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The Future of Cinema - 'Real' 3D
GunSlinger writes "The IGN movies site is running a story on an old movie concept seeing a resurgence. 3D movies are making a cinematic comeback via new, more sophisticated techniques. Yes, you still wear glasses. No you don't get a headache. Yes, the effect is fantastic. This story looks at the technology, past and future projects, and why just about every major studio is now planning in three dimensions. 'There is indeed a revolution in cinema taking place. It's quietly slipped under the radar of most technophiles, beginning its assault on the way we consume media clothed in thoroughly unassuming garb -- the Disney Digital 3-D film, Meet the Robinsons ... no, we don't blame you for being skeptical. Most people in their mid-20s or later think of 3-D movies from the old school perspective -- goofy red and blue coloured glasses, strained eyes, possible migraines. And most importantly, a so-so 3-D effect. No more.'"
3D is boring...
When is it going to plug directly in to my head already?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
cause as soon as you move it, the scene will fail to change and the illusion is lost.
Call me when you can give me 3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms.
How we know is more important than what we know.
3D cinema will never be accepted while you need to wear those cheap paper glasses. It will always be a gimmick. It doesn't matter if a major studio releases a children's school-holidays blockbuster in 3D - in fact that just makes it more gimmicky.
Wake me up when a 3D film wins an Oscar for Best Picture.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Anyone have a decaffeinated version of the summary? I got the jitters just reading it.
"You haven't noticed it, no-one, not the critics, not the "experts", not the "technocracy""
If no-one notices, no-one cares.
Am I supposed to wear two pairs to watch these movies?
Anybody got a screenshot?
Le français vous intéresse?
Nothing that hasn't been around for many years.
This is no more 'Real' 3D than the other polarized 3D systems that have been around forever.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
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..the polarized glasses, that produce a so-so effect that induces migranes? It's been around for years. It's always been pretty average.
One of the problem with 3D cinema is that it sometimes provides counter-intuitive cues to the viewer. When you see a 2D film, there is nothing in the film telling you the size of the objects. Large objects may be large because they are close to you, and small objects may be small because they are far away. You don't break suspension of disbelief when an actors face covers half the screen, because it's similar to standing close to a person.
When 3D is added, all this breaks down. An actor in close up suddenly becomes a giant. Everything changes size radically from shot to shot.
3D might be great for large vistas, but if you just insert 3D into a normal film, then you detract much from the visual language of film that we've gotten used to, as many of the shots become so disturbing.
Another drawback with 3D is that your eyes will attempt to focus at out of focus areas because the depth cues are there, but of course the focus is fixed
and cannot be changed and fatigue is the result. In a 3D generated film, it's possible to keep everything in focus at the same time, but for live action this is simply not practical.
A witty
I saw Meet the Robinsons in 3D the other week.
Shoddy glasses?
The glasses were not paper/cardboard. They looked like plastic sunglasses.
Already wearing glasses?
I wear corrective glasses and the 3d glasses fit fine over them.
Can't move your head?
No, you don't have to keep your head still. You can turn your head without bluring or motion sickness.
The 3d effect is stunning. This is miles beyond the old cardboard red/blue glasses.
--McVerne
Or at least that is how all of this talk about 3D sounds like to me... The industry feels like it needs something to bring people back into the movie house. Lets see, good movies at lower prices or 3D with the same crap movies and high prices. Guess which one they would like you to chose.
"GunSlinger writes" should read, "GunSlinger quotes" TFA.
If it's the same technology as they used in Superman Returns during the IMAX showings (and according to the little featurette video in page 2 of TFA, it seems like it is), then yes. I wear glasses myself. When I went in to the IMAX theatre, the workers handed me a pair of plastic glasses that did not look very sanitary. I tried wiping them off, but the lenses were still kinda grimy. So what ended up happening was that I had to watch the movie with two pairs of glasses on, and since I wasn't sitting in the middle, the 3D effect was "off". Not to mention the disgusting crap on the glasses. And that talk about not having a headache? Well ... I guess so. But I felt like my eyes were starting to cross involuntarily, and they felt more strained when I watched a 20-second stretch of 3D than when I spend 3+ hours sitting in front of a monitor.
