Not really, the movies I’ve seen in 3d didn’t really excite me, it was cool at first but ultimately underwhelming.
The same critique has been made of colour, synchronized sound, and multichannel audio.
Add me to the “can’t watch them; no stereo vision; looks horrible and blurry” crowd. The last time I saw one, I had to stare at the floor for minutes at a time to avoid puking, and it gave me a headache for several hours.
Yeah, I’ll pass.
I think this projection is a bit naive, as it doesn’t take in to account what has changed.
First, the technology has vastly improved and offers a better experience for viewers and much less of a pain in the ass for technicians. Anaglyphic 3D was going nowhere, because few people will be willing to trade colour for depth. Earlier linearly-polarized 3D was really dark, and the kludge of using dual projectors was a huge pain in the ass to keep synced. (Especially if you needed to make a splice.)
There’s also a lot going on in post to improve the experience for viewers. Transitions between cuts are graduated for differing focal distances to eliminate the jarring readjustments between scenes that attended earlier incarnations of 3D.
Most importantly, though - the scale of the economies involved is not comparable. There’s a massive investment in infrastructure to deliver 3D, and that’s not going to be abandoned.
Also, the types of films that are being presented in 3D are now the types that will continue to draw audiences. Past technological limitations guaranteed that the types of films that most benefit from a 3D presentation (animation and special effects spectacles) wouldn’t be attempted. Stuck with practical effects, scripts for 3D films were nearly uniformly a series of exercises in throwing things at the cameras; it’s natural that they didn’t hold audiences attention.
3D films are out of the ghetto now.
Ah yes, here is a Newsweek article written by Ebert entitled Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too). His point #5 makes it sound like it could be a projection problem after all:
5. HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT 3-D SEEMS A LITTLE DIM? Lenny Lipton is known as the father of the electronic stereoscopic-display industry. He knows how films made with his systems should look. Current digital projectors, he writes, are ‘intrinsically inefficient. Half the light goes to one eye and half to the other, which immediately results in a 50 percent reduction in illumination.’ Then the glasses themselves absorb light. The vast majority of theaters show 3-D at between three and six foot-lamberts (fLs). Film projection provides about 15fLs. The original IMAX format threw 22fLs at the screen. If you don’t know what a foot-lambert is, join the crowd. (In short: it’s the level of light thrown on the screen from a projector with no film in it.) And don’t mistake a standard film for an IMAX film, or “fake IMAX” for original IMAX. What’s the difference? IMAX is building new theaters that have larger screens, which are quite nice, but are not the huge IMAX screens and do not use IMAX film technology. But since all their theaters are called IMAX anyway, this is confusing.
No clue what that means, but it’s so bizarre I had to quote it.
I like 3D when it’s actually done well: Avatar, Up, and Toy Story 3 all looked amazing in 3D. In those cases it gave depth to the worlds shown on screen, it wasn’t just a cheap rush job of making something 2D into something 3D just to sell higher priced tickets. (ie Clash of the Titans or The Last Airbender.)
Also, as I write the examples of the films, it strikes me that those films that had 3D that worked were on the whole, much better movies in general.
The thing with sound and color is that anyone can experience it without getting sick or needing extra hardware.
If this had come out 10 years ago, I’d be thrilled, like I was when I saw that the 2000 swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated was in 3D. But now, honestly, I can get sick just seeing real 3D if the depth is really wide. I need to be able to put things I’m not looking at out of focus, something that diminishes when your GABA receptors aren’t working well.
I’m just hoping the fad lasts long enough that I can see a 3D movie at least once, but it’s still going to be a year or more until I can, I predict.
I’m kind of curious on how the numbers of people who can’t watch/stomach 3D compares to the number of deaf people, actually.
I don’t like it at all. To me if anything onscreen moves with speed then it gets blurry. It also hurts my eyes a bit, I think one eye is slightly weaker than the other and that only really becomes noticeable when I’m watching a 3D film.
I’ve only seen 2 films in 3D, Avatar and Toy Story 3. I can make the argument for Avatar but I felt it added nothing to TS3. In fact it detracted from the film for me.
