Can Modern VFX Artists Use a 30-YEAR-OLD MAC? Ft. LinusTechTips! 

This video is awesome and after having actually used the machine before sending it to you I'm extremely impressed by (some of) the results! Wow! - LS

"DOOM was obviously a revolutionary game when it came out" *Shows DukeNukem*

Here's the thing: it opens faster than the new Photoshop

When I started in advertising, I used Photoshop 1.0, and you'll never know the joy of that first update when they added layers. It's was one of the five greatest things that's ever happened in my life.

"Doom was obviously a revolutionary game when it came out" *plays duke nukem 3d footage*

Doom, shows Duke Nukem

Corridor: "OMG this computer is so old and mysterious!" Me, who works with aircraft electronics still running BASIC: "That's not old, it's got a mouse."

“He wants 80s style” Bro tell him you made it on a 90s computer

#1 advantage of old Photoshop vs new: you actually bought the software and weren’t just leasing a download.

Linus is Nick Fury and he's slowly uniting all the RU-vidrs for a massive crossover.

That "custom" filter is actually really powerful once you figure it out- it's essentially a really, really basic version of the code behind a ton of modern filters, and can do everything from smoothing to edge finding (but it only works at a really low resolution) Each box is a pixel around the "target" pixel, -1 means "increase contrast vs this one", 1 means "blend with this pixel", values between or outside that let you do more exotic weighted contrasts and blends.

"This is where you put the save button" Never change

This video makes me appreciate everything we have now so much

You aren't just paying $5 for crappy results, you're paying for an unforgettable experience.

8:00 this is a custom filter matrix that you can fill in, basically telling the computer how to calculate the new pixel (and it's neighbour) base on the matrix. I learnt about it in Computer Graphic class few years ago, never would imagine that it would become useful now that we have traveled back in time to use the original PTS.

So when I was only 8 years old my Mom was involved in a small business that digitally retouched photos back in the early 90s. This was the tech I remember them using. It seems really antique now, but I remember they could get amazing results back in the day

They really haven't changed that menu in 30+ years 🤣 its the same in Premiere Pro as well !

1:25 "There's like a rat hair in there" Really blew your chance at a mouse pun there...

The custom filter is for setting a custom kernel that can be used to perform convolution with the image. With this you can do edge detection, blurring, improve sharpness, etc! Pretty cool stuff!

I love how pissed Sam looks in the background during the call lmao

I'm disappointed we didn't get a reaction of the Middle Child Syndrome art because that one was actually pretty rad. Peter's the man.

Guys... your toy was my powerhouse back in the 90s. We used to think ‘how can it possibly get better than this?’. In fact there was a guy at an Adobe presentation who said ‘to an unborn generation, this will be as easy as using crayons’... you’ve proved that he wasn’t lying.

I'm not even in my 20s yet and knowing that 1990 was 30 years ago scares me.

Worth mentioning that the Mac featured in this video was basically the lowest-end Mac on the market and was generally consigned to the educational market. The high end of 1990 included a system, with 40Mhz 68040, that could accommodate six GPUs and [eventually] 128MB of RAM.

I was 100% convinced the misspelling of “Address” was on purpose... then Niko said he didn’t notice until Linus mentioned it. xD

Honestly that Lost Watch pic is so retro janky that it would work million times better than any of the generic synthwave album covers.

Sam: sees Marathon; "Okay guys, take a vacation; I'll be sitting here until you come back as my 8-year-old self"

Back in elementary school I would go through pixel by pixel editing pictures in MS Paint because we didn’t have photoshop on the school computers. Took so damn long and barely looked presentable but I was proud of it

* Niko chatting with Linus * Sam: ._.

The Custom filter actually allows you to write your own convolution matrix, that's pretty cool! So all those filters like Blur, Sharpen etc. were done with specific values in such a matrix, but nowadays you don't even need to know how they work internally.

When Sam mentioned Marathon I nearly jumped out of my seat. I love every Bungie game

Layers: *didn't exist in Ps 1.0 every VFX artist in existence: *CRINGE*

Really cool idea getting fans involved at the end there

The fact that they both made the save button joke is hilarious

@5:40. Talk about Doom while showing footage of Duke Nukem 3D and hope we don’t notice. Good try Corridor.

