3D's success, your current opinions please.

Konrad Haskins · September 8th, 2011, 12:21 PM

I prefer 2D to 3D in the theatre. I just dont see anything but a tiny niche market for indie 3D production. All these 3D Camcorder announcements. Who is buying them and what are they doing with them?

Seref Halulu · September 8th, 2011, 05:50 PM

Sorry but it looks like saying:
" whiy stereo instead of mono or why 5.1 instead of stereo or why HD instead of SD or why BR instead of VCD.... and bla bla..."

Seref Halulu · September 8th, 2011, 06:10 PM

Why 3D:

documentaries,
sport matches,
porn
horror and action movies
are perfect in 3D form when they are shot truly. (Imax Studios and Cameron : the masters of these stuff.)

Konrad Haskins · September 8th, 2011, 07:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seref Halulu

Sorry but it looks like saying:
" whiy stereo instead of mono or why 5.1 instead of stereo or why HD instead of SD or why BR instead of VCD.... and bla bla..."

There is no down side to those. Also there is seamless backward compatibility. Is there for seamless backward compatibility for 3D? Via what delivery mechanism?

There is a big downside to 3D. A significant percentage of people don't like it, don't want it or it for real gives them a headache.

Adam Stanislav · September 8th, 2011, 09:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Konrad Haskins

it for real gives them a headache.

How do they ever survive walking down the street then? Everything that surrounds us is in 3D. Everything! And we look at it the same way we do with 3D cinema: Using a left view and a right view, one for each eye.

Obviously then, it is not 3D that gives people a headache. It is improperly shot 3D. And 3D gimmicks, such as things coming out of the screen.

3D needs to be shot differently than 2D. Just because a studio decides to shoot in 3D, and assigns a director with no 3D experience to shoot it, does not mean that 3D gives people a headache. It only means wrong people are shooting it and for the wrong reasons. Worse yet, they often shoot in 2D and think they can convert that to 3D.

3D cinema is as different from 2D cinema as sculpture is from painting. You would not ask a painter to create a statue. Similarly, you would not paint a picture and think you can throw some software at it to convert it to a statue. They are two completely different things.

Yet, studios keep asking 2D cinematographers to shoot 3D movies. That and only that is what gives many people a headache.

Simon Wood · September 8th, 2011, 10:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Stanislav

How do they ever survive walking down the street then? Everything that surrounds us is in 3D. Everything! And we look at it the same way we do with 3D cinema: Using a left view and a right view, one for each eye.

Obviously then, it is not 3D that gives people a headache. It is improperly shot 3D. And 3D gimmicks, such as things coming out of the screen.

A good number of people got eye strain from watching Avatar; so clearly even 3D that has been properly delivered is less than perfect for a reasonably large percentage of the population.

Tony Asch · September 9th, 2011, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Stanislav

Yet, studios keep asking 2D cinematographers to shoot 3D movies. That and only that is what gives many people a headache.

I disagree! Another significant cause of headaches and eyestrain relates to WHERE you sit in the theater. For instance, if you sit in the front row, your eyes will be required to converge/diverge at physiologically impossible angles. 3D theaters are inconsistent. Some are short and wide; others are deep and narrow. Most theaters have plenty of seats where 3D viewing is quite uncomfortable.

Properly shot 3D anticipates the viewers' physical location with respect to the width of the screen. Once a 3D shot is mastered, the ratio of viewer distance to screen width determines the magnitude of eye convergence/divergence. If the 3D producer can not control that ratio (i.e. demand that viewers sit in a certain place in each theater), the front section of the audience may be prone to headaches, while the rear section perceives diminished 3D.

Adam Stanislav · September 9th, 2011, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tony Asch

Properly shot 3D anticipates the viewers' physical location with respect to the width of the screen.

Yes, it does.

I was actually meaning to give an example of that but was distracted before saying everything. Namely, recently I bought a 3D BD about ancient Egypt. It was shot for IMAX with its huge screen. As a result, on my 3D monitor it all looked like miniatures. Clearly they used a wider interocular distance for it to look great on a 20 foot tall screen. And that made it truly horrible on a small monitor.

That film should have never been released on Blu-ray and should have only been shown in IMAX theaters!

That is why I have been saying that 3D needs to be shot with three lenses, one on the left, one on the right, one a certain distance between them, about one third the distance from the left lens and 2/3 from the right lens, so you get three different possible outputs:

1. For a huge screen showing the left view shot by the left lens, the right view by the right lens;

2. For a medium screen showing the left view shot by the in-between lens, the right view from the right lens; and

3. For a small screen with the left view from the left lens and the right view from the in-between lens.

Carlton Bright · September 11th, 2011, 05:20 AM

Here is an interesting 3D article in the NYTimes this week:

Quote:

Directors Adapt to Shooting 3-D With Depth

By DAVE KEHR

EVEN as Hollywood prepares for an autumn onslaught of 3-D movies from big-name directors (including “Hugo” from Martin Scorsese and “The Adventures of Tintin” from Steven Spielberg), the future of the format remains uncertain. Resentful of premium ticket prices and burned by too many films hastily and unconvincingly converted from 2-D to 3-D, audiences aren’t flocking to stereoscopic films the way they did a year ago. The novelty is fading.
Digital 3-D may be facing its 1954 moment — that turning point when, during the initial postwar boom for 3-D movies, filmgoers suddenly decided they were fed up with flaming arrows and other unpleasant projectiles being hurled from the screen and turned in their polarized glasses en masse.

