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There's real 3D directed by James Cameron, where the movie was shot in 3D. And there's Disney Fake3D(tm), where "3D" is added in post-production. The latter is like watching a multi-layered Flash animation.

Cameron uses depth to add reality, not generate in-your-face "effects". At no time in Avatar does an object come "through the screen". That looks fake, and breaks the mood.

Alice in Wonderland, on the other hand, was shot in 2D, and converted to 3D by In-Three. The 2D images go through a program called "In3gue", which segments the images and adds depth info for each pixel. Once this has been done, the image layers can be manipulated in depth.

Even if the original content was shot in 3D, extensive post-production is required. See this guide to 3D post.

Understand how fake stereoscopic 3D is. In the real world, beyond a few meters, there are no noticeable stereo effects.

An interesting point made by In-Three is that content for kids requires a narrower eye separation. It's well known that objects placed "beyond infinity" by stereoscopy produce much unhappiness in viewers, up to and including eyestrain and stomach distress. Content created for adult human eye separation inflicts this effect on children.

An important problem that hasn't been faced yet is that 3D viewing on smaller home screens viewed at close range requires quite different parallax adjustments than on big distant screens. Merely transferring theatrical 3D to Blu-Ray disks is really going to suck.

There's real 3D directed by James Cameron, where the movie was shot in 3D. And there's Disney Fake3D(tm), where "3D" is added in post-production. The latter is like watching a multi-layered Flash animation.

Cameron uses depth to add reality, not generate in-your-face "effects". At no time in Avatar does an object come "through the screen". That looks fake, and breaks the mood.

Alice in Wonderland, on the other hand, was shot in 2D, and converted to 3D by In-Three. The 2D images go through a program called "In3gue", which segments the images and adds depth info for each pixel. Once this has been done, the image layers can be manipulated in depth.

Even if the original content was shot in 3D, extensive post-production is required. See this guide to 3D post.

Understand how fake stereoscopic 3D is. In the real world, beyond a few meters, there are no noticeable stereo effects.

An interesting point made by In-Three is that content for kids requires a narrower eye separation. It's well known that objects placed "beyond infinity" by stereoscopy produce much unhappiness in viewers, up to and including eyestrain and stomach distress. Content created for adult human eye separation inflicts this effect on children.

An important problem that hasn't been faced yet is that 3D viewing on smaller home screens viewed at close range requires quite different parallax adjustments than on big distant screens. Merely transferring theatrical 3D to Blu-Ray disks is really going to suck.

There's real 3D directed by James Cameron, where the movie was shot in 3D. And there's Disney Fake3D(tm), where "3D" is added in post-production. The latter is like watching a multi-layered Flash animation.

Cameron uses depth to add reality, not generate in-your-face "effects". At no time in Avatar does an object come "through the screen". That looks fake, and breaks the mood.

Alice in Wonderland, on the other hand, was shot in 2D, and converted to 3D by In-Three. The 2D images go through a program called "In3gue", which segments the images and adds depth info for each pixel. Once this has been done, the image layers can be manipulated in depth.

Even if the original content was shot in 3D, extensive post-production is required. See this guide to 3D post.

Understand how fake stereoscopic 3D is. In the real world, beyond a few meters, there are no noticeable stereo effects.

An interesting point made by In-Three is that content for kids requires a narrower eye separation. It's well known that objects placed "beyond infinity" by stereoscopy produce much unhappiness in viewers, up to and including eyestrain and stomach distress. Content created for adult human eye separation inflicts this effect on children.

An important problem that hasn't been faced yet is that 3D viewing on smaller home screens viewed at close range requires quite different parallax adjustments than on big distant screens. Merely transferring theatrical 3D to Blu-Ray disks is really going to suck.

Last week's SIGGRAPH had almost two days of sessions about 3D in Hollywood- both animation and live action. The recent revival of 3D movies is not just a marketing gimic, but involves a new understanding and implentation of technical details learned since the last 3D fad in the 1950s.

One of the more interesting presentations was In-Three's talk "Dimensionalization: Creating 3D Movies from 2D Images" in the 3D Cinema session. They showed a space battle clip from Revenge of Sith which had been "Dimensionalized" which is their term for 3D-conversion. They showed dimensionalized clips from other movies with people and nature scenes, the latter which can be challenging. Overall, I thought they were pretty good- just a bit short of have filmed in 3D in the first place.

Dimensionalization involves includes volumizing individual objects and positioning them in a 3D depth-of-field. Some is this is done automatically by the software, and some of it is interative. The interative part includes outlining objects to improve efficiency and quality. It also includes fixing flaws like how to filling in missing "around the edge pieces", and erasing "eye discomfort artifacts" where the the stereo view doesnt quite work right. The director also adds "artistic control" such as highlighting portions of depth of view. In-three showed various examples from a complex Sith space battle scene where the director might want to highlight the action of subset of spaceships. My perception was movie-dimensionalization operated in a similar fashion to movie-colorization 15 years ago with both computer and artistic components.

As of last week the In-Three presenter said that LucasFilm had not commited to dimensionalization of the six movies yet. They also did not mention names of other clients and movies when asked, but I think they are definately doing some.

Last week's SIGGRAPH had almost two days of sessions about 3D in Hollywood- both animation and live action. The recent revival of 3D movies is not just a marketing gimic, but involves a new understanding and implentation of technical details learned since the last 3D fad in the 1950s.

One of the more interesting presentations was In-Three's talk "Dimensionalization: Creating 3D Movies from 2D Images" in the 3D Cinema session. They showed a space battle clip from Revenge of Sith which had been "Dimensionalized" which is their term for 3D-conversion. They showed dimensionalized clips from other movies with people and nature scenes, the latter which can be challenging. Overall, I thought they were pretty good- just a bit short of have filmed in 3D in the first place.

Dimensionalization involves includes volumizing individual objects and positioning them in a 3D depth-of-field. Some is this is done automatically by the software, and some of it is interative. The interative part includes outlining objects to improve efficiency and quality. It also includes fixing flaws like how to filling in missing "around the edge pieces", and erasing "eye discomfort artifacts" where the the stereo view doesnt quite work right. The director also adds "artistic control" such as highlighting portions of depth of view. In-three showed various examples from a complex Sith space battle scene where the director might want to highlight the action of subset of spaceships. My perception was movie-dimensionalization operated in a similar fashion to movie-colorization 15 years ago with both computer and artistic components.

As of last week the In-Three presenter said that LucasFilm had not commited to dimensionalization of the six movies yet. They also did not mention names of other clients and movies when asked, but I think they are definately doing some.

How about doing this to this?

Lucas saw it. He saw clips from Star Wars IV converted to 3D and was happy about the results. I think you are overly sceptical. If people can make stereo 3D from NO footage (just do a CGI scene), certainly doing 3D based on the existing live video should be possible.

Wouldn't 3D versions of the movie require that the original footage be shot using dual lenses that are spaced about 3 inches apart?

Not anymore. There is a company that has figured out how to do it with computers, and George Lucas has said he wants to use their technology to re-do all 6 movies.