I have seen exactly one 3D movie–Avatar. All the 3D added to the experience was $3 to the ticket price and twenty extra minutes of sitting in a dark room while the theater staff struggled to get the projector working. You can have your 3D, but I for one will be avoiding it in the future.
I listen to a number of film podcasts and read some blogs. From what I’m hearing, 3D is here to stay. We should expect refinement of the technology, and an increasing number of films being shot in 3D.
I’ll be happy with 3D when we’re watching holograms. Otherwise it’s just a big fat pain in the ass for little payoff.
Besides which, what we have now (stereoscopic 3D) is not even 3D! There’s no full 3D information there to see. It looks like a bunch of 2D objects on a 3D plane. Like cardboard cutouts on a stage.
Stupid.
3D does violence to my suspension of disbelief. Holograms would be a big fail too I think, at least for me. Call me when I can get a neural interface on the back of my skull.
Lightnin’, have you called and told your local theater why you won’t be seeing Tron there? They may not know that their decision to show only the 3D version is driving away some regular customers.
Maybe it’s time to look at getting a really big HD TV, a home theater sound system, and a Blu-Ray player with WiFi capability so you can stream video from Netflix. The 3D craze may be sweeping through your local theaters for a while, but a nice home theater setup would probably keep you very happy until (if) the fad dies down.
(Despite my amblyopia I don’t have too much trouble seeing the 3D effect, but I don’t think most movies benefit from it, and like you I appreciate having the 2D option available. Theaters which offer the film in both 3D and 2D are the ones I prefer to give my business to.)
What? That actually is not the case at all, with a movie filmed in proper 3D. The only time you get that effect is for movies that were converted to 3D afterward, such as with Clash of the Titans.
I don’t think anyone was arguing that there are various ways in which to convey depth? And that article’s primarily focused on the virtues of head-tracking, which is something that, not only convey a different effect, but also would not work well in theaters.
Try moving your head an inch or two to one side or another when looking through a window. Unless everything within view is far, far away, you will be able to see little perspective shifts due to parallax motion. In real life, much of our sense of the third-dimension comes from our (mostly unconscious) registration of such effects. That is why one-eyed people are, in most circumstances, scarcely impaired at all in judging the relative distances of things. Binocular disparity is only one of several mechanisms* that provide us with visual information about the third dimension, and almost certainly not the most important, but it is the only one that current 3D movie technology (and, I understand, the current or imminent 3D TV technology) simulates. It can be made to look impressive (especially when you only look at it for a moment or two), but it can never be made to look natural over any sort of extended period of time (unless cinema-goers all agree to have their heads clamped motionless for the duration).
*Other depth cues, such as texture gradients and static perspective, work just as well in regular 2D movies as in 3D ones. In reality, because of these cues, we get a pretty good sense of the third dimension even in regular movies. We do not experience the regular movie world as 2D, it is just not the aggressive, forcing itself on your attention, 3D that you can get from stereo-glasses technology.
You are aware, are you , that the fad for 3D movies has flared up and died down again in the past? As for 3D TV systems, we have yet to find out if they will catch on at all.
As I understand it, the Nintendo 3DS will make use of a quite different technology, that tracks the viewers head motion and alters the display accordingly so as to simulate the parallax based depth cues I described above. How natural this will seem in the absence of the binocular disparity effect you get in contemporary 3D movies remains to be seen (my guess is that the 3D effect at least in gaming, where you do tend to move your head much more than when watching a movie, will actually be more compelling than what you get with 3D glasses, but, of course, for a truly natural experience you need to experience both effects at once).
Anyway, this technology requires everyone to have their own personal screen (as everyone will be moving their heads differently), so although it may well turn out to be great for single-player gaming systems, it can’t be used in a theatrical context (or even for communal TV watching). Also, although I can see how it can be made to work easily enough with computer generated graphical animations, I should think it would be quite impractical to apply this technique to cinematography of actual scenes. Every scene would have to be shot from multiple, slightly different angles, and then the different perspectives seamless substituted for one another on screen with every twitch of the viewer’s head.
ETA:
It was you who brought up the Nintendo 3DS.
It is not a “different” effect. It is a different technology that simulates a different aspect of the totality of real-life depth perception. The real thing uses both sources of information (and more) at once, and you will not be able to get a fully realistic effect unless you are simulating all the different ways we get depth information at once.
You are aware that I indirectly referenced such in that very quote, aren’t you?
You understand incorrectly, unsurprisingly. The 3DS makes use of a Parallax Barrier to provide the same 3D effect found in cinemas, only sans glasses. (incidentally, I’ve played the 3DS; though a few moments of research will reveal the same truths).
No shit, hence why I stated “which is something holograms wouldn’t significantly enhance.” Besides that, it’s extremely impractical for theater usage–you’re confined to a seat near others, very much restricting your movement. Plus I don’t want to have to crane my neck for 2 hours in order to see around something, when there should be no need for such in the first place.
And it is you who has no idea what he’s talking about, as the 3DS does nothing of the sort, and does not at all relate to what you think I “brought up.” Learn about it.
This should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement of crappy post hoc 2D-to-3D conversions, but this isn’t even true for those.
If you’re converting a single 2D frame into 3D, you aren’t going to end up with 2D slices on planes of various depths - you depth-map the whole scene and shift the pixels for the 2nd viewpoint accordingly. Then you finesse it by filling in “hidden” pixels - those bits which would have been hidden behind other objects in the original scene.
For the second POV, every point in the scene is independently shifted relative to the mapped depth. If you convert a flat image of a textured sphere into 3D, the depth map will be a spherical gradient, and the viewer will have the impression that they’re looking at a solid sphere, rather than a flat cut-out of a ball. If you’re looking down a tunnel, all the surfaces will main surfaces will be mapped with linear gradients (with any details on them independently mapped, of course.)
Of course, the limitation is how much detail goes into the depth mapping process, and I would never expect a conversion job to come anywhere close to duplicating the effect that you’d have if you simply photographed/rendered/composited each POV properly. But even crappy conversions have better stereo information than a bunch of flat images on differing planes.
And of course, true stereo has as much depth information in it as a solid scene does, provided that the viewer’s position does not change, as is the case when you’re sitting in place to watch a film.
I concede that devising a way to deliver a head-tracking parallax 3D experience to diverse viewers in an auditorium *is *an important concern for engineers to begin working on - without this technology, Hollywood has no hope of ever appealing to the pigeon demographic.
I haven’t seen any of the “converted” 3D movies, though I am familiar with the process you describe. I’m merely conveying what I’ve heard, which is that several of them offer a sub-standard 3D experience, most similar to layered planes.
Unsurprisingly, Cameron has championed against many of these movies, while stating that conversion can still be effective, much as he aims to do when he 3Ds Titanic in 2012.
Nope. More likely, for the same reason Smell-O-Vision, Sensurround, etc – including all the previous iterations of 3-D – ended: i.e. it was a stupid gimmick that was “funny once”.
This. Given that the current generation of 3D is but a marginal advance over the previous red-and-blue-glasses iteration, it will die out for the same reason – it just looks phony and lame after the first gee-whiz impression.
This is akin to saying “color is a marginal advance over black and white film,” or"surround sound is a marginal advance over stereo," etc, etc.
Damnit, all the ads I’ve seen for Tron:Legacy have just said Imax 3D, not Real 3D, so I thought I’d be able to get away with seeing it in 2D. No dice - it’s probably a 6-8 hour drive to see it in 2D right now.
It isn’t that 3D bothers me, it’s that it isn’t worth the extra 3 bucks for most movies. Tron would be worth it because it’s the type of graphical style that lends well to 3D, but Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Meh.
Actually I am. I bet there are few movie goers indeed who see any significant percentage of every film to hit a theater screen in any given year. There are plenty of other options, and the makers of those films will appreciate your patronage.
Or, if none of those are your style, fine, there are plenty of other things to do in the world, even here in BFE where I live.
