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3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will
circletimessquare writes "Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically. Nothing but true holographic images will do. The crux of his argument is simple: 600 million years of evolution has designed eyes that focus and converge in parallel, at the same distance. Look far away at a mountain, and your eyes focus and converge far away, at the same distance. Look closely at a book, and your eyes focus and converge close, at the same distance. But the problem is that 3D cinema technology asks our eyes to converge at one distance, and focus at another, in order for the illusion to work, and this becomes very taxing, if not downright debilitating, and even, for the eyes of the very young, potentially developmentally dangerous. Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience."
shitty filipino horror movies.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Lack of closed caption support doesn't help either.
i watched avatar in 3d huge screen, and it worked well enough for me to be impressed by it and not to regret 15 bucks i poured into it. actually, i was thinking of going and seeing it again, but didnt have time due to work and life.
really, i started to wonder why i am paying to cinema and widescreen, if we are not going to make use of the screen size advantage.
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It generates an extra 3 fiddy per ticket. It works perfectly!
...in stereoscopy (NOT "3D!): one aspect of parallax is quite wrong - the "doubling" of objects in front of focus plane, of background behind it, etc. Strangely, people hardly realize it's there...maybe because it's so unavoidable.
They also forget how "3D" had its golden area already, half a century ago (with polarizing filters!)
Or how the stereoscopic sister of photography is barely younger than its "2D" sibling, at ~160 years. Quite easily done and inexpensive for a long time.
Now ask yourself this: did you make even one such photo? Know anybody who did?
One that hath name thou can not otter
there are a LOT of people with one primary eye, and if the second one works at all, is only used to fill in peripheral data. a LOT of us. it has nothing to do with pinhead 3D glasses with are still as dorky as they were in the 60s. this is a cash grab by the entertainment industry to obsolete and sell-up a bunch of equipment before even the promoters wise up and start looking for the soft-OFF selection in the setup menu.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Is that in the past movies have used tricks like focusing in a particular screen element in order to get you to pay attention to it. With 3D movies you should be allowed to focus on any element you want, yet film-makers (including for Avatar) have persisted in using 2D film tricks like this.
The only solution would be to film with a very wide field of view so that your focus point is essentially infinity.
This could also mediate the focus problem mentioned in the article ... but movie theaters would need to change the seating so that there were no seats anywhere near the screen.
...if you like excessive nudity and bouncing breasts in your horror movies. There was some movie out recently where one of the female actresses ran around naked for something like five minutes, and the whole spectacle was recorded in titillating detail in 3d. For those who want the most sex in cinema, 3d could work quite well. The depth of field is short, the actual on-screen duration for the needed 3d is short relative to the whole picture, and the content will mesmerize those individuals most likely to pay for the privilege enough to keep it viable.
On a more serious note, if 3d is applied to much narrower field depths then the audience might not get nearly as many headaches, as their eyes won't be straining opposite instincts nearly to the degree that they do when the effects go off to infinity. Trouble is, those aren't the kinds of films where 3d will be appreciated, unless, again, porn or on-screen nudity are primary applications.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Vision scientist here ... sorry to have to disagree with you, but actually they are linked ... mostly for very near objects though, so the problems mentioned would be worst for handheld video games like the 3DS.
This 3D stuff is doing great getting people to buy stuff. Yes we know it's snake oil, we don't give a damn, it sells. If we could just sell snake oil for this much money that would be great, but people won't pay $800 for a "full snake oil kit", unless you call it "full 3d graphics and video setup kit", you just don't sell as much. Now take your science mumbo jumbo elsewhere and let us get to work, we have people to fool and orders to fill, ok?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically.
Since 3D cinema pretty clearly empirically does "work" for most reasonable definitions of the word "work", arguments that it theoretically cannot work are obviously evidence of either bad theory or pointless misuses of language, or both.
Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience.
Experience, including experience of immersion, is subjective. If a sufficient number of people didn't find 3D using existing, non-holographic technology, to increase immersion when executed well, it wouldn't be a successful selling point.
