David32441 wrote: Sun Nov 23, 2025 3:36 pm
On film resolution, I do recall seeing that Star Wars Episode II was recorded by Lucas on digital cameras that could only do 1440x1080 (in fact he filmed 1 or 2 scenes in episode 1 on the same cameras as a test) - knowing that they would eventually be scanned for film anyway. The special effects then were rendered at full 1080p. That means that even a bluray release is an upscale of what was captured - let alone newer 4k releases - not that Star Wars was great quality cinema
George Lucas made plenty of questionable decisions with his franchise - the last being turning it over to Disney, who have managed to ruin Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the Marvel properties.
It's strange that movies produced in the late 90's-early 2000's are available in lower resolution than movies filmed in the 1930's. Adoption of digital cameras for filmmaking too early didn't exactly pay off.
He's got $4bn from selling to Disney. But yeah agree that they've ruined franchises. Hollywood it seems has to always be releasing films at a rate of about 3 a month, 20-30 per studio per year, so it's got to be constantly extending / rebooting franchises as they're too scare of original content - occasionally some cool / weird stuff comes out (Mickey 17, Poor Things - being the weirdest) - but seems rarer. Toy Story - now going to be a 5th film when 3 was fine. Indiana Jones - 2 unnecessary films. New Batman / Superman films every 10 years.
But back to the theme - everything has gone digital. Cameron talking about the Avatar films where every scene has digital elements - 3500 digital fx shots per film vs T2 with 35. Same for all most of the recent Marvel films >3000 fx shots per film.
David32441 wrote: Sun Nov 23, 2025 8:40 pmAvatar films where every scene has digital elements - 3500 digital fx shots per film vs T2 with 35.
And everyone agrees with Cameron that the Avatar films are 100 times better than T2, right? Right?
In all seriousness I simply consider mostly-CGI films to be cartoons, and I readily admit to liking cartoons. If the cartoons are animated with computers instead of pens and pencils that just makes the work faster. So I really should not complain. When I want to watch an actual live-person modern day movie then I should probably go with a genre that is not fantasy or action. This is what I tell myself anyway.
David32441 wrote: Sun Nov 23, 2025 8:40 pmAvatar films where every scene has digital elements - 3500 digital fx shots per film vs T2 with 35.
And everyone agrees with Cameron that the Avatar films are 100 times better than T2, right? Right?
In all seriousness I simply consider mostly-CGI films to be cartoons, and I readily admit to liking cartoons. If the cartoons are animated with computers instead of pens and pencils that just makes the work faster. So I really should not complain. When I want to watch an actual live-person modern day movie then I should probably go with a genre that is not fantasy or action. This is what I tell myself anyway.
It's a bit of a shame that at 70 years old that Avatar will be the only films he's likely to ever make again - given there's 2 or 3 more of these and they come out every 3 or so years! Also that he's only made 12 films. He likes to disown Piranha 2 - but think he's still listed as director even though he had some battle with the studio - the effects were quite poor in that. Talk of throwing rubber fish at the camera.
David32441 wrote: Sun Nov 23, 2025 3:36 pm
Toy Story 1 at least was rendered at 1536 by 922 pixels (it just had dam good anti-aliasing so you didn't see jagged edges unless you were close to the cinema screen). I think a few years later they went back and re-rendered it at much higher resolution with 4k in mind. I think some other early CGI films (maybe Dreamworks?) they looked to do that but had lost many of the original elements!
Ok, this'll blow the mind of the person who made that youtube video - but A Bug's Life was rendered for home video differently to the 2.35:1 (very wide cinema version). They re-framed the camera and characters differently for the 1.85:1 (aprox) re-release, so I understand. Or was it for the 1.33:1 TVs as this was old enough before widescreen TVs were popular and most people had CRTs (cathode ray tubes).