All in all, it was a terrible experience. The "3D" effect was marginally better than the old red/blue method at best, and completely ineffective at worst. My eyes felt like they were about to pop out. I'll never watch another movie with that technology again.
I agree.
I took my kids to see Robinsons as well - best 3D ever imho. Glasses weren't bad at all.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
The Amiga, long before any other desktop system, had a 3D system using LCD shutters sync'd to the interlaced video fields (interlaced video was one of the display options in the Amiga chip set), so your eyes saw different images, which your brain understood as 3D. With digital theaters, improvements in LCD tech', synchronization by RF, IR, or whatever it takes to trigger the tiny processor controlling the shutters (could be a component of the screen image), so there are no wires to the glasses, 3D is trivial to present. Takes a bit of compute power to produce, but still commercially viable.
Only two real problems:
digital movies are at pathetic resolutions, and 3D won't be better, so I don't go to theaters that use them.
theaters are full of stupid and/or inconsiderate people continually distracting me from the movies, and the theater owners/managers won't do anything about it, so I don't go to theaters.
Oh, and the movies are almost all terrible, anyway, but for a couple of bucks to watch at home, it doesn't bother me so much.
Problem with this tech is that it is STILL stereo graphic. It's not volumetric, and therefore, the old eye strain problems will still exist.
OK, these guys may have developed a better way to deliver and display a stereo graphic image, but in the end, it's the same old crap we've seen for decades. You're still wearing stereo glasses. You put some glasses on, your right eye sees one image, your left eye sees another image, your brain converges the two images, but you can't focus on the depth of your choosing. Focus is predetermined by the film.
Human stereoscopic vision relies upon two mechanisms, convergence and accommodation. This cinema tech doesn't account for the latter. With this tech you still can't focus on depths of your choosing... as you would with a volumetric image or a real 3D object in the real world. These guys are trying to skirt around accommodation by limiting shots to particular ranges of depth. While this may help to minimize the problem, it doesn't eliminate it.
All in all... move along, nothing new to see here.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The article is a little vague about how it works, trying to make it sound more magical.
What the system does is alternate projections of the left and right eye images using the same DLP projector. They said 144 frames per second, which I think means that each film frame (of which there are 24 per second) is projected 3 times for each eye, this means each eye sees the image flickering at 72 times a second, which is above the threshold for most people to see flickering. The real technology is a special lcd screen that is put in front of the lens of the projector that changes it's polarization 144 times per second so each image is polarized differently.
The real advantage of this is that the same DLP projector used for non-3D films can be reused, just put the lcd in front of the lens when showing 3D. Any other system would require a second projector, which not only adds the cost of the projector, but the cost to mount it and add another aperture in the theatre wall. (actually another system would be shutter glasses with lcd lenses that turn on/off so each eye sees one side, but handing each customer an item that costs 10 or more dollars is probably out of the question) Also this system allows perfect alignment so that things that should appear at the screen plane really appear there, and high-contrast things like the credits can be projected at that distance with no ghosting.
It does appear fortunate that they can run at 144 frames per second, though if they were like consumer ones with a maximum of 90 or 100 it would still be an acceptable flicker rate of 45 or 50 (classic film projectors flickered 48 times a second due to having 1 extra vane on the shutter).
That's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the headline.
They are hoping it will be somehow harder to copy 3D movies. It's not. So if that's the motivation behind this push then they can forget it.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
The point isn't that polarization for 3-D project was just invented. The point is that a few particularly filmmakers and studios are keenly interested in it at the moment and have refined the technology further than it's ever gone before. Many of the problems with perspective and motion not being quite right before have been solved. The visors and the reflective screens are better than before. 3-D movies might actually be a substantial improvement now instead of a mere gimmick.
The real test may be James Cameron's Avatar, which goes into production soon. Cameron has overseen the development of completely new digital cameras for shooting in 3-D, and he plans to take advantage of the format's superior frame rate as well; we're talking about sci-fi action in 60 fps or more.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
IMax has two different systems for 3D effects.
