Whoa what’s with the totally confrontational argumentative stance?!?

Someone correcting you isn't victimizing you.

I’m very confused by your reply.

That's fine, I'll explain it again.

We did, however, multiple times, sit down to evaluate and compare various pixel filters built into the renderer,

Makes sense, this is initial set up.

because the resolution was low, less than 1k pixels vertically.

Resolution isn't referred to by the vertical resolution in shorthand. 2k usually means around 2,000 pixels or more horizontally. The vertical resolution is mostly dependent on what crop of the 35mm negative is being used which dictates aspect ratio. You said things like "low resolution, 1080p" which aside from mostly being used for HD video, is actually close to 2k resolution (1920x1080). The reason this is important is that when I said 1.5k is still sharper than film I'm talking about a 25% step down in resolution still needing to be softened to fit in with 35mm photography.

Here is the really relevant part - this is mostly about edge anti-aliasing and possibly motion blur.

and the director and supes could tell the difference in short animated clips scanned to film, which is why it was so impressive to me. If you don’t believe me, I can only say that reflects on your experience and assumptions and not mine.

If there are clips meant to compare filters and they are being told what they are looking at this makes sense. If you are saying that they would look at a clip on film and say what pixel filter was being used, it's just not true. It's gone through too many stages and it's not something anyone cares about once it's locked down. It's too soft and pixel filters are too similar to each other. It's like someone drinking a long island iced tea and saying they can taste where the water in the cola came from.

Both subtle high frequency sizzle as well as other symptoms of aliasing do occur when the pixel filter is slightly too sharp. I don’t know why you’re arguing that, but you seem to be making some bad assumptions.

I already said this up top, but I don't think you're understanding what I've been saying all along, which is that the sharpness from something other than gauss isn't worth the trouble and whatever super minor and subtle softness is there is irrelevant because it's overshadowed through the rest of the process.

What you're saying here doesn't seem like you are talking about pixel filtering. Aliasing on the edges is the easiest aliasing to deal with because it doesn't take many samples. Dealing with it with pixel filters is basically the same as blur, which isn't really a way to confront it at all.

Before you were talking about texture aliasing and now you're talking about "high frequency sizzle" and if this was anywhere except the edges of the CG, it wasn't people talking about pixel filters that are being discussed here, it was texture or shadow map filtering.

I'm sure you saw and learned a lot, but this is a very specific context and part of rendering which is arguably one of the easiest parts to set and move on. It's much more likely what you saw was people dealing with difficult aliasing problems through other means that wouldn't blur the entire image.

I'll say my overall point again though (which isn't exactly related to what you said) - CG goes through a lot of stages that affect the image much more than the pixel filter, so it is not wise to use something with negative lobes to get very slight sharpness at one stage when it is all downsides with no upsides when looking at the entire pipeline.