Pixar to Release All New Movies in 3D

emcron writes "The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday its Pixar animation studio will commit to 3-D by releasing all of its movies in the format beginning with "Up" in May 2009. Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter made the announcement in New York at a presentation of Disney's upcoming lineup of animated movies."

I hate 3D glasses.

[morgan_greywolf]

I've always hated 3D glasses. They don't quite fit me right (I have a wide head), and I don't have symmetrical vision (I see better out of my right eye than my left), so they don't work as well for me.

So let me know when the 2D versions come out? Kthxbye.

Re:Why?

[Tennguin]

I am guessing that the reason is that the format cannot be replicated in current home theater setups. This is a two fold win for the studios as 1. it gives people an incentive to get off their couches and into the cineplex and 2. it makes it close to impossible for pirates to toss up on torrent sites.

Re:I hate 3D glasses.

[Steauengeglase]

I had the same feeling until going to a Real D 3-D movie. They have these orthogonal polarized glasses that look and feel a lot like a pair of Ray-Bans. They even design them to easily fit over any other eye-wear.

Why has it taken so long?

[Jason1729]

Since they already render the movies in a 3D world, I've always wondered why they don't make 3D versions of everything.

At least because of this, it should be little trouble (and very profitable) for them to go back and re-render their library in 3D.

home market is not important to Pixar?

[Speare]

What this announcement means to me is that the home movie market is not particularly important to the artistic vision of the upcoming Pixar stories. Very disheartening.

Home viewers don't have the 3D hardware, and even if they did, the displays are already horribly low-fidelity compared to the professional projection equipment. Encoding stereoscopic information into the already limited datastream just reduces the image quality even more, either in frame rate or color fidelity. Or the home copy of the movie just doesn't encode any stereoscopic view and you lose out on all the uses of 3D that they wove into the artistic cinematic choices throughout.

An example of this phenomenon is the Christmas movie, "Polar Express." The movie is crafted as a classic 3D experience: nearly every scene uses extensive use of depth, foreshortening and glistening reflective surfaces that really come alive in stereoscopic view. By contrast, watching the monoscopic view on the DVD is like covering one eye with a Dixie cup at the doctor's office.

And given my esteem for artistic attention to detail in past Pixar movies, this is a real problem in my book. The "depth" of Polar Express is nothing compared to even a Pixar short.

Re:w00t!

[Animaether]

Depends on which you saw...

If you saw the IMAX 3D, then you got the standard polarized version (one left projector with vertical polarization, one right projector with horizontal polarization, and matching cheapo glasses).

If you saw the other one (RealD?), then you got a fancy set of glasses that had to be initialized first to match the current rotation angles for single-lens single projector, which projects both fields at once with rotating polarization. More than likely, you have to give those back (I did; NL). The main advantage is that you don't have to keep your head level... you can rest your head on your SO's shoulder and still enjoy the 3D effect instead of it being lost, muddied or getting ghost images.

I wouldn't call it 'circular polarizers', btw... tends to get confused with circular polarizers in photography which are just standard polarizers with another layer that 'de-polarizes' the result so that optical autofocus systems and such don't get confused.

Re:w00t!

[Jupiter Jones]

Even neater trick: Take two pairs of modern 3D glasses. Hold them both up to a regular light so that the light goes through one lens of one pair and then the corresponding lens of the other pair. Rotate one of the pair, and you'll see the light fade in and out as you change the polarization angle.

Rotate the one pair so that no light gets through. Basically, you're letting through only half the light with one lens, and what does get past it is polarized to a certain angle. The other lens then blocks all of that remainder, since its polarization is 90-degrees off. You've got crossed polarizers.

But that's not the neat part. Get a friend (unless you're Zaphod Beeblebrox) to position a third polarized lens between the two. Rotate it to a roughly 45-degree angle from the other two. You'll see light coming through again! This is a big WTF moment when seen in terms of classical physics (but is explained by quantum physics).

JJ