The first is the polarized glasses, this is used for films that have not been filmed in 3D but they then process and setup multiple projectors to give a 3D look. They glasses look like sun glasses but and from my limited experience they just barly fit over the glasses of existing wearers. This is the kind of technology the article is refering to.
Then you have the full Imax 3D with just plainly rocks!!!! It consists of a full head gear which fits over your head and easily over existing glasses, it comes with built in speakers to add to the theater sound and uses signals from the projector to flip the lens to give the 3D illusion. If you have not seen one of theses they are a must see. Even the dopey films are impressive just for the 3D effects. My personal favorite is the _Deep Sea_ it is really funny to lift the head sets and see people attempt to grab the fish as they swim up to them.
Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in highly critically acclaimed films like The Great Dictator and Modern Times, both of which are in the IMDB's top 250 films of all time.
You can't dismiss Chaplin as gimmicky comedy, that's just not fair.
Video games have had 3D since 15 years now.
No wonder Movies and Music are dying and everyone is rather downloading them instead of looking like a retard for spending money on that ridiculous crap.
Because if we don't, "Graft'n Play" is going to give a new meaning to the word "Death" in the expression "Blue Screen Of Death" !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Enough titles in 3D and there will be better eyewear for the consumption of it. Maybe collector's edition specs with the 3D boxed set...
Its been around for years ... I believe they call it "theatre" or something.
This "circular" polarization only solves problem with head tilting.
Another factor which is order of magnitude more important in depth perception is the parallax effect : When you move the coordinates of the point of view (be it because you made a step on one side OR because you slightly turned you head and your eyes aren't at the same position down to the milimeter), the object that are neerer in your field of view appear to "move" much more than those that are farther away.
It's how the sensation of "depth" is done in games using 2D displays (either using several scrolling layers in older games, or using 3D polygons on more recent FPS. As a example of parallax effect, the wobbling of the ship in the Descent series helps illustrating the depth of the labyrinth on-screen). The depth perception is VERY sensitive to small parallax effects linked to slight head motion.
This CAN be done with head mounted displays (HMD) equiped with accelerometers (any slight motion of the head is translated into microscopic camera motion in the game world).
This CAN be somewhat done with rotation/projection systems that can be shown as 3D from any angles (if the subject moves he'll see different reflections on the rotating target corresponding to different angle).
This could be somewhat done with shutter glass, provided enough head tracking.
This is circumvented with historical stereo 3D as from the Lumière era (where the eyes are kept fixed against the binocular aperture and thus there's no motion to provoke parallax effect. BUT you lose the depth information you could get from it).
This CAN'T be done with traditional 3D cinema (because there are only 2 different image projected on the screen, they don't change as the head moves).
This CAN'T be done with current stereographic LCD pannels (when in stereomode, only 2 image are projected) unless separate head tracking is used, but it'll only work for the user holding the accelerometer, not the other viewers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Be worth my time to go to a theatre again.
I used to really enjoy going to the movies... it's just too damned hard to find one with sound comparable to my home system, clarity comparable to my flatscreen, and sanitary standards of some sort. My home system is a total patchwork of commodity parts, not high end by any means.
Not to hold up progress or anything, but the theaters in my area have more pressing concerns than getting a 3d system in place... Like the basics.
A 3d system like this might get one visit out of me a year when there is some sort of nature documentary playing. That's not going to stop the incursion of DVD's into the theater's turf.
Regards.
Move on, nothing to see here.
IMAX cinemas have been using this technology for 3D movies for a number of years now.
America, Home of the Brave.
What I'm asking myself how that experience will be for people like me. I have about normal sight in my left eye but the right one is thoroughly fucked. Not only is it only about 20% as strong as the left eye but it also is several degrees off to the right.
Now I can deal with never actually watching 3D (normal movies for me are quite realistic... I don't see more depth in the real world anyway) but I'm a tad scared what I'd do if they all started shooting in 3D only. I tried the crappy paper glasses once and all I got was a red or green image or the distorted blurry picture you see without them. It hurt.
Is that there's always some leakage in the circular-polarized images from one eye to the other, but it's always the same amount of leakage. So, you see a ghost of the right eye's view in the left eye, and vice versa.