As fate would have it, this popular uprising arrived just as Hollywood was beginning to move beyond carnival-like attractions toward more respectable 3-D fare: musicals (“Kiss Me Kate” from MGM), dramas (“Miss Sadie Thompson” from Columbia) and big-star vehicles (the John Wayne film “Hondo”). Alfred Hitchcock made “Dial M for Murder” in 3-D, but by the time it opened at the Paramount Theater in Times Square on May 28, 1954, the film was presented in a standard version. “3-D was a nine-day wonder,” Hitchcock reportedly said. “I arrived on the ninth day.”

But this time the outcome could be different. Not only is the technology easier to handle at both the production and presentation stages, but more interests are also at stake. Chief among those are the investments made by electronics manufacturers, among them Samsung, Panasonic and Sony (the parent company of Columbia Pictures), in bringing 3-D into the home through a new generation of 3-D-capable HDTVs and Blu-ray players.

Although they have been on the market for a while, the new devices are just now beginning to achieve some degree of household penetration. (3-D capabilities come unbidden with many of this year’s high-end displays.) And as the recent theatrical 3-D releases gradually make their way to home video, there is finally enough 3-D product available to have something to talk about.

I’ve had 3-D capabilities in my home system for a couple of months now, which is just about long enough for the initial “Wow!” factor to wear off. No longer do I rush, hands trembling, to try out the latest 3-D screener to arrive in the mail. (Alas, “The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011 3-D Experience” no longer seems the essential viewing it might have a few weeks ago.) But a well-engineered 3-D Blu-ray still generates a particular kind of atavistic excitement, as if the View-Master slides I loved as a child had acquired a new depth, definition and ability to move.

In one important respect home 3-D is superior to the technology employed in most theaters. Rather than using polarized lenses to separate the left eye and right eye images, the new home system uses “active shutter” LCD glasses, which are synchronized with infrared signals from the television set to alternately block the left and right view, so that each eye sees only the image intended for it. Because less light is lost through the polarized filters, the result is a crisper and brighter image than the 3-D systems in most common use in American theaters.

The gold standard remains, not surprisingly, James Cameron’s “Avatar,” the film that set off the recent wave of live-action 3-D films and remains the format’s highest-grossing film. For the moment, however, “Avatar” is available in 3-D only as part of a Panasonic Blu-ray player promotion that runs through February. (Regular retail editions will presumably become available when Panasonic’s exclusivity runs out, though used copies are available on the Internet in the $100 to $150 range.)

Questions of scale aside, “Avatar” at home seems no less immersive than it did in the theater, thanks both to Mr. Cameron’s compositional eye and the flexibility of the Cameron-Pace Fusion 3-D camera, which eliminates the static proscenium effect produced by older, less maneuverable systems.

You’ll find a Cameron-Pace credit on most if not all of the live-action films that work best on Blu-ray 3-D: Joseph Konsinksi’s “Tron: Legacy” (Disney, $49.99, PG), Eric Brevig’s partly animated “Yogi Bear” (Warner Home Video, $44.98), and my personal favorite, Paul W. S. Anderson’s “Resident Evil: Afterlife” (Screen Gems, $39.95, R).

For one thing the camera’s presence is a guarantee that the film is not a conversion from 2-D and was conceived for stereoscopic viewing from the start. It’s a pity that Mr. Brevig’s 2008 “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the first feature shot with the Fusion camera, isn’t available in an active-shutter 3-D version; a longtime visual-effects supervisor, he seems to possess an innate sense of what will please the eye in 3-D (elaborate, cathedral-like spaces) and what will distract or irritate it. (Like Mr. Cameron he systematically avoids projecting effects that threaten to puncture your eyeballs.) And Mr. Anderson, a professionally unpretentious genre filmmaker (“Event Horizon,” “Death Race”), has long used depth effects to give his action scenes an extra shot of adrenaline, seems naturally born to the format. He was always shooting in stereo, it’s just that we couldn’t see it before.

2-D to 3-D conversions, like “Thor “ (Paramount, $54.99, PG-13) and “Priest” (Screen Gems, $45.99, not rated), often seem less visually robust than their 2-D siblings, cursed with the kind of pop-up book effect that results from digitally clipping out figures and rearranging them against backgrounds that remain distractingly flat. For the moment they are best avoided, and like the part talkies of the late 1920s, their days are clearly numbered.