I’m with Ebert on this, don’t like. Now 3-D porn would be worth a spin; has it been done?
Of course. The 1969 soft-pore corn movie The Stewardesses was the most profitable 3-D movie ever made:
Playboy gave good reviews to 3D porn, saying that 3D was really made for porn. There have been other movies, since. And the first 3D TV setup I ever saw for home use, many years ago, was devoted exclusively to porn. yet another piece of evidence toi sup[port the theory that progress is driven by horny engineers.
I love 3D. And I wear glasses and have no problem with wearing the 3D ones over those, for what it’s worth.
ISTM that the incidence of people on the Dope who can’t see stereo is abnormally high. I must dig up the numbers sometime.
Cool! Thanks. I was thinking more hardcore, though. A theater full of people in glasses all ducking at the same time to avoid an ejaculatory surprise. . .
Well there’s actually two different problems being discussed in this thread
- Inability to see stereo in the exact way necessary for 3D to work
- “simulator sickness” (motion sickness from visuals which are realistic and don’t match physical sensations)
I understand that category 2 affects about 30% of the population.
http://www.nads-sc.uiowa.edu/dscna07/DSCNA05CD/papers/Objective_Measurement_Simulator_Sickness_Role_Visual.pdf
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA498150
I find 3-D that is inserted in the editing process (which is pretty much any special F/X film) unimpressive and forced. That’d be all computer animated features and green-screen fests like Avatar. You’re putting the natural feel of 3-D environments into the hands of a tech to decide where objects are in your field of depth. Overemphasized in certain areas while neglected in others.
I much prefer 3-D that is filmed directly with 3-D cameras and no post production work is needed. Actual live environments. The last “good” 3-D film I saw was the NASCAR one in IMAX. The shots down the length of pit row were amazing as well as the on-track stuff.
I am sure. And unlike others, I don’t think it’s a passing fad. I think it’s here to stay, no matter what. But that doesn’t mean I like it, and yes, it gives my SO a bad headache. It doesn’t bother me as much, but it doesn’t feel good, either.
This is true of 2D->3D conversions, but emphatically not so for movies where CGI elements are composited in. This process is generally entirely automated now, as far as parallax is concerned - CGI elements are keyed to actual camera position + orientation with motion control software, and rendered with virtual optics that precisely match the physical cameras’.
This is effectively exactly the same as if the rendered element were solid and actually present in the filmed scene. Trying to manually match parallax for every item in a composited scene would be a logistical nightmare, and would inevitably lead to disagreement between depth information inferred from parallax and inference from perspective, creating an unsettling effect.
I’m sorry about that. I wonder if this is something that people will eventually get accustomed to? I recall some of my friends complaining that 1st person shoots made them feel sick, in the early nineties - but eventually they managed to get used to it.
Help is on the way. Even as I sit here typing, they are working on the first hard-core 3D porno film, in Hong Kong for release next May. Stars Japanese peformers. Stories here and here. This will probably be worth a thread when it, er, comes out.
Excerpt: “Leading man Hiro Hayana, 35, admits starring in his first erotic film is daunting, although he had no complaints about a scene in which he is tasked with satisfying 100 women – many flown in from Thailand due to a lack of willing talent in conservative Hong Kong.”
Yay, Thailand!
However, there are some things you simply don’t want popping up into your face.
Note the mention of a 3D remake of Caligula being in the works, as well as a pornographic spoof of Avatar in 3D.
Larry Mudd, you’re clearly the advocate here. What would you say is the very best 3D production to date, the one that really showcases the process done well and what it can add to a film?
Same here. The last time I went to a 3D movie, I could only take about 15 minutes before I had to close my eyes and keep them closed the rest of the film. The nausea persisted a fairly long time, much like with certain non-3D video games I’ve tried to play. (Notably, the Plane of Mischief basement maze in EverQuest, plus Morrowind and some others. I tried repeatedly to get used to Morrowind but would get horribly nauseated within 10-15 minutes.)