Could it be Time for 3D Again?
Anyone suggesting that 3D is the way to make digital cinema a compelling and profitable experience for theater owners and filmmakers, knows he’ll encounter a few skeptics:
- Cinema lovers who reason that no serious filmmaker (except James Cameron or Robert Rodriguez) would try to shoot a film that way.
- Those who got a headache after 10 minutes (almost everyone).
- Theater-owners who don’t see why they should go digital, much less why they would pony up for a second projector.
- The American public which hasn’t been demanding Bwana Devil 2 or The Creature from the Black Lagoon Returns.
The founders of In-Three, an Agoura Hills, California company, who have been showing their "dimensionalizing" system to the studios quietly for a year-and-a-half, came to ShoWest this spring with answers. First, they told an audience at a Texas Instruments-sponsored event that the process doesn’t require a two-camera shoot, as "dimensionalizing" happens in post. Second, there are none of the vertical anomalies that cause eye fatigue. Third, one 2K DLP projector can project "sequential" or 96-frame 3D. And last, the American public hasn’t seen Star Wars: Episode II in 3D and George Lucas, who headlined the demo of a dimensionalized version of Attack of the Clones, has.
While they didn’t originally see it that way, the company’s founders call 3D a catalyst for digital cinema. "Everyone’s been focused on how expensive digital projection is over film," says In-Three VP Neil Feldman. "We’re suggesting that the argument be reversed. For one-tenth of the cost of an IMAX MPX projector (and no cost for prints), a theater owner could be doing digital 3D and charging more by branding digital as a special experience." The only other cost to the theater owner, he says, is for LCD active-shutter glasses and a cleaning machine.
So how is this form of 3D different from the fad of the fifties? Rather than shooting with two cameras to approximate the separate views of each eye, the In-Three process creates all the features of depth in post. The scanned original negative element becomes the left image and from that the right side of the stereo pair is created by "dimensionalists" using a proprietary system. (An average feature currently takes about three months to produce.)
The company’s principals, President/CEO Michael Kaye and VP Neil Feldman, both come from high-end postproduction and realized that as Kaye puts it, "Unless you can repurpose content by people who have no interest in shooting 3D, it’s not going to pay off."
Categories: Creativity, Technology