Given the importance of the family market to home video, it’s probably in animated films that Blu-ray 3-D will find its fastest and widest acceptance. Robert Zemeckis’s 2004 “Polar Express” was the film that started the digital 3-D phenomenon, and it remains (Warners, $44.98, G), along with Mr. Zemeckis’s 2010 “Christmas Carol” (Disney, $49.99, PG), a thrilling example of a filmmaker able to indulge his taste for long takes and deep focus without any practical, physical constraints. No matter how complex a shot he may conceive, Mr. Zemeckis now has the means to execute it.

The puppet animator Henry Selick brilliantly uses 3-D to set an eerie, dreamlike mood in his 2009 “Coraline,” which was reissued last January in Blu-ray 3-D (Universal, $49.98, PG) in a version that makes the previous releases obsolete. The summer hit “Rio” (Fox, $49.99, G) opens with a dazzling Busby Berkeley-type musical number, with tropical birds soaring in formations through a digital jungle. But the film, directed by Carlos Saldanha, seems to lose interest in depth effects soon after.

We will have to wait until Nov. 1 to see Pixar’s “Cars 2” and “Toy Story 3” in Blu-ray 3-D, but in the meantime there is “Tangled” from Disney ($49.99, PG), the first of that studio’s in-house animations to take full advantage of the 3-D format. This mildly sarcastic retelling of “Rapunzel” seems a little too knowing for its own good, but every so often the directors, Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, unleash an image of startling beauty. The climactic sequence, with a thousand candles floating through the night sky is a visual coup worthy of the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. To watch these warm specks of light lift out of the screen and float into the room in front of you is to experience the “Wow!” factor and a little something more.

There may be a future in this thing after all.

Original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/mo....html?src=recg

Tony Asch · September 11th, 2011, 12:47 PM

The strongest indicator of 3D Cinema's immaturity is that 3D is not being integrated into the artistic or story narrative. It does nothing to further the development of characters, story, emotion, sense of place and time, or the grammar of film-making.

Drawing a parallel with the use of color in popular cinema, full color is introduced in the mid-30s mostly as a gimmick to sell tickets (Kid Millions, Becky Sharp, Dancing Pirate, etc...) By the end of the 30's directors and cinematographers begin to "get it." Wizard of Oz metaphorically separates the drab dustbowl depression world from Dorothy's brightly saturated color fantasy world of Oz, by taking us over the rainbow, from black and white to color. Color finally serves a narrative purpose (imitated again in Pleasantville - 1998)!

See how Lucas uses color in THX-1138; a sterile amorphous white world punctuated by small bits of flesh tones tells us everything about the world that THX and LUH inhabit, contrasting dramatically with the blindingly rich color sunrise in the final shot.

The D-Day scenes in Saving Private Ryan are drained of color, connecting us with the black and white newsreel footage that are our only memories of that day.

Color grading is often about setting a mood through the use of tint, saturation, and dominant colors.

Directors have adapted other visual technologies to express their story. Chris Marker's La Jetée is presented almost entirely in still frames, representing the fragmentation of time that is at the core of the protagonist's perspective (something that is missing in Terry Gilliam's remake: 12 Monkeys.)

To date, I've not seen 3D used to further any aspect of cinematic expression. (I'll overlook Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 3D punctuating the transitions from real to fantasy world with "Put Your Glasses On" - "Take Your Glasses Off" title slides. SK3D hardly qualifies as having any relationship to cinematic expression.)

3D has not made the leap from gimmick to instrument of expression. Cinematographers must move beyond composing technically correct 3D shots and start making 3D shots that augment the story and characters. Directors must integrate 3D into their quiver of expressive tools. Thousands and thousands of 3D movie screens (and many more televisions) are out there, just waiting for something with a heart and soul.

Seref Halulu · October 6th, 2011, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Stanislav

Yes, it does.

I was actually meaning to give an example of that but was distracted before saying everything. Namely, recently I bought a 3D BD about ancient Egypt. It was shot for IMAX with its huge screen. As a result, on my 3D monitor it all looked like miniatures. Clearly they used a wider interocular distance for it to look great on a 20 foot tall screen. And that made it truly horrible on a small monitor.

That film should have never been released on Blu-ray and should have only been shown in IMAX theaters!

That is why I have been saying that 3D needs to be shot with three lenses, one on the left, one on the right, one a certain distance between them, about one third the distance from the left lens and 2/3 from the right lens, so you get three different possible outputs:

1. For a huge screen showing the left view shot by the left lens, the right view by the right lens;

2. For a medium screen showing the left view shot by the in-between lens, the right view from the right lens; and

3. For a small screen with the left view from the left lens and the right view from the in-between lens.

Hi Adam.

It seems to me very logical and i liked the idea.

But considering the film is shot with 3 lens, how it is gonna be distributed?
3 Masters of the same film for every suitable screen?

Or any other ideas?

_ _ _ _

Adam Stanislav · October 6th, 2011, 02:50 PM

You’d have one studio master with three views. From that you would produce a separate distribution master for IMAX, with two appropriate views, a different distribution master for regular cinema screen, with two different views, and a third distribution master for BD, with two proper views.

So, in each case you would distribute just two of the three views.

Bruce Watson · October 7th, 2011, 09:21 AM

Quote: