Several 3D animated films have done it well also, and you'd expect them to be the ones most likely to abuse it. UP and How To Train Your Dragon come to mind as non-gimmicky 3D films. I hear Coraline was very good in 3D also, but I've only seen it in 2D (and it was good there too).
The gimmicky usage is the key. All the problems he mentioned are either non issues (you can't get up and look up the skirt of an actress in a 2D movie, why would you think you could in a 3D? That's just a stupid complaint) or they are nowhere near as big a deal as they used to. There are some people who just have no depth perception. They usually have this problem with actual, real 3D shit, so you can't expect them to see depth in a 3D movie. The current crop of 3D in theaters produces headaches only in a very small number of people. TV's are another story altogether (shutter glasses can produce an effect similar to sleep deprivation, that won't change until we get rid of shutter glasses).
All that's left really is the gimmicky usage, and that will go away with time. 3D is just something to make it seem more natural (like surround sound and color), and if studios/directors would treat it as such we would be much better off. Some of them get it. Others, like Warner Brothers, obviously don't.
For what it's worth, Batman isn't the type of movie that would greatly benefit from 3D. It would be nice because it would look a little more realistic, but having it is not going to significantly enhance the movie, and not having it isn't going to hurt it any. Avatar was just the opposite - it is absolutely spectacular in 3D, and watching it in 2D later is a big disappointment. The 3D does a lot for the movie, because Cameron really worked to maximize the quality of the 3D experience.
...unless you went in and fixed the perspective for every frame.
You realize we've got cool things now called computers that can do that pretty easily, right?
I don't see how this is a problem at all. In fact you could even do it without post processing with the proper equipment - a camera that spreads the distance between the lenses as the field of view is adjusted should maintain the effect in 3D perfectly. In fact, it would probably look pretty damn cool.
If you think about it, you get quite a few more options with stereoscopic in-camera effects. For example, the point of the dolly zoom is to give you an unsettling feeling by confusing your perspective. What happens if you've got another reference point for perspective that can further be confused? The 3D version could be even more unsettling than the original dolly zoom is. What about adjusting the distance between lenses but maintaining the field of view? I'll bet that would give you some interesting effects.
Really, you get more options with 3D once the directors and camera wizards get comfortable with it. The problems it causes with the old tricks can be solved, and there are whole new horizons to explore.
...and requires the director to make hard choices about focus and focal points.
Ummm... isn't that why the director gets paid millions of dollars to shoot a movie? 3D doesn't change the fact that the director has to make hard choices about focus and focal points - those choices existed before 3D. It's also pretty easy to do deep focus in 3D - Avatar did a ton of it. That's a totally bullshit excuse.
The only difference between 3D and 2D is you're shooting with a stereoscopic camera when you shoot in 3D. The optics don't change one bit, and neither do the in-camera effects.
I went and saw a normal movie immediately after watching Avatar in 3D, and was surprised at how disappointed I was. I never got the sense of "flatness" before 3D movies (actually I probably did, just didn't notice), it was kinda shocking.
Well used 3D can definitely immerse you more completely into a film than non-3D can. However, if used incorrectly it can just as easily toss you out of the immersion, like when they use stupid gimmicks to throw shit at your face. Very rarely is that going to be an immersive effect.
Yeah, that was totally a bad analogy, since Apple is definitely overrated, is certainly the devil, and just might be the new Microsoft.
There is also some negativity bias there. People who are dissatisfied with a product/service/whatever tend to complain a lot, but people who are satisfied rarely go ranting and raving about how content they are.
What you want to do is estimate how many people are complaining vs how many people are going to see it. There may be thousands of people complaining about it, but if millions are going to see it then a few thousand people complaining is not significant.
Honestly, the number people who enjoy the 3D enough to pay 30% more for the ticket should tell you something.
When I go to my local cinema, they have a digital projector with pixels more obvious than my home screen and poorly set up sound so there's often clipping or distortion - and it's only stereo in some of the smaller screens.
Damn that's a shitty theater! I wouldn't go there either. There is a good deal of competition where I live, so even the cheap theaters are well maintained and well run.
