Hollywood Going Digital and 3D

teutonic_leech writes "Last weekend the Directors Guild of America hosted its annual Digital Day event, which gives filmmakers a look at revolutionary new movie-making gear. Judging from a Wired article reporting on the gathering, Hollywood's future not only seems to be digital - there are also indications that stereoscopic 3D has caught the attention of filmmakers in and outside tinseltown. One Indie filmmaker even went so far as to build his own homebrew stereolens attachment enabling him to film in 3D."

Comments

3D nowadays

[samael]

I've seen 3D IMAX films three times so far, and the glasses are, indeed, large. Which is good, because it meant they fitted over my glasses. But they aren't heavy, or unwieldy.

Modern 3D uses polarised light, with the left eye filtering out horizontalally polarised light, and the right eye filtering out the vertical. This means that a very light pair of plastic glasses can allow for proper 3D without changing the colours at all.

It looks _fantastic_.

Stereoscopic limitations

[dpbsmith]

The big problem with traditional stereoscopic 3D isn't the need for glasses. It's problems with geometrical distortion. Sitting in a theatre, everyone sees slightly different images with their left and right eyes. But a person sitting front left sees a VERY different PAIR of images than a person sitting in the back right.

With the traditional two-image processes--versions of Wheatstone's nineteenth century stereoscope--everyone in the house sees the SAME thing through their left eye and the SAME thing through their right eye.

This has serious intrinsic limitations.

The audience view appears geometrically distorted, except for a few lucky members sitting in a fairly small central "sweet spot."

3D tends to make every movie look like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

Suppose Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and she chucks a handkerchief at the camera, and it lands ten feet away. In the theatre, EVERYONE sees the handkerchief chucked straight at them, and landing halfway between them and the screen. People near the front see a flattened version of the original space. People near the back get exaggerated depth. People at the sides see rectangular geometry as rhomboidal.

Even in the sweet spot, there is only one camera focal length that reproduces depth accurately. If the cinematographer chooses to use a long lens for a closeup, rather than physically moving the camera closer, the picture will look wrong.

These geometrical distortions actually apply to ordinary 2D films as well, but you do not notice them because the image is already so spatially distorted by being flat that you are not processing it as an accurate representation of reality.

(Warning: ageist/sexist alert): Another issue is that 3D is unflattering to actresses, as it reveals the true spatial contour of their faces regardless of makeup. A forty-year-old actress can be made up to look twenty-five in regular films, but not in 3D.

They struggled with all these things in the 1950s, both with stereoscopic 3D and with the ultra-wide-angle processes like Cinerama.

All of these problems suggest to me that 3D will be fine for fantasy, science-fiction, and generally surrealistic subject matter, but I don't see how it can ever be used for traditional mainstream cinematic drama.