So, they just subtract that percentage of the right-eye's view from the left-eye image, and voila! No ghosts.
That said, peope I know who have reviewed this technology in depth find that while it's not as headache-inducing as some of the other 3D formats, there's still something that feels wrong about it -- their feeling was more epilepsy than migraine.
disclaimer: Haven't seen it myself yet, and that's a breach of my duty to my visual effects company.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I'm going to assume you've never seen the non-red/blue glasses at work. While the very vocal people on here are complaining about how the polarized glasses gave them headaches, most people had no issue with them at all. I certainly never did, and I saw Captain EO, that stupid Kodak thing, and Honey I Shrunk the Audience dozens of times. (Gotta love living in Florida.)
Each eye sees a different image on the screen. If you close one eye, it's just like closing 1 eye in real life. You get that image only. The glasses themselves are like polarized sunshades. I doubt it's the actual polarization that bothers those that get headaches, but is instead the framerate of the picture since it's effectively cut in half. (15 fps per eye, instead of 30.) The strobe effect could be quite annoying.
If you take off the glasses, you end up with a watchable but odd-looking image where things that are supposed to be very close or very far are fuzzy. Since most action is in the middle anyhow, it's not that bad.
These new glasses won't work on exactly the same technique, so they'll look a little different, but the effect when you take off the glasses with probably be about the same. Same for the effect with 1 eye closed, also.
In the end, I think you'll find the glasses don't make it much different from a real scene.
If they start 'shooting in 3d only', you'll find that the effects in the scenes are boring to you and you'll wonder why people care, but other than that, I don't think it'll affect you adversely. (And they'll eventually get over the whole 3d thing and start actually producing good movies again eventually, too.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I know I'm part of a very small minority, but I'm blind in one eye. So even if this technology is a great improvement for most people, it still doesn't help some of us, and in fact it sounds like it's not even worth my time trying to watch a film being shown in "Real D".
Of course, I don't go to the movies that often anymore anyway, given the expense today, but if the studios are going to put up the killer barrier, then I suppose the choice will be out of my hands.
I know, but give it a chance, let it feel its way out to find a home.
Even if its only at themeparks and IMAX documentaries which are good, i wish they released more documentaries in 3d, especially on dvd, and give
people those odd/even shutter glasses to sync to show 60fps as 30/30. This requires CRTs or 60hz LCDs, with 60fps video files.
You need the compelling content to be created first, give it sum buzz, and get the producers interested because of the larger number of audience willing to
try it. Because its so new, there is less competition to try something new that might be a huge it if done right that no one has tried really before. Kind of
like film in the 30s when color first came about.
Though try this company, ddd.com They have some 3d technology system. For professional quality 3d polarized format viewing.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
How is this different than 3D using polarized light and special glasses that has been around for years?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Although I'm still skeptical about the quality (until I've seen it) and speed of takeup, it's worth congratulating the studios for innovating (talkies were a novelty to begin with, as was colour and widescreen). Particularly during the era of piracy - regardless of the pros and cons of free sharing, while the 3D film can only be seen in a cinema, people are going to pay to see it. Hell, if I downloaded a 2D film and it was really decent (ie. not generic Disney saccharine) I would pay to see it in 3D.
You mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#IMAX_3D
Yes, but only 96hz, so each eye sees 48fps, so its basically a 24fps film run at 2x speed and done with two views at the same time. 4x the data rate.
I used to use the amiga to fake the screen FPS on the CRT to go above 60/80/100hz but it also did an auto widescreen effect, so 100hz screen would be a 2:1 ratio.
You would loose resolution as the screen is still 15khz full bandwidth, but you caused the gun to jump back up so each frame would be 1/100th, but only 1/2 the amount
of vertical height. The computer would just keep feeding data from the top 0,0 and it would still take same amount of memory bandwith. It looked real good at 100-120fps.
So natural. and brighter because the gun going over the same area.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Putting a patch over one eye (and still wearing the 3D glasses) ought to solve any problems caused by the 3D effect. With the projection technology on Meet the Robinsons, I didn't notice any bleed-thru of the "other" image on either eye, so you should end up simply seeing a single 2D image, just like ye olde flat cinematographie.