You know they've done that in 2d films since movies were invented right? It's called depth of field, and is determined by optics, not the overlapping of two shots to get the 3D effect.
I don't know why you're just noticing it now. Maybe you're looking for 3D gimmicks and don't want to admit it?
Except the whole reason they do it is to force you to focus on what is important to focus on. That's the whole point of a story. Yeah, there are some directors who like to do everything in deep focus a-la Orson Wells, but most directing styles aren't well suited by the practice, and most movies would be worse off for it (including Avatar, IMO).
The way they would have to do what you want is to have all those scenes shot with a very boring background, so that you wouldn't want to look at anything but what your attention should be focused on.
If you didn't go gaga over 3D and instead let it do what it's supposed to do - immerse you further in the film - you wouldn't have this problem. It's still a film, and it has something it is trying to show you. Why don't you just let it show you?
I don't see how this is a problem for 3D but not 2D, the optical focus has absolutely nothing to do with the overlay of images that gives the sense of 3D in 3D films. The background isn't blurry because it's 3D, the background is blurry because the director chose a shallow focus to force you to look at what he wants you to look at.
Avatar in fact used deep focus on pretty much all of the big scenery shots (and there were a lot of them), and that's the movie the GP is complaining about! You know the shots where the ship in the foreground was in focus, and so was all the cool shit in the background? Yeah, that was deep focus. It's done with optics and optics only.
When the director wants you to focus on what's going on, he's going to make you focus on what's going on. That's his job as the director. It has absolutely nothing to do with 3D.
Every movie I watch that is not 3d gives me a disappointing feeling of flatness. Not enough to ruin the movie by any means, but it's definitely noticeable. Inception, for example, I caught myself thinking "This movie is great, it would be awesome in 3D!". Did it ruin a good movie? Of course not, not by a long shot. Would I have enjoyed it more if it were 3D? You bet your ass I would have.
The problem with 3D comes when people try to use it as a gimmick, instead of as a tool to increase immersion. It's just like the old color movies - you had people doing all kinds of flashy things, and of course they were stupid. Same thing with stereo sound - gimmicks like alternating noises between speakers and shit, making absolutely sure that everyone knew you were using stereo.
3D is no different. 80's 3D was almost pure gimmick, because it was so crappy that was all it was good for. The current iteration of 3D is much higher quality, and yeah it still has issues, but it is at the point where directors are able to use it to enhance a good movie, and they are doing it. Look at Avatar and How To Train Your Dragon - neither of those used 3D as a gimmick, with stupid shit flying in your face. They used it to make the movie feel more real, to immerse you deeper in the story, and it worked extremely well. In fact it was after Avatar that I watched a normal movie and realized how disappointed I was that it wasn't 3D for the first time. It was a good movie too.
I don't often watch movies more than once (there are a few exceptions, of course), so watching movies on a 50' screen in high-def and superior surround sound at $3-$12 a pop (depending on which theater I go to - $3 theaters rock!) is a better experience for my money than dropping $1.5k+ and spending $3-$30 per movie. Do you realize I could watch 150+ movies in the theater at $9 each for the price of a decent 52" TV? 450 if I stick to the cheap theaters (one of which is actually probably the best movie experience in town - beer + pizza+ $3 movies = awesome).
With my movie viewing habits (average about 2 per month) that's 6 years worth of movies. You'll probably be upgrading your equipment before then, but who knows, maybe not eh? If we add in the cost of movies (assuming $3 per movie 2 movies a month, you're probably spending 2-5 times that though) and a mid-range blu-ray player and it's another 3 years before you break even with me just going to the theater.
Of course, that's just for me. If you watch every movie that comes out, for example, you'll burn through $2k worth of movies in a year or so. If you stick to the cheap, $3 theaters (which still have better picture and sound than your home theater, btw) it would take three decades to break even with me. If you got the premium online rental plan at $30 per month, you'll never break even. But then, if you like to watch every movie under the sun, you would break even pretty quickly.
