Coraline 3-d at home vs theater

Cafe Society
1

Despite my disbelief when my 15 year old sister, who is still at the stage where she knows everything, told me that Coraline was available in 3-d for home purchase, apparently she was right.

I still have my doubts, however, about how it will look at home in 3-d. I have no doubt about the art, and it would nonetheless still remain the most well-executed example of 3-d I’ve ever seen.

I’m worried more about the technology. Has anyone seen both 3-D versions of the movie? Does the crispness, depth, and richness of color hold up in the home version?

2

It uses a different technology, specifically the standard anaglyphic type, whereas the theatrical release was Real3D circular polarized 3D.

That can’t help but alter the colours somewhat, and certainly won’t give quite the same effect.

3

Darnit, the glasses they showed that came with the movie were not the old red-and-blue ones I remember from the 80s, but are still apparently using a variant of that technology. (I did know that they couldn’t be the same new polarized 3-d technology because you’d have to have polarizable playback technology, but I was hoping that there was a third method that would be somewhat in between the “reality” of the two methods.)

Of course since the movie comes bundled with a 2-D version for the same price I will probably still end up getting it eventually.

4

Rent it from Netflix and you get both both 2-D and 3-D, but no 3-D glasses.

5

Uh – 3D movies have always used polarized lenses. The red and blue were cheap knockoffs for TV viewing, but the films in the theaters used polarized lenses as far back as the 1950s.

There is no new technology in current 3D movies (to make the 3D effect, that is).

6

Just watched this at home the other night. We tried the 3-D version on a 42" television from a distance of roughly 9 feet. I found it pretty dissapointing for the following reasons:

  1. The Blue/Red glasses distorted the color, and to me, made everything sort of pale and purple (this did seem to diminish as your eyes adjusted, but it only took a brief second of glancing “underneath” the glasses and the purple returned

  2. Many of the scenes seemed very blurry (at some point I realized that you could somewhat compensate by forcing your eyes to focus at a different depth - kinda like those pictures where you relax your eyes and a 3-d picture pops out of a bunch of random dots- but my eyes never naturally adjusted)

  3. Much of the movie seems not to have any 3-D material, so you are bassically wearing uncomfortable glasses for 90 minutes for only a few quick snatches of 3-d effect.

7

Thanks for the report: so it’s definitely not as good as in theatres. Can I hazard a guess that you did not originally see it in 3-D in the theatre? Because as for your #3, it’s hard to explain if you didn’t see it in polarized 3-D, but it’s not so much a view of specific “3-D material” as a completely new medium. It looks so much more alive and immersive than even most live action 2-D films, not to mention miles ahead of every 3-D film I’d seen up until that point. But yeah, specific points that seemed contrived to show off the capabilities of 3-D were few.

8

Ah, for what it’s worth, I saw it in theaters, in 3D, and at least a few of the scenes on screen weren’t 3D—I know because I peeked under the glasses to check.

They were mostly mundane, two-people-talking shots, I think. And I wasn’t keeping track on how much of the movie was or wasn’t 3D, but a good amount definately was.

I don’t know if the 2D filming was for artistic, financial, or technical reasons. The last one actually gives me a little pause; for all the effort people put into making models and puppets look “real” onscreen, I’d never really thought about what it would take to get the focus right!

9

Thanks for bringing this up. I was going to ask about it on here but forgot.

  1. I’ve never seen a 3D movie in a theatre.

  2. I bought the Coraline disk to try out my new Blue-ray player.

  3. The glasses that came with it are clearly magenta and green.

  4. The 3D effect is terrific. The color is atrocious. Everything is sort of a monochrome yellowish-gray with occasional flashes of color.

So my question was to be: Is this normal or is there something wrong with my perception?

10

I remember theatrical 3-D films with red/green glasses in the 50s and 60s. Some of us are old, remember.

11

Sounds about right to me, given my experience with various two-colored 3D glasses. Polarized 3D glasses can give you the full color effect since they separate the images going into your left and right eyes through polarization. With colored glasses, they’re using complementary or near-complementary colors (I’ve seen red-green, yellow-purple, red-blue, magenta-green) to separate the left and right images. This means that, essentially, you have a very limited color palette at your disposal.

12

I’ll take your word that they used polarization, but it still wasn’t the same technique as they’re using now. The old polarizing glasses used linear polarization, which means the effect was destroyed if you tilted your head slightly one way or the other. The new systems use circular polarization, which doesn’t have this problem, but it was only very recently that someone figured out how to cheaply mass-produce glasses for circular polarization.

A home system could very easily be modified to work with blink-glasses 3D, but the glasses themselves would be more expensive, and you’d get flicker.

13

Huh. When I saw Invasion of the Saucer Men in 3D we were given red/blue glasses. Admittedly it was about forty years after the original theatrical release…