Some people don't like it, and it doesn't work well for some people (just like all the non-movie, non-holographic 3D tricks -- all of them work well for some people, and for any one of them they aren't comfortable for other people.) And, for that matter, things like shaky camera work -- for some people, that induces nausea and breaks immersion, for some people, it increases immersion and the sense of reality.
Movies rely on lots of tricks of the eye -- whether 2D or 3D -- and the experience of movies is subjective. Arguing that something you don't like that lots of people demonstrably do somehow can't work even in theory is rather pointless.
From
http://www.slate.com/id/2282376/pagenum/all/#p2
Two Thumbs, Two Dimensions
Roger Ebert is done talking about 3-D movies. Thank goodness.
By Daniel EngberPosted Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011, at 12:00 PM ET
As far as Roger Ebert is concerned, the discussion about 3-D is over. "The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous," he wrote in his blog Sunday. "The case is closed."
If that means Ebert will stop complaining about the medium, so much the better. For years now, the venerable critic has been griping that 3-D cinema is dim, distracting, and useless. And I mean for years: Even at the age of 10, young Ebert turned up his nose at Arch Oboler's stereo jungle adventure, Bwana Devil. (Deeply unmoved, was he, by the hails of spears.) That was back in 1952; more than a half-century later, he's still shaking his fist at the silver screen—I hate 3-D and you should, too! Professional obligations notwithstanding, Ebert doesn't want to see another movie in three dimensions. Ever.
I've had enough of this persnickety crusade, marching, as it does, under the banner of pseudoscience. "Our ancestors on the prehistoric savannah developed an acute alertness to motion," Ebert writes, in an attempt to explain why movies like Clash of the Titans totally suck:
But what about rapid movement toward the viewer? Yes, we see a car aiming for us. But it advances by growing larger against its background, not by detaching from it. Nor did we evolve to stand still and regard its advance. To survive, we learned instinctively to turn around, leap aside, run away. We didn't just stand there evolving the ability to enjoy a 3-D movie.
OK, let's not quibble with the idea that human beings might have evolved to jump away from oncoming automobiles on the prehistoric savannah. I'm more interested in the two notions that follow from this dubious logic. First, that we ought not consume any form of entertainment that doesn't derive from a selected biological trait; and, second, that standard flat-screen cinema is somehow better suited to our genetic makeup—more natural, I guess—than 3-D.
I wonder if Ebert really believes that the arts should cater to our Darwinian design, or that we're incapable of enjoying anything for which our brain wasn't delicately prewired. But in the event that he does, I'd only point out that such gimmicky and distracting art forms as, say, music, may very well be fiddling with our cortex in ways that have nothing to do with the fight-or-flight demands of a saber-toothed tiger attack.
It's just as silly to presume that viewing a film in 3-D is any less natural—from an evolutionary perspective or otherwise—than watching it flat. For starters, the human eye did not evolve to see elephants stomping across the Serengeti at 24 frames per second. Nor are we biologically attuned to jump cuts, or focus pulls, or the world seen through a rectangular box the sides of which happen to form a ratio of 1.85 to 1. Nor indeed was man designed to gaze at any image while having no control over which objects are in focus and which are blurry. If all those distinctly unnatural aspects of standard, two-dimensional cinema seem unobtrusive, it's only because we've had 125 years to get used to them.
According to Ebert, the 3-D effect brings in an "artificial" third dimension, which doesn't serve to make a movie any more realistic. In fact, he says, it makes an image seem less real, since under normal circumstances "we do not perceive parts of our vision dislodging themselves from the rest and leaping at us." Here he appears to be confusing cheesy, pop-out effects (which are used judiciously in the better—and more recent—films) with the medium as a whole. Yes, some 3-D movies do contain these gimmicks, but others do not.
In any case, it's not clear to me why one de
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
From this reference:
According to Prof. Martin Banks, Professor of Optometry and Vision Science at U.C. Berkeley, the vergence-accommodation conflict should be kept at less than ½ to 1/3 diopters for the majority of a 3D viewing experience to avoid discomfort and fatigue.
