Filmmakers Resisting Hollywood's 3-D Push 521
gollum123 passes along a piece from the NY Times on the building resistance to Hollywood's 3-D plans — from filmmakers. "A joke making the rounds online involves a pair of red and green glasses and some blurry letters that say, 'If you can’t make it good, make it 3-D.' While Hollywood rushes dozens of 3-D movies to the screen — nearly 60 are planned in the next two years, including 'Saw VII' and 'Mars Needs Moms!' — a rebellion among some filmmakers and viewers has been complicating the industry’s jump into the third dimension. Several influential directors took surprisingly public potshots at the 3-D boom during the recent Comic-Con... Behind the scenes..., filmmakers have begun to resist production executives eager for 3-D sales. For reasons both aesthetic and practical, some directors often do not want to convert a film to 3-D or go to the trouble and expense of shooting with 3-D cameras, which are still relatively untested on big movies with complex stunts and locations. Tickets for 3-D films carry a $3 to $5 premium, and industry executives roughly estimate that 3-D pictures average an extra 20 percent at the box office. Filmmakers like Mr. Whedon and Mr. Abrams argue that 3-D technology does little to enhance a cinematic story, while adding a lot of bother."
This just in (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's nice to see (Score:3, Informative)
My eyes - the goggles - zey do nuhsing!
The quote is "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!".
Get it right. There is no "they", nor is there any bad pronunciation. There is an accent, but it is still clearly and properly enunciated and articulated.
Re:entrenched people don't like new. (Score:1, Informative)
My kid is 10, and doesn't like 3D.
People resist stupid change for changes sake. It reeks of gimmick, because, much like smell-o-vision, it is a gimmick.
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
As I've yet to attend a 3D movie without them, I say enjoy your fancy theater. For the rest of us it is rather annoying and even more so for my subclass of those who wear regular glasses and thus get headaches from improperly aligned lenses.
Can't see it. Literally. (Score:2, Informative)
I cannot see 3D (along with ?? percent of the population) so the 3D versions
are simply something to be avoided.
Re:FX always trump story. (Score:3, Informative)
You must not have an arthouse theater in your town. Go find one. There are lots of good movies being made here in the USA and released in theaters all around the nation. 2002-2008 was a huge boom era, but there are still independent films that lean heavily on their story and lack of special effects, made from that boom era but stuck in post production and being put into theaters even now.
The correct term (Score:1, Informative)
The correct term is "stereoscopic."
A truly "3D" film would allow you to view the 3D objects from any reasonable angle (Say at least a 90 degree arc). You would not need to wear glasses, unless you are missing a lot of depth perception like me. The lack of glasses would mean you don't get disoriented or see blurring if your head is tilted slightly to the side.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
I have astigmatism too but it's easily corrected with glasses or contacts. If you don't already have a set you should probably get some. In my case it helped a lot with headaches and depth perception I didn't even realize I was lacking before.
The 2k-48fps vs 4k-24fps article you mention... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1 [variety.com]
I'm hearing that there are already calls to increase the frame rate to at least 30 fps for digital 3-D because certain camera moves, especially pans, look jumpy in 3-D. I saw that in the Imax 3-D "Beowulf." You've been an advocate for both 3-D and higher frame rates. Have you seen the problem and do you have any thoughts on it?
For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it's like you're standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It's like you never saw it before, when in fact it's been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Some people call it judder, others strobing. I call it annoying. It's also easily fixed, because the stereo renaissance is enabled by digital cinema, and digital cinema supplies the answer to the strobing problem.
The DLP chip in our current generation of digital projectors can currently run up to 144 frames per second, and they are still being improved. The maximum data rate currently supports stereo at 24 frames per second or 2-D at 48 frames per second. So right now, today, we could be shooting 2-D movies at 48 frames and running them at that speed. This alone would make 2-D movies look astonishingly clear and sharp, at very little extra cost, with equipment that's already installed or being installed.
Increasing the data-handling capacity of the projectors and servers is not a big deal, if there is demand. I've run tests on 48 frame per second stereo and it is stunning. The cameras can do it, the projectors can (with a small modification) do it. So why aren't we doing it, as an industry?
Because people have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second ... with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won't. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don't solve them at all.
If every single digital theater was perceived by the audience as being equivalent to Imax or Showscan in image quality, which is readily achievable with off-the-shelf technology now, running at higher frame rates, then isn't that the same kind of marketing hook as 3-D itself? Something you can't get at home. An aspect of the film that you can't pirate.
Other than that, for digital 3-D, would you rather see energy going into moving from 2K to 4K, or into moving from 24 fps to 48 or 72 fps, and why?
4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080x1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema? Which ignores the fact that the social situation is entirely different, and that the cinema screen is 100 times larger in area. So they somehow hit on 4K, which people should remember is not twice the amount of picture data, it is four times the data. Meaning servers need to be four times the capacity, as does the delivery pipe to the theater, etc.
But 4K doesn't solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA e
Re:FX always trump story. (Score:3, Informative)
Ask the kids that saw Episode 1 how they feel about it today (they're 17-20 years old today) and you will universally hear "OMG, I can't believe I ever liked that crap!"
As much as I wish that were true, that's the exact opposite of what I've heard from most younger people I've talked to. The ones who grew up with the new movies still like the new movies, because that's what they grew up with, and a sizable chunk of them actually prefer them to the originals. Some of them react how you said as they get older, but far from all of them. Maybe not even the majority of them, but I've never actually kept score or anything.