An early glimpse of 'Toy Story'...

Awesome!!!

Looks great, those shots also reveal that the first dvd looked pretty good and the 10th anny one looked very very good.

For the few holdouts who claim they see very little difference between BD and DVD (I am referencing some non-HTF friends I have) those screenshots should be evidence enough to the contrary. Those Toy Story DVDs were reference quality at the time and the improvement between them and the BD is night and day.

Those DVDs hold up really well, but the BDs are clearly better.

Looks so good you would never know the original movie was rendered at considerably less than 1080p.

Which brings up a question I have: were these rerendered straight to digital (during the process of getting everything modernized for the 3D changes), or are these an old print?

I hope the former, but don't want to assume it.

I could be wrong but I thought the 10th anniversary DVD came from the digital files.

**Gulp.**

Both of the films have been completely re-rendered since their original releases though, so I doubt that's accurate here.

I believe both films were re-rendered for their 3D theatrical re-release.

eventually all Pixar films will be re-released in 3-D. Up and the Toy Story trilogy will be the 1st 3-D titles cause they've already been released that way. but later on, i suspect all of it will be. i did watch TS1&2 in the cinema during the 3-D re-release and i'm excited to own it all on 3-D.

i think the prices for the BDs will be very low though... so i suppose this'll hold me over til then.

PLUS, even if you owned the BD3D discs... it's not like the 2-D movie just DISAPPEARED! you can still watch it in 2-D! =P

regarding "masters" there is no "film negative" for these things. everything is stored on the computer/server somewhere in Pixar-renderfarms. all they gotta do is encode them into DVDs or BDs straight from the computer =P.

That's all they have to do if they can still load the files. Getting fifteen-year-old files loaded into modern CGI software was probably not a trivial task. :)

Look at the scales on the Dinosaur and the texture on the dog's nose and the wood grain on the bed post. The Blu-ray is miles ahead of the DVD!

Either way, this looks like an exciting release. Seeing them in 3-D reminded me just why I love these films, and why I can't wait for Toy Story 3. The art, the story, the characters, the craftsmanship, the excitement. But for now I can live without the 3-D effect, it was just gravy (but a rich gravy nonetheless).

that's the great thing about CG movies. you can keep improving the polygon and texture and lighting, etc . over time if you really wanted.

That must be why George Lucas is so fixated on it.

I wouldn't want Pixar or anyone else to make any artistic changes to a movie, but I do appreciate that CGI allows the film to be re-rendered as necessary, for high-definition, 3D, etc.

Yeah it's a fine line. It could be argued that the special effects at the time, no matter how dated it may look now, represented the artistic capabilities of the people who worked on it. Especially if that film won awards for them, to re-render later could be argued that it overwrites the award-winning efforts of the time.

Luckily I'm not one of those people.

As long as there are no substantive story/character/dialogue changes (i.e. Greedo shooting first, Bring My Shuttle, etc.) then in general I'm fine with CGI correction/re-rendering. I see it more like removal of matte lines, etc. I would generally not want more special effects (i.e. how Lucas took the Mos Eisley scene and added a bajillion buildings and creatures to it), but if Pixar goes back and simply re-renders the scene to existing HD specs, adding textures, smoothing out polygons, etc. I'm okay with that. Now if they went in and added 50 new toys to the scene...

I think Pixar did fine with the 3D conversion of the two Toy Story films; they didn't add things being thrown in your face, but instead made it subtle and atmospheric. For me to see the extent of what, if anything, had been changed in re-rendering means I'd have to run an original 35mm print from 1995 side-by-side with the 1080p master.

I'm not against fixing special effects goofs like bad mattes, or re-combining things digitally to remove the generation loss from optical compositing (when possible). In fact, I welcome it as long as it recreates the original type of effects with today's better processing technology. It's the Lucas-type stuff that bothers me.

When Toy Story was first released on laserdisc, wasn't it famous for being the first animated film to be released to home video from digital files rather than from a film source? Seems like I remember that as part of the lure for techies: from digital to digital without that in-between step.

Maybe I'm thinking of another Pixar instead. But I could have sworn it was Toy Story on laser.

I could be wrong but I believe that honor went to the first DVD release of  "A Bug's Life".

I do not think anyone has mentioned this yet but aren't Toy Story 1 + 2 equally enjoyed by movie fans? In fact, I would go as far as to say the second installment is even more loved. So I'm curious as to why Disney isn't offering them in a Blu-Ray two pack. I suppose they could be waiting for Toy Story 3 to hit theaters and then, once the run is complete, they can make a NEW "Ultimate Toy Box". This will have the added benefit of allowing Disney to include the missing extras that the new separate Blu-Ray releases will not contain (per the Digital Bits).
Edited by Jeff Robertson - 3/12/10 at 7:27am

That scenario wouldn't surprise me, Jeff.  Disney's been known to milk the cow...

I think the box set in the fall will have these two releases and the Toy Story 3 release. The only difference will be is that there's a box that they all go in.

Couldn't have been the case - because the video on laserdisc was never digital, it was only analog.  Digital audio, sure, but never digital video on LD.  (And Toy Story would not have been the first film to have its theatrical DD and/or DTS tracks down-converted to home video bit rates.  That would have started with the first digital audio track on LD.)

Regards,

Joe

This will probably be the only time I don't sell my DVD copy whenI get the Blu-ray.  I've upgraded a few titles to BD, but I'm keeping my Ultimate Toy Box.