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If it actually cut the FPS in half, it would be 12. Hollywood shoots at 24fps, not 30fps. Also, I don't think it's likely split in half like that. There's ways to split a single mussed-up image into 2 clear ones with polarization. Most likely, any discomfort is from seeing two different frames of reference with each eye on the screen, and having a completely DIFFERENT frame of reference in the peripherals. It may not cause pain, but if you're not used to it, your eyes are probably jumping around to "adjust" to the "problem". I wouldn't be surprised if one's eyes are pretty tired or sore after 2 hours of that.
...is the real skill. See cross-viewing here. I'm afraid I have a bit of the binocular problem they describe there, but I hope to improve.
Errr - I'm 29, and I clearly remember watching 3D movies using polarized glasses back when I was a teen. Someone please explain to me how is that different from what Imax and Disneyworld have done for the past 15 years.
There are a few major approaches being used right now. They all come down to delivering a different image for the left and right eyes. The system in TFA uses a combination of circular polarization and frame sequential techniques. Here are the major techniques currently used:
Frame sequential
_This uses a single projector or screen with a high framerate, 120Hz or higher. Each frame alternates between a left and right eye view. The viewer wears a pair of LCD 'shutter glasses' which are synchronized to flicker and allow only the correct frame through per eye. Thus, a 120Hz output becomes a 60Hz image stream to the viewer. Unfortunately, the glasses are expensive and not easy to deploy to a large audience. This technique also often causes headaches after extended viewing.
Head mounted display
_Funky goggles are used to provide a dedicated image for each eye in close proximity. Advantages include the ability for head tracking which provides parallax shift and real immersion. The units are also localized to the wearer, so you can have them in small spaces like cockpits. Disadvantages: relatively low resolution and expensive for large deployments.
Linear polarization
_Using 2 projectors (usually DLP) which have linearly polarized filters in front of the lenses, one has left-right polarization for one image and the second an up-down polarization for the other eye. The user wears paper glasses with lens orientation corresponding the the projector output. This technique is easiest to deploy to large audiences since the paper glasses are relatively cheap. However, the 3D effect can be broken by rotating the head.
Circular polarization
_Similar as the linear approach, filters are used in front of 2 projectors creating left-right images. The filters used for the projectors and glasses are circularly polarized which allows head rotation, but suffers from 'ghosting' or 'image bleed' since the circular polarization does not block all light intended for the other eye.
Chromatic filtering
_Similar to the old red and blue glasses from yesteryear, this technique uses spectrum filtering to restrict certain wavelengths from reaching each eye. When used with filters in front of 2 projectors, dedicated left-right images can be created. The newer techniques use more controlled filtering so that the color aberrations are minimized.
Lenticular
_Using a special vertically banded lenticular lens in front of a back-projection screen or TFT/Plasma, this technique creates 'zones' in which 3D images can be seen without any hardware required on the viewer. By shifting your head left or right, you fall into viewing 'sweet-spots'. This is based on the fact that a human's eyes are generally spaced the same distance apart. One of the great things about this approach is that since there are images from multiple camera angles being displayed simultaneously, you can actually get a little parallax before falling out of a sweet-spot. You'll see this technique more and more at trade shows and in public advertisements.
Our studio makes actual 3D content for 3D visualization systems.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
This is not the same technology that was used in Superman Returns for IMAX 3D. For the IMAX version, they used "proprietary 2D to 3D conversion technology." It wasn't actually filmed with stereoscopic cameras. IMAX 3D also only does 48 frames per second instead of 144, and as far as I can tell does not use the radial polarization that Real D uses.
What IMAX seems to use is just the standard current 3D technology, which uses polarized lenses rotated 90 from one another. I've not seen Real D in action, and I have my doubts as to whether it actually lives up to their claims, but it sounds like it should at least be better than the current technology.
It would be 14 and 24 . . . if that was how this worked.
The technology discussed in this article uses two sets of 24fps images played back at a total of 144fps. Covering one eye will take you down to normal 24 frame film refreshed 72 times per second.
I saw the re-release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" on this system and it is perfectly watchable with one eye.
