By this weekend, Avatar will becoming the highest grossing movie in history.  Ironically, it beats out another James Cameron film, Titantic.

I saw the film in an IMAX theater on Christmas day.  It was sold out for nearly a week in advance so I was lucky my family was able to get reservations. Yes, seating reservations.  But that is also a contributing factor for the movie to become the highest grossing film.  In the regular, non-3d theaters, there was plenty of room.  People were paying higher ticket prices for the IMAX experience.  Higher ticket prices means higher grosses.

I must say it was a fabulous experience.  I don’t remember ever watching a 3d movie before.  If I did see one as a kid, it would have been with the blue and red paper glasses.  Yuk.  This movie was real 3d like I imagined it should be.

The movie wasn’t perfect.  I saw flaws that reminded me of cutting my own films using HDV and AVCHD.  For example, a shot in the control room had a close-up on one of men while another walked quickly by behind him.  I saw the stuttering image but I don’t think anyone else around me did.  There were also some problems with a darker foreground character against a bright background image.  It seemed to form a halo around the foreground person.  Very disturbing.

When I read about all the 3d television coming out (and some already out) for home viewing, I was all excited about the possibilities.  In fact, that was the hot subject at CES this year and maybe very well be for NAB in April.  We’ll have a 3d sports network in June and a 3d channel by satellite.  Discovery Channel, et al, will also be doing 3d.

No wonder I was ready to jump on the bandwagon.  I’d buy a second camera and I’d being doing 3d as well.  But wait.  I didn’t have a way to see 3d.  And how would I edit it?  I thought I could manage.

As I researched the subject, I discovered a mountain of technological problems in doing 3d correctly.  Well, you don’t find it by search for 3d.  That gives info on digital 3d objects.  You need to search for stereoscopic filmmaking.

First set of problems was that the lenses of the cameras should be the same distance apart as the eyes.  Well, I have small cameras.  Is mine close good enough?  I don’t want to have to shoot into front-silvered mirrors set at 45 degrees and flop the images in post.  Hand-held also becomes a real mess.

Then there is a problem with parallax.  If both cameras are pointing straight ahead, they won’t be covering the same area.  One image will be shifted a little to the side.  So convergence needs to be set so they will be covering the same area.  The closer the scene is to the camera, the bigger this problem becomes.

Next is an issue with keystoning.  If the camera is in a room and tilts up, parallel lines converge.  That convergence will be different for each camera.  And there goes your 3d.

Another issue is depth of field.  Independent filmmakers having been doing all sorts of things to reduce depth of field like the big movies do.  But for 3d, you need as much depth of field as possible.  What happens when the audience looks beyond your subject?  It isn’t normal for us to look past someone and see an out-of-focus background.  Whatever we look at should be in focus.

With the focus issue, we lose a great advance we had while making 2d films.  So do we shoot 2 ways so we can release in 2d and 3d?

Shooting 3d could give an independent filmmaker a real advantage when competing with the big boys.  And the dearth of content would work to their advantage.  That’s IF we can do a credible job.

But there are still some bumps in the road.

Cineform probably has the key to being able to go 3d.  Their product, Neo3d, solves the editing problems.  It will render to different formats.  Viewing the edit can probably be done on a 3d gaming machine.  So the problems are surmountable.

So where are we at.  Neo3d costs $3,000.  And I could easily that much or more on hardware to film and view it.  And there are the technical difficulties.

The biggest question of all:  Will there be an audience?

I’m not thinking 2010 will be a great year for home 3d viewing.  Not with the slow economy and people having to replace obsolete equipment (televisions and blu-ray players).  And there are those glasses which could cost as much as $50 each.

I can’t afford the switch.  And there are too many pieces of equipment on my want list already.  How about a nice jig I’ve had my eye on?

– Rich Pulham

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Dailies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.