Has 3D Film-Making Had Its Day? 436
dryriver sends this hopeful note from the BBC:
"'It's three years since audiences around the world swarmed into cinemas to see James Cameron's Avatar. It rapidly became the biggest grossing film of all time, in part because of its ground-breaking digital 3D technology. But, in retrospect, Avatar now seems the high-point of 3D movie-making, with little since 2009 to challenge its achievement. Three years on, has the appeal of 3D gone flat? Nic Knowland has been a respected director of photography in Britain for 30 years. He's seen cinema trends and fads come and go, but never one for which he's had so little enthusiasm as 3D. 'From the cinematographer's perspective it may offer production value and scale to certain kinds of film. But for many movies it offers only distraction and some fairly uncomfortable viewing experiences for the audience. I haven't yet encountered a director of photography who's genuinely enthusiastic about it.'"
Re:It's not true 3D (Score:5, Informative)
Rise of the Guardians (Score:5, Informative)
It may just be that the filmmakers need to learn how to best use 3D, the same way they had to learn using color.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Films shot in Technicolor (Score:5, Informative)
See also the new HFR High Frame Rate stuff in Hobbit. Not a damned thing seemed odd about that, but then I've been watching TV recently. Who wants artificially-forced degradation?
I do, surprisingly often.
One big problem is that TV and movie sets are just that - sets. They're cardboard and gaffer tape and spray foam and quick drying paint. They are good enough for the medium they're produced for, but nothing better.
Look at any television show from the 1960s that has been recently re-released on digital media - Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, Mission: Impossible, or whatever. These shows were shot on high resolution film that captured the sets in all their hokey glory: cardboard; tape; foam; runny paint; a vast array of visual sins are painfully visible. The directors relied on their being broadcast in NTSC's System M with its 483 lines of video for TV. The technology of the day hid these flaws because the video was so degraded during delivery. Converting them to digital has revealed just how bad the original sets were, which I personally find very distracting.
I see a couple of choices: I can watch the films in high definition 1080p and be bothered by bad sets, or I can watch them in NTSC and assume the faults I see are of the technology and not of the filmmakers.
Re:HR3D (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually better than that. There are quite a few technologies which will interpolate the "in between" views from several cameras (google "Novel View Synthesis" [google.com]). Don't forget that lightfield capture technologies like the Lytro Camera [lytro.com] also exist.
I've seen projection based glasses free 3D systems that are also quite impressive, such as Holografika [holografika.com].
I really do wish this 3D Hate would end...
More importantly, it's dangerous! (Score:5, Informative)
Government studies on stereoscopic viewing shows that viewing artificially created 3D can lead to a loss of depth perception. I built 2 different 3D CAVE/powerwall systems at the DOD. Engineers were limited to 5 hours per week which was considered the safe exposure rate. Viewing generated 3D can be used in some cases to treat strabismus, but normal eyes it's known to cause strabismus (more easily termed, permanent lazy eye).
Of course Hollywood would never tell you about such dangers since it would hurt their bottom line. Here [avsforum.com] is a link of note, which is important to note " 1 + 2 = if you use stereo 3D routinely and intensively, you will develop strabismus, period. Government studies showed that damage is not always from "routine" and "intensive" viewing. 8 hours a week had a very high rate of eye damage which is why we limited Engineers to 5 hours.