Slashdot Mirror
How James Cameron Pumped Volume Into Titanic
MrSeb writes with ExtremeTech's account of how director (and deep sea explorer) James Cameron spent a reported $18 million converting his blockbuster movie, Titantic, to 3D. The article "looks at the primary way of managing depth in 3D films (parallax), how you add depth to a movie that was originally filmed in 2D, and some of the software (both computer and human-brain) difficulties that Cameron had to overcome in the more-than-two-year process to convert Titanic into 3D."
I saw this movie, not out of my own free will. I was impressed with the 3D. It was good, not over done and I could not believe it wasn't filmed that way.
It wasn't just a cheap shoe-horning of objects onto differing planes. I still don't think the 3d added value, but the tech itself was done right.
Thats more creative accounting than anything. It cost 208 million, marketing, accounting, everything included.
Hollywood companies publish the real numbers in their shareholders reports, one of which happened directly before the titanic movie was released in theatres.
It was only after the fact that they came up with the other shit. Like they always do.
If you talk to anyone, ever, who was due a cut of profits in hollywood, they'll tell you their film lost money. Yet somehow Warner, Universal, Sony etc manage to stay in business and have so much cash that they can spend upwards of 100m a year just on people to talk to people in washington.
If you look at the records, almost every single film they produce loses money. The ones that don't make a very meager profit.
That's because almost every movie loses money. The industry is rather infamous for their dodgy accounting practices - it's a hollywood tradition. If there are no profits, there is nothing to tax.
If it were real 3D, sure then everyone would be all about it. If you could get a real 3D display, they'd be the Next Big Thing(tm). However the "3D with glasses" shit we have now is nothing new. It has been tried at least twice before by my count and failed badly both times. There are multiple problems:
1) You have to wear glasses. If you don't it is an unwatchable mess. So you can't just have something in 3D playing on your TV and have people wander in and out. Also all the glasses have downsides. The polarized ones lose the 3D effect if you tilt your head too much, the shutter ones flicker a bit and require power, the analgyphic ones fuck with colour.
2) For the polarized and shutter glasses, they kill brightness and hurt contrast ratio. They are like wearing ND4 or worse filters on your eyes. So you take a nice bright digital projection screen, put those on and it is kinda dim. Only thing to be done is to just overpower it with even more brightness but that isn't always feasible.
3) There is no parallax. As you shift your view and position, everything stays static, because they only provide image separation. They don't provide parallax so shit looks wrong.
4) There is no focus. Everything is in the same plane of focus. This only works if everything is at or beyond your infinity focal point. If anything gets closer, your brain gets confused.
It is a half-assed 3D implementation, as I said tried before (Disneyland had a 3D Micheal Jackson flick years ago as an example). It isn't a real 3D display. You show me the display that can get all the aspects of 3D, separation, parallax, and focus, and can do so without wearing something, you've got the next big thing in displays. Until then, it isn't going anywhere.
Yeah, but titles that never made it to home video are unlikely to ever have been revived in theaters, either. Song of the South, for instance, has been suppressed because Disney is embarrassed about its racist content; it's hard to imagine that if home video suddenly disappeared Disney would ever consent to it being shown in theaters.
Read my blog.