Comment by opello
3 months ago
> He [David DiFrancesco] broke ground in film printing — specifically, in putting digital images on analog film.
> Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie.
While I have no doubt that this hadn't been done at the scale and resolution, it struck me that I'd heard about this concept in a podcast episode [1] in which very early (1964) computer animation was discussed alongside the SC4020 microfilm printer that used a Charactron CRT which could display text for exposure to film or plot lines.
[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-88-beflix-early...
For Flight of the Navigator (1986) they sent renders of the ship directly to film because the system could only hold one frame at a time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8
That was excellent, thanks for sharing it! I enjoyed the appearance of the Cray X-MP.