Really? There are not already wide gaps between what is in the labs and what is in the theaters? There is no room for innovation? Seriously? On what basis would you support that claim, if it is indeed the claim you are making?
Well, the 3d seems to be bringing people out to theaters compared to just a few years ago, and at a price premium no less!
That keeps the theater managers happy - asses in seats and all, but they increasingly have other options too, given digital distribution - showing concerts from venues, e.g. In fact, this is part of the pressure that theaters are able to bring on the studios, which they couldn’t before - they could conceivably threaten to defect, and still keep the crowds.
Studios otoh make the real money outside US theaters, either overseas, or dvd or other distribution channels, plus merchandising and licensing. They only need the theaters to create the buzz to drive the rest.
So that is the tension right now in film exhibition: Theaters are doing better than before, maybe even OK plus have gained some leverage. Studios are investing huge sums in each film, so need the ancillary sales, but need the theaters to drive that.
Meantime, viewers have increasing options to see films outside of theaters (see: ancillary sales), while everyone above is still happy, which is what I was alluding to.
Sure, b ut in the same time, the directors will learn ot make better use of it, the technology will get cheaper, etc.
Y’all really ought to review the history of movies, particularly the beginning of projection theaters, to see what the content was, and why people went, and what happened after that bit of time.
The history of early film is being repeated right now in a lot of ways, and 3d films is just one aspect of it.
Are you serious? This next-gen 3D is no fad. This isn’t some gimmickry like the old blue and red lensed paper glasses…its real, and it looks amazing in most movies. The best movies I’ve seen in 3D lately use it more for depth texturing than “gotcha, penis in your face” moments. Unless you cannot see it as one of the 3D impaired, I don’t know what to say. It isn’t all just “Avatar was the only reason for it…and it was Avatar’s only right to exist as a movie…” blah, blah, blah. Watch “Up” in 3D, if you can percieve it and aren’t one of the apparently 99.5% of the population that cannot see it, has one eye or gets migraines from it. This is no fad. Its the future. There’s no comparison at all, really, for the 3D that is being produced now than from before. Its not even remotely close.
I do agree that like any other technology, it can and has been abused. But in the hands of a proper director, 3D is bringing movies into your mind and lap like no other has before. Sorry if some can’t/won’t see it that way. And I’m perfectly happy with 2D movies too. Not everything has to be in 3D.
Yeah, this current configuration of 3D is soooo like the former one, and also just like Smell-O-Vision, etc.
Uh-huh. Exactly alike.
:rolleyes:
Alright, before you were making no argument. Now you’re making a terrible one. I should be effectively banned from movies if they don’t bother to put a 2d version out? Yes, there are a lot of good things in this world. But I love going to the movies. I am almost an idea movie-goer for th studios: I will watch any movie with a compelling premise and good energy. I once went to the movies almost every other weekend. I’d see good ones, bad ones, and fun ones. My family would go out all together several times a year.
Not anymore. A combination of quality, pricing, and several other problems have mostly driven me away. 3D is but the latest in a long line of indignations - but oen that’s driving me away from even more movies. And yes, having to go to farther theaters isn’t a huge problem in the gran scheme of life. But ;et’s face facts - I am not going to travel 45 minutes, see a 90 minute movie, and then drive back the same. Every time they shove bigger obstacles in my way, I’m less likely to buy. Movie theaters and studios have been complicit in this crap, because it lets them shove out worse product and less of it. The glory days of the theater are long gone, but it wasn’t TV which killed it.
Yes., that’s pretty much the case. Unlike you, I actually understand the technology of 3d glasses. It’s simple in design, easy to use, cheap the manufacture, hard to break. And when you get an invention that elegant, there’s almost never a good way to improve upon it.
There’s no way around the 3D glasses they use now, likewise for glasses in the general sense. You could switch to 3D contacts, maybe, but that would cause… problems, and it still wouldn’t work for me because it blurs the image. I’d like to have contacts instead of normal glasses, but that’s not happening, either.