-Peter
Yes, there are some people who can't. I myself have an eye disorder called strabismus, which causes my eyes to not line up quite right, preventing my brain from successfully integrating the two images into a 3D picture. Hence no 3D technology will work for me, or those like me. Existing 3D movies are pretty much impossible for me to watch, because of the weird coloring and such. Even the existing polarized technology (iMax, anyone?) doesn't work too well since it leaves the image blurry.
We've got 3 kids [boys from 9 to 13] and none have coming running home saying, "Billy says we just hafta hafta hafta go see Meet The Robinsons!" And if the kids aren't doing it, the adults sure as heck aren't going to.
Disney is so off-mark these days, it is pathetic. Good luck, guys, but I'm betting on your competition.
I come here for the love
8 years ago the 3d movies inside disney used these plastic polarized glaases, and not the colored paper ones.
What's the news?
I say a very interesting version of 3D that used Polarized glasses to create the effect 15 years ago. Simply but very effective. The two films were Captain Eo and Magic Journeys at Disneyland's Space Mountain Theatre in Anaheim, California. Now many would think that this would mean the movie is unwatchable without the glasses but that's not the case. It was completely watchable without them and yet the polarization method selected was highly effective in bringing a true sense of depth from a 2D format.
Agreed. My wife tends to get motion sickness in IMAX and 3D type movies.. combine the two and we're got bigger trouble. With the polarized technology, she was able to watch Meet the Robinsons without a problem. If the effects ever bothered her, she could close one eye and watch it in 2D. No noticeable blur, nothing lost except the illusion of depth.
The company doing this is paying to install digital DLP projectors - 2 per screen, actually. So if your enjoying the "DLP" experience at a theater that just went DLP, thank them. Cool seeing them take a risk - my wife loved "Monster House" in 3D - I hope they make it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Only 8 years ago? In 1969 - 38 years ago - there was a soft-porn movie called "The Stewardesses" that used polarized glasses, full color. The rollercoaster ride was impressive, the pool table cue jabbed out over the audience, and yes, there were naked 3D women. I don't know why the article keeps harping on about how this "new" technology represents amazing progress from red and green glasses - that hasn't existed since it was a short fad in black-and-white B movies in the 50's. It is like saying that DVD-audio is the next step after 78 RPM records. One thing it possibly has going for it is that it uses circular polarization, apparently meaning that you don't lose the effect if you tilt your head, but I don't recall that as being a problem when I saw The Stewardesses (sometime in the 70s). Technically I recall it as being as impressive, or at least nearly as impressive, as the Disney stuff you mention (which I also saw).
we went to see one of these the other day(meet the robinsons) and it blew away anything 3D i had seen before.
and as said, no headache.
it's 3D done right!
This is yet another technology that the porn industry can bring into the mainstream.
...
Boobies you can reach out for!
Pussies you could almost eat!
A beowulf cluster of ejaculating penises!
Oh, shit
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Agreed, Meet The Robinsons was really stunning. I caught myself admiring the animation and 3D quite a bit to the detriment of following the film (no big deal, really).
The only problem I had was that at the very beginning, after getting the instructions to put the glasses on, the first 3D stuff was a trailer for a Tim Burton animated Halloween movie - this scared the crap out of my kids (aged 5, 5, and 4, this being the first time they experienced 3D), with all sorts of nasties reaching out of the screen at them. They followed that with an old 1950's 3D cartoon with Donald Duck, which was harmless and would have made a much better introduction to 3D for the millions of little kids who will see it.
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> 'Real 3D'
Can you guys hurry it up? Nina Hartley ain't getting any younger, you know.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Folks,
I had actually read something about the Disney Digital 3D "system" before "Meet The Robinsons" came out and was intrigued. I've done some design work for a 3D system that I can't talk about and I'm old enough to remember the flood of "bad" 3D from the 50's.
So, I was in chair in see the Disney flick.
Kids...this is pretty good. The movie was actually cute, but I was blown away by how well the depth of field held up throughout the movie.
