How James Cameron Pumped Volume Into Titanic 289
MrSeb writes with ExtremeTech's account of how director (and deep sea explorer) James Cameron spent a reported $18 million converting his blockbuster movie, Titantic, to 3D. The article "looks at the primary way of managing depth in 3D films (parallax), how you add depth to a movie that was originally filmed in 2D, and some of the software (both computer and human-brain) difficulties that Cameron had to overcome in the more-than-two-year process to convert Titanic into 3D."
Re:make or break (Score:5, Informative)
I saw this movie, not out of my own free will. I was impressed with the 3D. It was good, not over done and I could not believe it wasn't filmed that way.
It wasn't just a cheap shoe-horning of objects onto differing planes. I still don't think the 3d added value, but the tech itself was done right.
Re:Wonderful, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Thats more creative accounting than anything. It cost 208 million, marketing, accounting, everything included.
Hollywood companies publish the real numbers in their shareholders reports, one of which happened directly before the titanic movie was released in theatres.
It was only after the fact that they came up with the other shit. Like they always do.
If you talk to anyone, ever, who was due a cut of profits in hollywood, they'll tell you their film lost money. Yet somehow Warner, Universal, Sony etc manage to stay in business and have so much cash that they can spend upwards of 100m a year just on people to talk to people in washington.
If you look at the records, almost every single film they produce loses money. The ones that don't make a very meager profit.
Re:Wonderful, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wonderful, but... (Score:2, Informative)
3D has not failed big time. Avatar at $1.6B is one of the most successful films of all time.
That includes both the 2D and S3D (not 3D, it's Stereoscopic) versions.
I did a small amount of looking, I don't see anywhere that the revenues for box office sales are broken down by which version grossed how much. Raw dollars are also not a good measure of popularity of the S3D version over the 2D version, because you're not adjusting for the increased ticket price. The numbers we need are actual ticket sales for each version, which I haven't been able to locate.
I think it's fair to point out that people were saying the same thing about color TV in the 1960's: It's a fad--who needs it.
No, it's not fair at all to say that. We already see in color, black and white was a step backwards in terms of imagery... caused by technological limitations of early film and cameras. It's important to understand this is not "3D", it's just another way to add Depth to the screen. Traditionally, ever since the dawn of time, humans have used Perspective in 2D mediums to convey depth and it works very well because we already naturally use 2D perspective to build a 3D "scene" in our minds.
The S3D is not doing anything new in this regard- it's just another mechanism to simulate Depth in a 2D scene. The primary difference is that traditional 2D perspective creates a sensation of looking through a window into a 3D scene, where the S3D make the scene appear to "pop" out of the "window" and float in front of it.
If you adjusted the color for one station/network so that flesh tones were natural, they were yellow on other channels because there was no agreed upon standard on which to base this and each network did its own thing. Eventually, the standards were developed and each station/network adopted them, which is why, today, you can channel surf and never need to adjust it [if you even can on a modern TV set].
And that had absolutely nothing to do with color in film-making. Color was first added when we were still using projectors- light shined through actual film reel, so there was not any variation between projectors. The color balancing issue was a result of encoding the images electronically, broadcasting them, and then reprocessing the signals into output for TV displays. So it's not even a problem which is directly relevant to your point.
Look at any recent DVD releases of classic films and you'll usually see that the entire film has been "digitally remastered".
What that means was the original filmstock was used as a master for making the digital copy, instead of using a copy which had been created for the production of VHS tapes. You always want the digital remaster because it's a copy from the original, mixed for modern audio and high resolution digital screens, instead of a copy of a copy which was specifically mixed for VHS resolutions, playback rates, etc. The digital remasters sometimes have been "cleaned up" or otherwise restored, just depending on the condition of the original masters, but it's not always the case. Regardless, they are the closest you can get to the original film-based projection without using an actual analog light-based projector.
I can assure you that there are many players in the video technology field that are placing heavy longterm investments on 3D.
That's because some of this technology will still apply whenever we develop actual 3D displays, which will be an entirely different story.
Something that was once known as "Seward's Folly" is now known as something called "Alaska" ...
And something which was once known as "The Promised Land" is now known as a seething pit of racial hatred and sand.
The problem is 3D sucks (Score:5, Informative)
If it were real 3D, sure then everyone would be all about it. If you could get a real 3D display, they'd be the Next Big Thing(tm). However the "3D with glasses" shit we have now is nothing new. It has been tried at least twice before by my count and failed badly both times. There are multiple problems:
1) You have to wear glasses. If you don't it is an unwatchable mess. So you can't just have something in 3D playing on your TV and have people wander in and out. Also all the glasses have downsides. The polarized ones lose the 3D effect if you tilt your head too much, the shutter ones flicker a bit and require power, the analgyphic ones fuck with colour.
2) For the polarized and shutter glasses, they kill brightness and hurt contrast ratio. They are like wearing ND4 or worse filters on your eyes. So you take a nice bright digital projection screen, put those on and it is kinda dim. Only thing to be done is to just overpower it with even more brightness but that isn't always feasible.
3) There is no parallax. As you shift your view and position, everything stays static, because they only provide image separation. They don't provide parallax so shit looks wrong.
4) There is no focus. Everything is in the same plane of focus. This only works if everything is at or beyond your infinity focal point. If anything gets closer, your brain gets confused.
It is a half-assed 3D implementation, as I said tried before (Disneyland had a 3D Micheal Jackson flick years ago as an example). It isn't a real 3D display. You show me the display that can get all the aspects of 3D, separation, parallax, and focus, and can do so without wearing something, you've got the next big thing in displays. Until then, it isn't going anywhere.
Re:Wonderful, but... (Score:5, Informative)