are two kinds of vector art: artwork that is vinyl cutter ready and vector art that isn't. The stuff that isn't vinyl cutter ready must be edited to make it so. Only one color of roll vinyl material can be loaded at a time into a plotter and cut. In a cut job you can't have any overlapping paths. The plotter blade will cut wherever a path is present. If there is a path running behind the middle of some letters the plotter blade will cut through the middle of the letters. Even with black and white artwork any intersecting paths must be welded or cut to get rid of the overlaps.

The same principal is true for routing table jobs. Additionally one must adjust the order of parts being routed, especially if anything has compound shapes. Cut the "hole" of a letter "A" first and then the perimeter of the letter. The sheet of aluminum, acrylic or whatever substrate is being cut might have to be taped down really good if there is a lot of small shapes, multiple compound paths, etc. It's not a good idea to leave a routing table unattended when cutting anything complicated. A small piece can kick up and jam in the router. Gotta be ready to hit the stop button.

There are practical size limits on how small one can go with detail being cut on a vinyl plotter or routing table. Tiny letters or really thin line detail on vinyl can get chewed up by the plotter blade. Plus the material must be manually "weeded" after the cut job is finished. The negative waste material has to be peeled off the carrier sheet away from the graphics you want to keep. Then it is covered with release tape to make ready for application to the final surface, such as window glass. Delicate detail work can get pulled up with the negative vinyl material. It's not fun having to do delicate vinyl surgery in the weeding process. In some cases I've applied un-weeded vinyl to the finished sign surface and then weeded away the negative material there. With routing jobs the diameter of the routing bit is a factor. A thinner bit can cut finer details, but a thinner bit is more prone to break. Spindle speed and how faster the router moves are two important factors. If a traditional routing job is too challenging then it may have to be cut using a water jet or laser-based system.

[Frank Cox]

Are all of the standard box signs with a light behind the plexiglass done with vinyl stick-on stuff, or is there another way? I'm pretty sure my sign is a vinyl stick-on for the part that says Pepsi but I'm not sure how they did the part that says Melville Theatre since the Pepsi part seems to be peeling a bit around the edges after all these years but the Melville Theatre letters don't seem to be peeling at all.

[Bobby Henderson]

Graphics on an acrylic or Lexan sign face in an interior lighted sign cabinet are often produced using computer cut translucent vinyl. A combination of computer cut stencil maskant and paint back-sprayed to the sign face can be used (this is common on formed and embossed Lexan faces). Some mass produced sign faces may have the graphics output via screen printing.

Large format digital printed graphics can be used on back-lit sign faces. But there are drawbacks with some approaches. Graphics output from standard thermal inkjet printers onto translucent vinyl are prone for colors to wash-out when back-lit. Print output from Latex printers is a good bit better for back-lighting purposes, but it's still not as good at the color depth seen in colors from roll translucent vinyl or back-sprayed paint.

Flatbed printers that output graphics direct to the sign face can produce much better results for back-lit sign faces, especially if the printer has the ability to print white ink. The printer can do multiple passes over the substrate, printing a color layer, then a layer of white followed by another layer of color and then maybe even a second layer of white. The principal is similar to that of movie poster one-sheets that are printed on both sides. The colors turn out deeper when back-lit.