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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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As with software development, some people have done this before and learned their lesson, others never do.

Once upon a time it was completely normal to have manual processes in your final build process. Something like a word processor in the 1990s would have one of the team sat at a machine building the "gold" binaries by hand, maybe following a checklist, likely hand written. OK, so we need to drag all the files except these two into this folder, then run this program...

Today, hopefully most of you today would see that's awful and you'd forbid it on a project you led and insist on CI instead.

Toy Story in particular had to be re-rendered to produce the 3D re-release over a decade later, and Pixar did that. They chose not to later re-render to 4K because in their opinion it isn't worth the effort compared to just upscaling it.

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.

Do you know that Toy Story was not re-rendered from the originals? Are you just guessing?

As another comment pointed out: Toy Story was re-rendered at great effort for 3D. That's the exception not the norm. They didn't feel it was worth it to do it yet again for the 4K version which is simply upscaled.

It is in no way a "download the archive and type make again" sort of situation. It's a huge effort.

Toy Story was not "re-rendered at great effort for 3D". It was converted to 3D. Obviously, this takes a lot of effort.

It's not obvious whether any of the comments here that "they didn't feel it was worth it" are actually informed, or that's synthesis (guessing).

Are your comments actually informed or are they just synthesis (guessing)?

> “We had to have some very, very smart people at Pixar go back in and write some software and figure out a way to make it so that those files would render on our current computers,” he said.

>It took four months to resurrect the old data and get it in working order. Then, adding 3-D to each of the films took six months per film.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/movies/04murp.html

Sounds like getting the render to work was about as much effort as converting to 3D.

It used to be said that python was the glue that made the whole workflow. I wonder how that looked like

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