It's all relative to your viewing habits. I personally find the theater a lot cheaper and more rewarding, but you may not. If I do have a movie I want to watch more than once, my 8 year old 42" HDTV that I got for $400 used is more than good enough for me.
Somebody hasn't been to the theater lately (you know, the ones that are packed night after night selling $12-$19 per seat for the latest 3D movie). There is definitely a lot of money in it.
Honestly, the current crop of 3D is vastly superior to the old methods. It can definitely make a good movie seem more "real" and immersive. What it won't do, though, is make a bad movie better. And really, some movies benefit more than others (particularly fast-paced action movies), and for some movies it's a complete waste of money.
I also think it's lame to have just one 3D movie in a franchise - Harry Potter for example. Six flat movies and one 3D? Lame. Batman too, especially if the third movie is going to be the last movie in this particular set of Batman movies.
That's just my personal opinion, but you can't deny that this particular "3D fad" is far more wide-spread and robust than any that came before, and people are not being constantly let down by the 3D effect. Perhaps it's just a case of finally having the technology to do it right. I'm sure when color came out a lot of people said it was just a fad, too.
Have you ever used Swype? I absolutely loved it from the first moment I tried it. It was instantly faster than two-thumb typing, and the more I use it the faster I get with it.
Ditto for T9 on a clamshell phone vs multi-button mashing (222-55-6-333-etc).
I've never used Gestures or Dasher, so I can't say for them.
We need to teach students calculus because it's the first real introduction to the type mathematics you work on as a mathematician.
I don't see how that creates a need to teach calculus to those who aren't going to be mathematicians, especially since, relatively speaking, we need so very few of them.
For example, most people can look at five items on a table and immediately tell you it's five items without counting them. They know what five items looks like.
Put ten items on a table, however, and very few people can do the same thing. If you didn't give them any time to count, they could probably guess pretty close. Get up to 15 items and people's guesses are going to be off by 30%+. 20 items and they don't have a prayer. Beyond that people can't really conceptualize how many individual "things" are in a number. 100, 1000, 10000000, it doesn't matter. All they can really tell you is one is a lot more than the other, and the last is a lot bigger than all of them. "A lot" doesn't really get quantified in their mind.
A person would get it if you had them look out on a crowd with a thousand people in it, and told them that under one person's chair is a thousand dollars, and then said it would be $10 to sit in that one empty seat over there. They'd be able to see that there is no way in hell that seat has the thousand dollars under it, and probably wouldn't bother. However, give them a slip of paper that says "one in 1,000 wins" and a whole lot of people would think "Damn! Those are pretty good odds!".
I remember seeing a story about a lady who played various lotteries religiously, day in and day out. She'd spend $800+ every week, and win back $400-600 every week.
My friend's girlfriend thinks we should just print a bunch of money and not tell anybody about it to get rid of our National Debt. I tried explaining how that causes inflation, and why inflation is bad, a dozen different ways, but she still doesn't get it, and still thinks that's the answer to the problem.
Except that it is still being distributed with DRM, which still places further restrictions on the rights of the recipients of the software to distribute said software, which is still a violation of the GPL.
They fixed part of the problem, but they are continuing to artificially restrict the distribution of the software, which is a clear violation of the GPL.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what any of the VLC developers think, what matters is what the GPL says. You cannot place distribution restrictions on the software, period.
Note: Under GPLv2 you can place restrictions on the hardware, just not the software. GPLv3 denies both types of restrictions, but VLC is GPLv2.
Then why did Apple choose to distribute it anyway?
It's the distributor who is responsible for not violating copyright law. The developer was well within their rights to give the software to Apple for distribution, and Apple had all the rights necessary to legally distribute the software.
Instead they chose to distribute the software in a way that violates the terms of their license to distribute.
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Several 3D animated films have done it well also, and you'd expect them to be the ones most likely to abuse it. UP and How To Train Your Dragon come to mind as non-gimmicky 3D films. I hear Coraline was very good in 3D also, but I've only seen it in 2D (and it was good there too).