I worked on a LCII for years. You can run photohop 3.1 in there which introduced layers and is a much better tool than 1.0, but it's biggest tools were Freehand and Quark. You may think that stuff was slow, but you have to compare it to working using photocopies, which was the way we did that when I studied design.

I remember the first time I saw layers in Photoshop. They freaked me out to the point I was like "well, can't do digital art anymore I guess, this is way beyond me."

That maintancence issues cover looks like it would be the raddest album that only your weird friend knows about

I've worked in VFX for over a quarter-century, and this machine is very close to where I started (8-bit machines)

Props for the historical accuracy of including the inevitable Hair-Wound-Around-The-Mouse-Ball-Roller.

Former IT Administrator here just saying this video made my entire year. See you guys mess with this old piece made me super happy. Reminds me of the my old Pentium days with DOS. :)

Wow, I remember using Photoshop 1 back in the day. The airbrush is your friend. To do any sort of layered composite images, you had to line it up as best you could, get it where you want and deselect, then use the airbrush to tease one color towards another along the edges to soften that harsh unblended edge... like.. manually blending literally one pixel at a time by eyesight. This brings back so many memories, lol!

I like how the guy who requested the group picture edited was genuinely mad at them

"They haven't changed this menu 30 years!" Can't fix what's not broken.

"We've got... VGA to DVI!" Oh, you sweet summer child.

"doom was such a revolutionary thing when it came out" *shows Duke Nukem 3d*

I'd love to see you guys start with the earliest version of Photoshop, and progress through each version until you get to the earliest one that lets you do everything you can do today with a modern version.

This is taking me back to fifth grade in ‘95. The other kids and the teacher were amazed when I drew Spider-man and Venom by using a mouse.

This has to be the most unexpected collab to ever happen

Straight off the bat... should have sent them an Amiga with a Video Toaster installed!

8:01 - That's how an image filter looks like mathematically, it's a matrix used to calculate the value of a pixel (correspondent to the central element of the matrix, in this case 5) using the original pixel value and the values of the pixels around it. The matrix is scanned through the whole image (convolution). The known filter like Gaussian, Blur, etc all work like this, their result is determined by the values of the matrix elements. This window allows you to create your own filter, a super cool thing considering that today to do the same thing you have to manually open the file as a matrix and code your own filter and convolution, for example in Python or C++. It's hard to believe they don't know it because it's the most basic concept of digital image processing.

I love how they are just hanging out on the floor like a group of kids

Next collab: Linus judges you on your ability to make a real hacking scene that is both realistic and not completely boring. That's way harder than you'd guess.

This is hilarious. I would like to see you guys progressively move forward with different hardware and see what you can make as tech got better.

As an early 90's Photoshop user, I almost spit out my coffee when they realized there were no such thing as layers back then! Those were the days. REAL men still don't use layers.

"no pen tool" - yes, the pen aka Freehand Tool was invented by the competing software, Freehand, and was so superior to every other drawing tool that Adobe bought out the company so they could use it.

So, when I was in high school, l was extraordinarily privileged to have a Mac, very similar to that one, in the art department (key word there is “a”) with Photoshop 2.0 on it (also pre-layers). The art department also had an actual digital camera then (a Polaroid something, VERY basic point and shoot). No one knew anything about it or touched it except me. I loved that Mac. I just want to say Thank You and everyone over at LTT for giving me a huge trip of nostalgia. And a shout out to Mrs. H my old Photography teacher!

0:13 wren almost hitting the ceiling fan confirms he is accident prone lol

The Collab we didn't know we wanted but we deserved. 💥💥💥

OH MAN THIS MAKES YOU APPRECIATE ALL THE OLD SCHOOL FILMAKERS WHO WENT ABOVE AND BEYOND WITH SO LITTLE TECH ADVANCES IN THIS FIELD

*Video idea:* Can a modern videographer use a 30 year old camera to recreate a modern action scene?

I love how relaxed you guys are just chilling on the floor enjoying this computer!!