Which means if you are sitting ~16 feet from the screen, things can come ~10 feet out of the screen without you having any discomfort or fatigue. That is plenty of depth budget for most 3D movies. Thus, focus/vergence mismatch is not a real problem for stereoscopic 3D cinema.
Now if you are ~20 inches from the screen, things can only come out ~3 inches out of the screen before potential discomfort or fatigue, so vergence/focus mismatch is a real problem for small screens. Thus personal gaming devices, computers, and televisions will need careful depth budgeting in stereoscopic 3D.
"Super multiview" non-glasses 3D displays (generally with >32 views) where more than one parallax image is projected into your pupil at a time can force you to focus on the virtual 3D image where your eyes converge (this is how a hologram or the real world works, only they have nearly infinite number of parallax views).
Yeah, it was a huge fad in the 50s, too.
Nobody's going to deny that Avatar was a great experience in 3D. Problem is... every other 3D movie ain't Avatar.
Comment of the year
So have I.
They often don't work.
A movie needs to benefit from the tech and it needs to be used competently in the creation of the film.
Otherwise it's just a pointless waste of money and looking silly in those glasses.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
it didnt cause any headache and eye strain for me, and i even had to watch it from a totally oblique angle (right at the left front seats) because tickets ran out in that huge theater.
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Looks like Ebert is really set in his curmudgeonly "new forms of media are trash and always will be" pattern. Guess what -- 2D cinema already violates many of the visual absolutes that our ancestors took for granted. This article complains that 3D separates focus and convergence, but 2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature. We also evolved to have control over the plane that we are focusing on, which 2D cinema takes away. Even aside from depth cues, our ancestors only needed to perceive motion when they themselves were moving, there was no idea of sitting still and watching from a moving camera. I guess this "motion picture" thing will never catch on. It will always make some people motion sick from camera movement or give them headaches from the brightness and flickering.
What is with the timing of this article anyway? The most successful film of all time, Avatar, is a flagship of 3D cinema. Maybe his next article should be "why the cell phone can't work, ever" because calls sometimes drop. Or maybe "why flat TVs will never catch on" because they don't have as deep blacks as CRT.
You're apparently, not very hard, to please, when it comes, to punctuation.
there is a saying that says, "you have to listen to experts, they will tell you what is not possible, with wonderful theories about why... then you should just go and do it" :)
I am sure he's got a pretty logical argument... the same way I have heard years ago there was no way you would never ever get more than 64K out of a phone line... then there was DSL
some limits (like this one) are made to be broken :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
i watched avatar in 3d huge screen, and it worked well enough for me to be impressed by it and not to regret 15 bucks i poured into it
Ok. Yeah. It worked well enough for me to impressed and not regret the 15 bucks.
Although I developed a headache, and my wife developed a migraine. And the plot was complete and utter predictable rubbish. Its basically unwatchable garbage. So stereotypical and cliched to the point that it is painful.
But, I'll concede the headache inducing 3D was "neat", and I'm glad I saw it. I don't want to see it again though, and have little interest in seeing much else in 3D either. It's like a strobe ultraviolet light (black light)... pretty neat effect; kind of cool for them to pull it out for a bit at a night club. But I wouldn't ever in a million years want to switch all my lights over.
Same with stereoscopic 3D movies, there's a niche for it. From time to time a movie will be worth watching with the effect, but not in a million years do I want network television to switch to the format.
Vision scientist here ... sorry to have to disagree with you, but actually they are linked ... mostly for very near objects though, so the problems mentioned would be worst for handheld video games like the 3DS.
And virtually unnoticeable for images that don't attempt to get within about twice arm's length.
Also: For people of middle age and beyond, presbyopia drastically limits the ability of the eye to change focus depth. Older people would probably find the images very easy to view. Better than holography, in fact, because they'd stay in focus at all "distances" while a holograph would require the viewers to adjust focus when they can't. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wouldn't that be the iEye ?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Another problem with any fake 3D (i.e. dual images projected on a flat surface with binocular separation) is the fact that the parallax is fixed. When you view a truly 3D scene, your head doesn't stay still; it moves, even if just a little. You're not just sampling the scene from two angles, but from multiple angles. If you want a better look at a background object, you move your head to one side, and the image shifts a little. That's part of how your perception of depth works. Its much the same as why you need more than two speakers to create a realistically 3D soundscape (because we judge the direction of a sound in part by moving our heads imperceptibly). Even the most perfect flat-3D projection system cannot simulate that.