The gimmicky usage is the key. All the problems he mentioned are either non issues (you can't get up and look up the skirt of an actress in a 2D movie, why would you think you could in a 3D? That's just a stupid complaint) or they are nowhere near as big a deal as they used to. There are some people who just have no depth perception. They usually have this problem with actual, real 3D shit, so you can't expect them to see depth in a 3D movie. The current crop of 3D in theaters produces headaches only in a very small number of people. TV's are another story altogether (shutter glasses can produce an effect similar to sleep deprivation, that won't change until we get rid of shutter glasses).
All that's left really is the gimmicky usage, and that will go away with time. 3D is just something to make it seem more natural (like surround sound and color), and if studios/directors would treat it as such we would be much better off. Some of them get it. Others, like Warner Brothers, obviously don't.
For what it's worth, Batman isn't the type of movie that would greatly benefit from 3D. It would be nice because it would look a little more realistic, but having it is not going to significantly enhance the movie, and not having it isn't going to hurt it any. Avatar was just the opposite - it is absolutely spectacular in 3D, and watching it in 2D later is a big disappointment. The 3D does a lot for the movie, because Cameron really worked to maximize the quality of the 3D experience.
...unless you went in and fixed the perspective for every frame.
You realize we've got cool things now called computers that can do that pretty easily, right?
I don't see how this is a problem at all. In fact you could even do it without post processing with the proper equipment - a camera that spreads the distance between the lenses as the field of view is adjusted should maintain the effect in 3D perfectly. In fact, it would probably look pretty damn cool.
If you think about it, you get quite a few more options with stereoscopic in-camera effects. For example, the point of the dolly zoom is to give you an unsettling feeling by confusing your perspective. What happens if you've got another reference point for perspective that can further be confused? The 3D version could be even more unsettling than the original dolly zoom is. What about adjusting the distance between lenses but maintaining the field of view? I'll bet that would give you some interesting effects.
Really, you get more options with 3D once the directors and camera wizards get comfortable with it. The problems it causes with the old tricks can be solved, and there are whole new horizons to explore.
...and requires the director to make hard choices about focus and focal points.
Ummm... isn't that why the director gets paid millions of dollars to shoot a movie? 3D doesn't change the fact that the director has to make hard choices about focus and focal points - those choices existed before 3D. It's also pretty easy to do deep focus in 3D - Avatar did a ton of it. That's a totally bullshit excuse.
The only difference between 3D and 2D is you're shooting with a stereoscopic camera when you shoot in 3D. The optics don't change one bit, and neither do the in-camera effects.
I went and saw a normal movie immediately after watching Avatar in 3D, and was surprised at how disappointed I was. I never got the sense of "flatness" before 3D movies (actually I probably did, just didn't notice), it was kinda shocking.
Well used 3D can definitely immerse you more completely into a film than non-3D can. However, if used incorrectly it can just as easily toss you out of the immersion, like when they use stupid gimmicks to throw shit at your face. Very rarely is that going to be an immersive effect.
I think you may have problems with your eyes if clear 3D glasses make everything dark for you. They don't do anything like that for me.
Yeah, that was totally a bad analogy, since Apple is definitely overrated, is certainly the devil, and just might be the new Microsoft.
There is also some negativity bias there. People who are dissatisfied with a product/service/whatever tend to complain a lot, but people who are satisfied rarely go ranting and raving about how content they are.
What you want to do is estimate how many people are complaining vs how many people are going to see it. There may be thousands of people complaining about it, but if millions are going to see it then a few thousand people complaining is not significant.
Honestly, the number people who enjoy the 3D enough to pay 30% more for the ticket should tell you something.
When I go to my local cinema, they have a digital projector with pixels more obvious than my home screen and poorly set up sound so there's often clipping or distortion - and it's only stereo in some of the smaller screens.
Damn that's a shitty theater! I wouldn't go there either. There is a good deal of competition where I live, so even the cheap theaters are well maintained and well run.
How many movies have that?
A few pornos do it.
You know they've done that in 2d films since movies were invented right? It's called depth of field, and is determined by optics, not the overlapping of two shots to get the 3D effect.