I was working on this LC as well as on diverse Quadras, the iifx (which I bought in a monster configuration with a 21" 24Bit Color Screen those days for more than $25,000), as well as on the Mac SE. On the tiny Mac SE - with a larger BW screen connected - I was typesetting books for a German music editor in Aldus Pagemaker. And yes Photoshop was so slow, that my coffee consumption during rendering gaussian blurs went through the ceiling... I am still amazed by the development of machines in the past 30 years. On my MacBook Pro M1 Max I can work in real time on 64GB .psb Photoshop files, render 4K in FCP, and work fluent in C4D. And knowing where I am coming from, it shocks me every time I am in layer 127 in psd adjusting some filter and see the result in real time on the screen.

7:55 The custom effect seems to be showing a convolution matrix editor, where you could create your own blur or sharpening effects, by specifying how much each pixel bleeds into it's neighbours.

Here’s a fixed version of the saying: “It doesn’t matter what tools you use, it’s the artist that matters... to an extent”

Amazing how great we all thought that was back in the 90s, awesome work! Started animating vfx when I was 16 on my 486 DX4 100 for my A-Level Art coursework. Had a video camera and digitizer but couldn't digitize movement, only capture stills, so i moved very slowly to act out the action, replayed the video, captured a frame sequence. Used Aldus Photostyler to create file sequences for each layer. Manually copied the layers into a final composite file sequence (later used a macro recorder/programmer to automate this). Converted each final comp sequence into a GIF. Used a GIF sequencer/loader as an editor to play the shots in the correct order. Timed out the action with a stop watch, then built up a sound track using i think just 'paste mix' in windows sound player with a beep at the start to help synchronize. Recorded this to audio cassette. Hooked up my PC to the video in on my VHS recorder and the audio cassette to the audio in. Hit record on VHS, hit play on the audio cassette, waited for the beep then hit play on the GIF sequencer. Hey presto, I had an export with no encoding errors 😂 can't say i'd like to go back, but it taught me a lot! 😂

I started on ps 1 and it blew my mind, coming from a traditional print background it changed my life. I remember doing a montage and having to use the clone stamp to paint an original background from a saved version to combine images, layers were the best feature by far. Glad those days are gone. I still have a Mac clone, when other venders were allowed to build Mac knockoffs, haha. Great vid!

This is several models more advanced than the Macs I learned on. (breaks hip, leaves chat)

So, this is what happens when two dream companies come together to make a video!

You really nailed it at the end - layers seriously makes it so SO much easier to do digital art. You can suffer without even having undo as long as you use layers properly. More advanced layering systems with blending control, masks, etc. make that even better. On a related note, I remember trying a hacky way to add layers to the old MS Paint by combining multiple Paint windows and an Autohotkey script to make the background transparent (I used the classic magenta for subsequent layers). It was a monumental pain working across multiple Paint windows, but it worked. After incredible trial and error that is... good god.

Wild how far it has come. This colab was amazing.

For anyone wondering what custom does at 7:56, my guess is that it is a custom convolution matrix. An image is basically a 2D matrix and we basically have standard convolution matrices which we convolve with the image for different effects like Gaussian blur. By setting a custom convolution matrix, you can convolve basically anything. Yep, there's lots and lots of math behind these apps.

17:21 Niko rapping 🔥

Nothing humbles you like learning during the conference with the client that you spelled one the two words in their logo wrong. Scared my cat laughing. I love this channel

Two of my favs! Great crossover

I love the costume filter at 8:04 It is a matrix that is moved over the image pixel by pixel and calculates the new pixel value as a weighted sum of its neighbors with the weights that you defined in the pop up window (the mathematic procedure is called a convolution)

“They haven’t changed this freakin menu in like 30 years” 🤣🤣🤣

I love both channels, watched Linus for years and the past year watched corridor

Started out in 3d using 3d studio, before Max came out. All in dos with only wire mode, no shaded mode at all. Would love to see you have a go with that and react 😀

That moment when you realize you might actually be older than everyone working at corridor....

okay but “what the clouds can see” looks so cool, it would totally fit with like a Bill Wurtz song

Great to watch. My aunt started a little design firm right around 1984 and so was a super-early adopter of Macs, back when design on the machine wasn't in Photoshop and Illustrator, it was in Mac Paint and Mac Draw. Her first machines got passed down to my grandparents, who had an original 128k machine (upgraded to 512k) and a Mac Plus for years, and I spent hours on them while visiting for the holidays, machines a decade older than the one you're working with here. Wow. (Man, I'm old. I get to tell people that while my junior high had a fancy new lab of Macs, they still had us take a typing class on the adjacent lab of IBM Selectric typewriters.)