This doesn't mean that 3D "doesn't work", of course. It simulates an approximation of a scene, just as 24fps 2D images approximate it, and B&W 2D images approximate it less realistically, etc. But it will always fall sort of a true three-dimensional viewing experience. And kind of like a CGI rendering that doesn't quite look real (the Uncanny Valley), it'll always fall sort of satisfying.
Until we get real 3D projections. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Replacing good script, good acting, good plot and good characters with flashy effects.
With a lot of the latest THREE DEEE Movies I get the idea that they add a dimension to the movie to make us forget that the characters are at best one dimensional.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the only 3d I was exposed to was what I saw in theaters I would think 3d is inherently something that hurts your eyes. There's actually a couple things at play here:
1. A lot of movie theaters have bad technology that results in unwatchable motion blur. Hey tards, for starters lets get both eyes IN SYNC. I suppose asking a minimum wage earning employee to make sure this is correct is out of the question, they can't even get their sound levels to be balanced half the time. Here's another fun fact: I get the same problem on my DLP TV when I watch a 3d movie on my PS3; I have to enable "movie mode" to get the motion blur to go away. I'm not sure if this is a TV problem or if they really recorded the blu-ray disk with one frame for one eye and the next frame for the other eye but I doubt anyone who isn't as tech savvy as me would figure this little thing out. It's subtle for one, no one wants to spend a bunch of money on a TV and PS3 and 3D movie then say out lout do everyone around them "hey does that look blurry to you when it moves?"
2. The brain wants to control things when its in 3D. Despite having a lot of experience with 3D, being able to see stereograms without effort, and being able to play 3d games for hours on end, I don't feel that comfortable watching someone else play a 3D game. I get motion sick, I get eye strain, I feel things are blurrier or out of focus more often. I can't give a good explanation - maybe different parts of the brain are used when I play a game versus watching it.
3. If you hear someone bitch about 3D then they probably wear glasses or contacts. Seriously, I'm not kidding. As a non-glasses wearer I can only venture a guess that the cause is that people's brains are actually compensating for something at all times without them realizing it. For example, on 3d previews the text floats about a foot in front of the screen. My mom couldn't focus on it. Given how often 3d floats that far in front of the screen I'd imagine I wouldn't enjoy 3d either.
4. 3d is awesome for first person games. It is simply where it absolutely shines. There's no motion blur. You can set the depth to whatever you want. You are in control of the view so it feels natural. Real time strategy games can be kind of cool as well since it's like you have a bunch of toys in front of you fighting it out, but getting the depth to where it gives that neat effect without hampering gameplay is sometimes impossible if the game isn't already 3d ready.
Depth perception is not viewing in three dimensions. If you want three dimensions go develop a light field display (http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay/). Stereopsis is achieved perfectly using two displaced cameras to view the image. Parallax is not perfect unless head tracking is used to transform the view frustum dynamically. Its like static depth perception without it. Everyone knows that dynamic is always better unless it is typing (this is a funny truth/joke, I hope someone gets it).
There is a huge difference between the 2D to 3D conversion process to produce films and using a stereoscopic camera with dual cameras. Cameron used stereoscopic cameras to film Avatar, though I am sure he used some tricks to accentuate some scenes. Chronicles of Narnia used the conversion process, so all the characters are flat (I mean in regards to video, and not plot development), but the computer generated backgrounds have depth perception.
Somebody else mentioned that depth perception is past its prime. I agree with him/her. This is the same technology of the 60s. Until head tracking is combined with depth perception, all of the binocular cues are not active. Convergence can be achieved with future technology. The only problem with the current technology is that sometimes bad editors overlay foreground scenes (from a green screen) and backgrounds with different depths of field. This produces a wonky image that our brain has trouble processing. The Gestalt principles should be law when editing 3D video.