I don't know why you're just noticing it now. Maybe you're looking for 3D gimmicks and don't want to admit it?
but they should NOT do it anymore
Except the whole reason they do it is to force you to focus on what is important to focus on. That's the whole point of a story. Yeah, there are some directors who like to do everything in deep focus a-la Orson Wells, but most directing styles aren't well suited by the practice, and most movies would be worse off for it (including Avatar, IMO).
The way they would have to do what you want is to have all those scenes shot with a very boring background, so that you wouldn't want to look at anything but what your attention should be focused on.
If you didn't go gaga over 3D and instead let it do what it's supposed to do - immerse you further in the film - you wouldn't have this problem. It's still a film, and it has something it is trying to show you. Why don't you just let it show you?
I don't see how this is a problem for 3D but not 2D, the optical focus has absolutely nothing to do with the overlay of images that gives the sense of 3D in 3D films. The background isn't blurry because it's 3D, the background is blurry because the director chose a shallow focus to force you to look at what he wants you to look at.
Avatar in fact used deep focus on pretty much all of the big scenery shots (and there were a lot of them), and that's the movie the GP is complaining about! You know the shots where the ship in the foreground was in focus, and so was all the cool shit in the background? Yeah, that was deep focus. It's done with optics and optics only.
When the director wants you to focus on what's going on, he's going to make you focus on what's going on. That's his job as the director. It has absolutely nothing to do with 3D.
I could not disagree more.
Every movie I watch that is not 3d gives me a disappointing feeling of flatness. Not enough to ruin the movie by any means, but it's definitely noticeable. Inception, for example, I caught myself thinking "This movie is great, it would be awesome in 3D!". Did it ruin a good movie? Of course not, not by a long shot. Would I have enjoyed it more if it were 3D? You bet your ass I would have.
The problem with 3D comes when people try to use it as a gimmick, instead of as a tool to increase immersion. It's just like the old color movies - you had people doing all kinds of flashy things, and of course they were stupid. Same thing with stereo sound - gimmicks like alternating noises between speakers and shit, making absolutely sure that everyone knew you were using stereo.
3D is no different. 80's 3D was almost pure gimmick, because it was so crappy that was all it was good for. The current iteration of 3D is much higher quality, and yeah it still has issues, but it is at the point where directors are able to use it to enhance a good movie, and they are doing it. Look at Avatar and How To Train Your Dragon - neither of those used 3D as a gimmick, with stupid shit flying in your face. They used it to make the movie feel more real, to immerse you deeper in the story, and it worked extremely well. In fact it was after Avatar that I watched a normal movie and realized how disappointed I was that it wasn't 3D for the first time. It was a good movie too.
I don't often watch movies more than once (there are a few exceptions, of course), so watching movies on a 50' screen in high-def and superior surround sound at $3-$12 a pop (depending on which theater I go to - $3 theaters rock!) is a better experience for my money than dropping $1.5k+ and spending $3-$30 per movie. Do you realize I could watch 150+ movies in the theater at $9 each for the price of a decent 52" TV? 450 if I stick to the cheap theaters (one of which is actually probably the best movie experience in town - beer + pizza+ $3 movies = awesome).
With my movie viewing habits (average about 2 per month) that's 6 years worth of movies. You'll probably be upgrading your equipment before then, but who knows, maybe not eh? If we add in the cost of movies (assuming $3 per movie 2 movies a month, you're probably spending 2-5 times that though) and a mid-range blu-ray player and it's another 3 years before you break even with me just going to the theater.
Of course, that's just for me. If you watch every movie that comes out, for example, you'll burn through $2k worth of movies in a year or so. If you stick to the cheap, $3 theaters (which still have better picture and sound than your home theater, btw) it would take three decades to break even with me. If you got the premium online rental plan at $30 per month, you'll never break even. But then, if you like to watch every movie under the sun, you would break even pretty quickly.
It's all relative to your viewing habits. I personally find the theater a lot cheaper and more rewarding, but you may not. If I do have a movie I want to watch more than once, my 8 year old 42" HDTV that I got for $400 used is more than good enough for me.