The custom filter in PS1 looks cool. Its a kernel matrix where you can write your own filter, like sharpening or blurr.

Niko: What’s the oldest version of Photoshop you’ve used Griffin: I think the oldest I’ve used is CS2 or CS3 Me: (Dusts off disc with Photoshop 5 on it) Hello, old friend!

It's so great of Niko to still give his time to Corridor even while his rap career as Young Gravy continues to blow up.

07:35 *"Custom" is for manually defining a matrix (aka "kernel" or "mask") for 2D convolution.* It's a very basic but extremely powerful algorithm. Most of the factory filters (blur, sharpen, find edges, ...) are most likely using the same algorithm behind the scenes, just by plugging different values into that matrix. It works like this: Each pixel in the image is "convolved" separately with the kernel. You take the neighborhood around it, as big as the kernel (here: 5×5 pixels). Then, you multiply the brightness value of each pixel in that area by the corresponding value in the kernel, and finally all those get added together to get the new value for one pixel in the resulting image. Then, the kernel "slides" to the next pixel, and the procedure is repeated. (Usually the resulting value has to be "normalized" by dividing it by the sum of values in the kernel, to keep the overall brightness the same and fit into the 0.0-1.0 (or 0-255) value range again.) *Examples:* 1 in the center surrounded by 0s does not change the image. All 0s except a 1 just above the center shifts the image up by 1 pixel. All 1s gives you a box blur. If you decrease the values around the center with a roughly circular falloff it looks nicer, e.g. for Gaussian blur (3×3): 1 2 1 2 4 2 1 2 1 The "Sharpen" kernel uses negative values and looks like this: 0 -1 0 -1 5 -1 0 -1 0 And a simple vertical edge detector (the "Prewitt operator") that lights up when brightness changes from left to right: 1 0 -1 1 0 -1 1 0 -1 The blog Programathically has a good explanation with images, which makes the idea probably much easier to understand.

Corridor and LTT collaborations are always goated

Remember that scene from Apollo 13 when they have to quickly double check some calculations and everyone whips out their SLIDE RULES?

Two RU-vid channels with the most ridiculously awesome sponsor segments/segways collaborating together. It's beautiful.

this is my favourite vid you guys have done yet

So crazy! I feel old! first Photoshop I used was Photoshop 5 back in the 90s

7:18 I love how everyone's in awe of a bunch of squiggles

"They have a bounding box, It's just like the real thing." It's Photoshop 1.0 IT IS THE REAL THING...

Two of my favorite RU-vidrs collabed and I never knew about it, oh man this video is a treat for me!! 💯

Great video!... I learned to use Macs in a Mac Classic, when Photoshop and Freehand don't exist or was too expensive. LC3 was in the mayor league. It's amazing to view in retrospective how we was worked in this (now) precarious machines.

I was wondering why Linus' new channel had Adress the whole time until they asked Niko why it was spelled wrong 😂😂

7:54 In that "Custom filter" you specify the convolution kernel (that matrix of numbers you see in the dialog box) and the software uses convolution to apply the filter on the image. Convolution is really cool, you can do average blur, gaussian blur, low pass, high pass, etc... all depending on what numbers you enter in the kernel. It's also used in audio and in engineering fields. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(image_processing)#Details

That thing got Lode Runner tho?

I had NO idea that quack sound at 5:20 came from a Mac

Would be interested in seeing Jim Blinn's voyager probe animations recreated on a modern setup. That was my astronomy/CGI crossover back in 1977 and I still think they look impressive today