I've heard the Laserdisc transfer of Toy Story is the only one that was taken from 35mm sources. The DVD and BD were from digital files.

To those who have seen Toy Story on LD and on either of DVD or Blu-Ray, with the LD being from an actual film print does it make the transfer more film-like? Obviously the DVD and BD have a lot more detail, colour and pop, but does the LD look more filmic?

In my opinion, LD newer looks film like due to lack of resolution in both luma and especially in chroma. Its also telecined to be 60 fields which takes further away from the fluidity of film. As for the analog vs digital debate, most LD masters in 90s are from digital masters and as one of processing steps, the LD player digitizes the ntsc stream.

I don't get it. This is a computer generated movie. Shouldn't it be allowed to look that way?

99% of the time, in general, even a half decent BD will look a lot more like film than than the very best LD IMO, (and yes I'm aware a lot of Laserdiscs from the 90's were taken from digital masters, and the players themselves had a lot of digital processing chains going on as well), but I was just wondering in regards to Toy Story which was taken from an actual film print vs the DVD and BD which were from digital masters if this is a rare exception where the LD transfer has a certain theatrical quality to it that the DVD and BD lack?

Even without comparing, its fair to say the DVD and BD have more detail, colour and pop as they should due to the technical superiority of the DVD and BD formats over LD which is made even more obvious with a computer generated movie like you said. I'm still curious though that if the LD has a certain theatrical charm to it due to it being struck from a 35mm print compared to the DVD and BD releases.

Most of the "film look" I've noticed on LD comes from older discs where they used prints from wherever they could get them. When I see excessive jitter, scratches, real change marks, hairs, and water damage it really takes me back to the theater in my mind. However, long before Toy Story basically all new release LDs were recorded from new interpositives made just for that purpose and have literally zero flaws. This is why later LDs look like composite format DVDs.

The difference between composite NTSC and 35mm film is like the difference between chocolate and poop, and I don't only mean that qualitatively. NTSC is not only the more information poor of the two by orders of magnitude, but it's full of it's own specific biases and flaws. It has way less color information in relation to its luma, but it also short shafts particular ranges of color and has to be severely processed to remove moire effect junk. None of this is going to help make something look more like 35mm film which, with modern processes, is basically the best quality thing you'd really ever need.

So what I'm saying is that when I watch something "filmic" on LD, like 1970s unrestored power rangers shows shot on 16mm, I'm watching something transfered from such old banged up junk that I can't even see the composite video artifacting. By the time you get to, say, Ghostbusters, the look is maybe 50/50. On a movie like Toy Story their processes would probably have been so perfected that the "filmic" arrifacts would be completely overwhelmed by the composite video artifacts which, in 1995x would probably mainly be a lot of chroma noise in the reds.

So, in closing, two things:


1) you might get the softer look you want from the LD just because it's LD, even if the film aspect of the transfer isn't the reason. However, this will work better if you have a later player, virtually noiseless, CLD-97 or better.

2) this is a lot of talk for an LD I could just buy for $1 and watch instead of spending 20 minutes writing about.

I spin Toy Story (1995) last month and it does have a film like tone to it.

I won't be upgrading the film to DVD and certainly not bluray for near-field remixing. I'm happy and content with the THX laserdisc.








"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh THX Laserdisc"

thanks for the write-up, signofzeta, some really interesting stuff there. I wonder why the LD was struck from a film print in the first place for Toy Story (which is a computer generated film no less), when transferring films from digital masters was a long established thing for LD even for the time?

laserbite, what do you mean by near-field remixing? Sorry I'm not a audio buff.

I would imagine the reason they used a print is because back then that's how they made animation, even computer generated stuff. They did this because real-time rendering of a movie like toy story was waaaaaay beyond existing technology.

Once the film is perfectly "directed" and "animated" with minimal models and wire frames they "shoot" it by having the computer draw each frame with full detail and FX. For a single frame, 1/24 of a second, this may take minutes or hours even, I don't know, but as it renders each shot there is a reverse telecine sorta thing that captures each frame like any other animation. Now it's a film like any other and gets distributed to different formats the same way other movies did. They would have re-digitized it for D2 mastering and then converted it to analog once again, composite NTSC on the Laserdisc.

Basically it's like Jeff Beck's guitar pedal collection to achieve perfect sub-tonal fuzz.

To make an LD of a CG movie that never sees film you'd have to hook a VTR up to your SGI Onix (whatever made Toy Story) and record to video frame by frame, which probably doesn't work well, but I don't know. Either way, a "DDA" version of Toy Story on LD/VHS would need its own parallel rendering process. Either that or make your movie limited to real time running, which back then was sub PlayStation.


This is mostly conjecture over what I've seen as an animation fan boy for 40+ years. I've never watched a documentary on Pixar because their movies sorta bore me. I will say though that if you look at really early 3D computer animation that was made the same way, computer to film via a long rendering process, the "film look" goes a long way to making the stuff more timeless. Stuff like what you see in Beyond the Mind's Eye or whatever. It really helps that stuff so it probably helps Toy Story too.

It is also worth noting that the Toy Story Box set has the unaltered "Knick Knack" short.

With t***ies, baby please