But like I said, that's just me. :)
Somebody hasn't been to the theater lately (you know, the ones that are packed night after night selling $12-$19 per seat for the latest 3D movie). There is definitely a lot of money in it.
Honestly, the current crop of 3D is vastly superior to the old methods. It can definitely make a good movie seem more "real" and immersive. What it won't do, though, is make a bad movie better. And really, some movies benefit more than others (particularly fast-paced action movies), and for some movies it's a complete waste of money.
I also think it's lame to have just one 3D movie in a franchise - Harry Potter for example. Six flat movies and one 3D? Lame. Batman too, especially if the third movie is going to be the last movie in this particular set of Batman movies.
That's just my personal opinion, but you can't deny that this particular "3D fad" is far more wide-spread and robust than any that came before, and people are not being constantly let down by the 3D effect. Perhaps it's just a case of finally having the technology to do it right. I'm sure when color came out a lot of people said it was just a fad, too.
Perhaps you should try it first - you know, so you don't look like an idiot so much.
Have you ever used Swype? I absolutely loved it from the first moment I tried it. It was instantly faster than two-thumb typing, and the more I use it the faster I get with it.
Ditto for T9 on a clamshell phone vs multi-button mashing (222-55-6-333-etc).
I've never used Gestures or Dasher, so I can't say for them.
Swype is awesome, I'm faster with one finger in portrait mode than I ever was with two in landscape mode.
All I gotta say.
Nor can you resign from the Can't Understand Sarcasm department.
We need to teach students calculus because it's the first real introduction to the type mathematics you work on as a mathematician.
I don't see how that creates a need to teach calculus to those who aren't going to be mathematicians, especially since, relatively speaking, we need so very few of them.
Really, it's how our brain handles numbers.
For example, most people can look at five items on a table and immediately tell you it's five items without counting them. They know what five items looks like.
Put ten items on a table, however, and very few people can do the same thing. If you didn't give them any time to count, they could probably guess pretty close. Get up to 15 items and people's guesses are going to be off by 30%+. 20 items and they don't have a prayer. Beyond that people can't really conceptualize how many individual "things" are in a number. 100, 1000, 10000000, it doesn't matter. All they can really tell you is one is a lot more than the other, and the last is a lot bigger than all of them. "A lot" doesn't really get quantified in their mind.
A person would get it if you had them look out on a crowd with a thousand people in it, and told them that under one person's chair is a thousand dollars, and then said it would be $10 to sit in that one empty seat over there. They'd be able to see that there is no way in hell that seat has the thousand dollars under it, and probably wouldn't bother. However, give them a slip of paper that says "one in 1,000 wins" and a whole lot of people would think "Damn! Those are pretty good odds!".
I remember seeing a story about a lady who played various lotteries religiously, day in and day out. She'd spend $800+ every week, and win back $400-600 every week.
This was her long-term investment strategy.
My friend's girlfriend thinks we should just print a bunch of money and not tell anybody about it to get rid of our National Debt. I tried explaining how that causes inflation, and why inflation is bad, a dozen different ways, but she still doesn't get it, and still thinks that's the answer to the problem.
Frustrating is not a strong enough word for it.
Except that it is still being distributed with DRM, which still places further restrictions on the rights of the recipients of the software to distribute said software, which is still a violation of the GPL.
They fixed part of the problem, but they are continuing to artificially restrict the distribution of the software, which is a clear violation of the GPL.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what any of the VLC developers think, what matters is what the GPL says. You cannot place distribution restrictions on the software, period.
Note: Under GPLv2 you can place restrictions on the hardware, just not the software. GPLv3 denies both types of restrictions, but VLC is GPLv2.
I don't see how any of that should preclude someone from complaining about Apple's App Store policies.
Are we not allowed to have opinions any more?
Then why did Apple choose to distribute it anyway?
It's the distributor who is responsible for not violating copyright law. The developer was well within their rights to give the software to Apple for distribution, and Apple had all the rights necessary to legally distribute the software.
Instead they chose to distribute the software in a way that violates the terms of their license to distribute.
How is Apple not at fault?