Interestingly enough, there was a 1955 Disney cartoon...Donald Duck with Chip and Dale...that Walt shot in "Stereoscopic 3-D" shown before the movie. Made for a nice contrast as virtually EVERY 3D offering back then did the same "look!...this is right in your face!!!" stuff. With few exceptions, the new RealD process (and the way Disney did the film) stayed away from this.
I took the polarized glasses off a couple of times during the movie just to compare the 2D image to the 3D. Yes, you can do that as there's no red/blue halos around the screen image. I've since compared this to going from B&W to color or NTSC to High Def...it's that compelling.
If Indy 4, Spiderman 4, etc. is shot and shown using this, movie goers will flip out. This may very well be what gets people back into theatres....in droves.
And, as this matures, it's only going to get better!
BTW, my temp sig is in honor of a terrifically funny sequence from the movie.
I am my own gestalt.
Actually, the typical movie is already 3D: horizontal dimension, vertical dimension and time dimension.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Fly Me to the Moon" is a 3D animated film covering the Apollo 11 moon mission, told from the perspective of 3 flies who manage to get aboard the command module prior to launch. The stills and short video clips look really impressive:
http://www.flymetothemoonmovie.com/
I'm sure this film won't get the attention of a Disney release, but my space-obsessed 5 year-old son can't wait. I just hope it gets into a FEW theaters outside of science museums and the like...
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This will only work for CGI movies.
In movies shot in real life, you often do what's called 'cheating' in order to create a scene. The director will position a man and a women talking about one foot diagonal from one another, but from where the camera is placed, it looks like they are just inches apart. There are lots of cheats used to compose a frame just right, make an actor seem taller, improve the dramatic imagery. Very few of these could be translated to 3D, because that would make the cheat obvious. I think true 3-D films can only be created in CGI.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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Controlled focus and depth of field are as important to proper cinematic grammar as mise en scene and montage. The last thing you want as a director is the audience's eyes wandering all over the place in a totally uncontrolled manner focusing on unimportant elements within the image. It is not a problem to be minimized or eliminated, but a grammar to be enhanced.
--
Franklin
People aren't interested in movies that don't have special-effect-enhanced musculature any more. Thankfully.
You can tell the dreaded "comic book summer movie season" is about to start. Movies made for 15-year-old boys by those with the talent of 15-year-old boys.
Others have commented about this but I haven't seen the point yet made this way. A two-image 3D effect is realistic only from one seat in the house. In practice, there is a fairly small "sweet spot." If you view from too close to the screen, the image doesn't have enough depth; too far away, it has too much. Off to the side, everything that should be square becomes skewed, rhomboidal.
Oddly enough, exactly the same problems exist in 2D, but they are nowhere near as disturbing, presumably because 2D does look like 3D in the first place.
The second issue is that the cinematographer is limited to a single focal length. In effect, the location of the "sweet spot" depends on the lens. With a long lens, the sweet spot is toward the back of the house; with a wide-angle lens, toward the front. In practice, only a normal lens gives the real "you-are-there" 3D effect. Anything else looks distorted. What this means is that to make a 3D film the filmmakers have to throw out most of their lenses and a century of film grammar.
A third issue is that 3D photography is unflattering to actresses, because with 3D you can see the actual three-dimensional contours of their faces, which in 3D cannot be hidden or concealed with makeup, at least not in a closeup. (I'm using sexist language because for the most part a smoothly contoured face is still considered much more important for actresses than for actors). For a good example of this, see the 1950s 3D movie "Kiss Me Kate."
These fatal flaws will continue to restrict two-image 3D to a limited set of special applications: animated features and movies in which spectacle is important.
All of this, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Cinerama in the 1950s. It was not a true 3D process but was spectacular, beautiful, and pleasant to view--superior to present-day 2D Imax. The fatal flaw was not the three-projector system, although that was a problem. The fatal flaws were exactly the ones that two-image 3D has: the real Cinerama experience was only to be had from seats in the center of the house; telephoto lenses couldn't be used; and it was a challenge to use it for film storytelling (of about ten films made in Cinerama, only two--How the West was Won and The Wonderful Tales of the Brothers Grimm--had real story lines, the others were basically travelogues. Of course, to call a Cinerama film "basically a travelogue" is like calling Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue "basically a medley.")