Nintendo DS does not use stereopsis (two images). It uses big object detection with a computer vision library to detect the position of your large head. It does not produce two separate images for each eye to view. It then transforms the viewing frame to account for the position of your head. So if you are looking out a window, you can poke your head around and see around the interior of the edges of the screen.
I can't believe I had to read this article so I could comment on it.
3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick.
What nonsense, this is only because its feels weird wearing those glasses. And the glasses tend to be less translucent around the edges which causes a dream like effect similar to the blurred borders in scenes used in 90s TV to evoke a dream state, and in some bad movies.
The shifting of convergence he is talking about due to the strobing from horizontal motion would be greatly reduced using head tracking (with depth perception) to perfect the parallax, but it is kindof difficult unless everybody has their own display with a camera on it. A side angle camera is required to perfect this technology, as using the size of your head does not really determine you head z position. The dynamic/instantaneous position of your head is important.
this is what happens when you let marketing people run wild with sales charts chasing things nobody wants.
you can get a transparent eyepatch, which will still appear as matte and black from outside, wear it, claim piracy, and still have your vision !
i had to repost this due to new interface.
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has been in 3D for centuries.
on my computer
i started editing it. one problem: it sucks
not story wise or acting wise. but technically. the sound is awful, scratching, wind-blowing, the lighting is obviously amateurish. i used wireless mics and you pick up odd hums and rf ghosts. a nightmare
so there it will lie, forever, unreleased, until such time that i get over my perhaps too high self-standards about releasing a technically super-crappy movie in my name. but its embarrassing. i just don't want to edit it and release it. too depressing
someday i may finish editing it, perhaps drunk, to get over the depression of how much it technically sucks, just for laughs. so someday, you will have your laugh at how much i suck at the technical aspects of filmmaking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The crux of his argument is simple: 600 million years of evolution has designed eyes that focus and converge in parallel, at the same distance.
That same 600 million years of evolution has designed humans that frequently focus at different depths to focus upon points of interest. Both 2D and 3D films fail to allow us to focus anywhere but on the screen.
By this logic, 2D movies don't "work and will never work"; By this logic, the ONLY visual entertainment that can work is live: Plays, Opera, Concerts, etc. Unfortunately, it's not economical or practical to produce real time special effects and have actors deliver perfect performances with the same frequency that movies are played...
Once again, by the flim critics' own line of logic, I have once again arrived at the conclusion I always arrive at when critics speak: There is no need for film critics.
(...It would be awesome to have my own playhouse & players that could immediately put on any of the plays I want on demand; Sadly, a childhood incident involving a lost balloon, molten cheese and a bear's crotch has left petrified of those creepy animatronics.)
Yeah, 3D cinema will never work. Look at Avatar. It was a complete disaster. Nobody went to see it because the 3D experience just didn't work at all.
Although I developed a headache, and my wife developed a migraine.
One man's headache is another man's enjoyment. I watched the film twice and experienced no headaches, pain or fever. On the contrary, I found the 3D so realistic that I didn't even notice the effect of it after the first five minutes -- like the digital effects, it was convincing enough to not disturb my brain at all.
And the plot was complete and utter predictable rubbish. Its basically unwatchable garbage. So stereotypical and cliched to the point that it is painful.
Personally, I thought it was a cliched story (with some very two dimensional characters!) but nevertheless a story that I didn't mind hearing told again. Mindless entertainment, sure, but highly entertaining -- and given the record grossing levels I'd suggest that many people thought the same :)
The point about Avatar, though, is that nobody (or very few) people went to see it primarily because of the 3D effect. The 3D fun was an added bonus, but people went because of the sheer grandiose scope of the film, and because they wanted to enjoy another retelling of the fish-out-of-water dances-with-wolves going-native story. The error of film makers post-Avatar has been to assume that Avatar's success was all due to 3D, and that by kludging bad 3D onto bad films they would somehow draw in the masses by recreating some of Avatar's magic.
That trick was never, ever going to work.