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I had an uncorrected lazy eye from shortly after birth. surgery did not help. Consequently, I have no true depth perception. I can function fine as there are many, many ways to get depth cues from the environment. (I have had fewer accidents than my wife). Can you watch this technology without the glasses? Stereoscopes and the like do nothing for me.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Disney has been using this technology for decades in their theme park theaters. Walt Disney World has Muppetvision, Honey I Shrunk the Audience, Philharmagic, It's Tough to be a Bug. They all use the polarized filters to give the 3D effect, although they differ slightly in their method of delivering the video. All this is is commercialization of an existing product.
Real D and the 3D "revolution" have been reported on here, as part of a larger look at the future of "Digital Hollywood"
It's called a stage play. Check one out; the 3-D is *amazing*. The special effects, not so much...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I was just gonna comment on how excellently "Meet the Robinsons" looked. Kinduva train wreck of a film, but man... it sure looked great. I have to wonder how much Disney raided from the minds of Pixar on this one.
It was more than 8 years. There was a 3-D movie using polarized glasses in Epcot in the early 80's (pretty lousy though), which was replaced in the mid-80's with Captain EO (pretty good), replaced again with the current Honey I shrunk the Audience. I will say the current batch of 3D movies they have now at Disney World are all excellent. Incorporating physical gags (air puffs, water squirts, smells, etc.) into the movies make these great fun for the kids.
Far as I can tell the RealD stuff is just an improvement over this. Oh and it is all digital...ooooo....
Q.
When there's porn in 3D, then it'll take off. Just look at VHS and the Internet. I mean, since when "Disney uses the technology" has been a reason to adopt a new technology?
why don't studios concentrate on finding good screenplays? The box office wouldn't be suffering if Hollywood would stop rehashing the same stories over and over again. Take a risk and invest in a screenplay that's engaging and fresh.
My question is, what will this new 3D technology be for someone, like me, who can only see out of one eye. Of course, the 3D effect is lost, but will it be annoying (as it is with traditional 3D) to watch.
I've seen several of these movies over the last year or so:
Monster House
Nightmare Before Christmas (it was re-released in 3d last year)
Meet The Robinsons
My wife and I love these movies... it really is a blast.
Like others have mentioned you get a brand new pair of glasses (sealed in plastic) each time you go. Which, while it might be wasteful, I prefer over hand-me-down gunked up glasses (like I've used at the IMAX). The glasses are plastic and fit well over my normal glasses
I haven't had a headache from any of the movies... and the 3d effect works very well. Particularly "Monster House" had a lot of depth to it. Meet the Robinsons was the most like a "normal" movie where I basically forgot I was wearing the glasses for most of the movie... and just enjoyed the show. That could also be because it was my third movie so I was more used it.
The one problem I do have with the movies I've seen (especially meet the Robinsons) is when they use Depth Of Field tricks like they would if the movie were 2d (ie making things in the foreground blurry so that you will focus on whats in the background). The problem with that is in 3d your eyes are supposed to do this automatically... in some scenes where this effect is overused it did make my eyes start to water. It's almost _forcing_ your eyes to focus on something... which just doesn't feel right. But this is just a minor kink that movie producers will figure out.
All in all... if you have a theater equipped with this ability in your area, you owe it to yourself to check it out! It really is a great experience!
Friedmud
Most of the people complaining about polarized glasses have been traumatized by glasses that have linear polarization. You have to be "just so" in order for it to work without scrambling your brain. This generation of glasses are circularly polarized, in opposite directions, so that you can tilt whichever way without disrupting the picture, or your eyeballs.
Fnord.
but you do get nausea. I saw the last Superman flick, and the few minutes of 3-D in the thing made me want to blow my lunch. Admittedly, I was in the front row at an iMax when I saw it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
as all 3d tech is. People don't like wearing glasses.
This is to compete with TV. Looking at the way TV is going, it's only a matter of time before we'll all have 70" TV screens in our homes that appear as big as a full movie screen.
No, I will not work for your startup
Polarized 3-D is probably older than any of the people who work at Real-D, but none of them will ever admit it.
Free Hans!