3D again!

[RGA]

Chortle chortle Why 3D movies need to die - The Oatmeal

[Daybear]

And I expect that his Film collection is only silent movies

[Worf101]

That was funny as hell. I'm crying here! Thanks I needed a good laugh.

Worf

[RGA]

Ebert's review of titanic in 3D

"Now for the final flaw. It is, of course, the 3D process. Cameron has justly been praised for being one of the few directors to use 3D usefully, in "Avatar." But "Titanic" was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D. What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance. So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw "Titanic?" No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

But not quite. There's more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you're supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement. If you're alert to it, you'll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they'll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness. I know why the film is in 3D. It's to justify the extra charge. That's a shabby way to treat a masterpiece. Titanic [3D] :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

Ebert's review of titanic in 3D

"Now for the final flaw. It is, of course, the 3D process. Cameron has justly been praised for being one of the few directors to use 3D usefully, in "Avatar." But "Titanic" was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D. What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance. So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw "Titanic?" No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

But not quite. There's more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you're supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement. If you're alert to it, you'll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they'll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness. I know why the film is in 3D. It's to justify the extra charge. That's a shabby way to treat a masterpiece. Titanic [3D] :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

Richard,

Ebert may be a good film reviewer(but well past his prime IMO), but his technical expertise is sadly lacking. 3D in and of itself does not cause a loss of brightness. What causes the loss of brightness is the theatrical system not calibrated to show 3D. Cameron sent out prints to accommodate several different projectors, and if the projector setting are correct for the print, the loss of light is very minimal.

Not every shot needs to be in 3D, and the shots in 2D just further enhance the shots that are converted to 3D. I saw the movie in a properly calibrated theater, and I found it to be a quite good 3D conversion. 2D to 3D conversion can be really good, or really bad. Not all 2D to 3D conversion are as bad as Ebert would like you to believe.

Ebert now has to many prejudices to make him an objective reviewer. We can now count on him to trash every 3D movie he reviews because of his personal biases on 3D. If I could look Ebert in the eye right now, I would tell him to hang it up, your time has come and gone.

Richard you have made your point. You hate 3D, we get it. Now can you stop brow beating us(like you do with AudioNote crap) with your anti 3D BS?

[RGA]

Maybe you should take it up with the Theater Roger Ebert goes to. I am sure he is not making what he sees up. You may be correct that it is a theater problem. I am sure Ebert goes to the best theater that city of Chicago operates. So if the best theaters in Chicago all suck maybe, since you have a financial stake (bias) in the movie industry, you should do something about those theaters that are all misrepresenting the technology you strongly advocate. Or must people now fly to the only theater in America (the one you go to) to see properly rendered 3D.

What doesn't seem to get through your financially biased views defending this bill of goods technology is that virtually every person I know that has seen 3d thinks it's total rubbish. Ebert is hardly the only reviewer who makes these comments - lots of much younger fresher critics, and people who work in the industry.

But they're ALL wrong of course and only you are right. I guess Walter Murch doesn't know anything about the film industry either right?

It's great to think only RGA and Ebert and the Oatmeal guy are left of field on this technology. But apologists always want to blame the theaters. I have no problem with that except that "how is it that OUR FAULT?"

You got to an amusement park and you get on a ride. If the operator runs it half speed it's not fun then you have an opinion of the ride. "Oh but sir it's not the ride - the operator was trying to save on wear and tear blah blah." Excuses.

Ebert said he watched it in 3D took his glasses off and the screen was brighter in the 2D segments. Pretty sure the guy has been to several theaters - so they all suck? All the theaters I have been too suck? All the theaters everyone I know who has the same opinion they all suck? All the TVs I've seen using 3D also suck? I mean at some point you can't blame the regular joe six pack from having a negative opinion on this Sir T. Even if you know there is better out there and that the theaters and entry level Sony/Samsung/Panasonic/Sharps are doing a crappy job compared to the $20k front projectors and million dollar home systems that Joe Six Pack will never get the chance to see let alone purchase.

When I saw Avatar it looked gloomy - I could not see a true real world three dimensional image. When i walk down a street I see things up close in the mid field in the distance and EVERY POINT in between - that is real 3D. Even with Avatar it simply reminded me of a better Jaws 3D. I saw some stuff in my face - some stuff in the distance and some stuff in the middle - basically looked like 3 plates on in front of each other. Nothing about that seemed like real life. It was tiresome after awhile and basically I felt it was there to cover for a very overrated badly written, weakly acted film.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses "gather in" the image -- even on a huge Imax screen -- and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980's -- "Captain Eo" -- and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now "opened up" so that your lines of sight are almost -- almost -- parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the "CPU" of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to "get" what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are "in" the picture in a kind of dreamlike "spaceless" space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch



Plenty of people dislike 3D

Seats that suck in 2D invariably suck ten times as much in 3D. Even in optimal seats, often it just doesn't work. While watching Avatar for instance, some of you may have noticed a weird warping or blurring around the edges of your vision whenever you turned your head. Watching Avatar meant looking at the screen at just the right angle. Don't you dare move your head, or Jake Sully turns into a ridiculous, rainbow blur. Wait, what did I miss? I had to inhale oxygen. Sure, 3D looks good when you sit in the middle of a theater imitating a statue, but how does it look when you fidget in your seat or have to keep one eye on your kid? Not good. The Trouble With 3D: Why Hollywood's Savior Could Be Bad For Movies - CinemaBlend.com

And this - it's not the article it's all the people writing in to say they dislike 3D that should tell you something. So maybe you can somehow prove the point by getting your film exec friends to actually make sure theaters are using the right equipment with the correct calibration. Otherwise you will get lots and lots and LOTS of people dissing it as most of the people here are doing Ebert: 3D movies suck - Boing Boing

The question that never seems to be asked is Why? It isn't offering something that is needed and IMO it doesn't make the films "better" the film is either good or bad and 3D doesn't make a lousy film better. It doesn't enhance good movies - since good movies were not filmed in 3D.

[Hyfi]

Both the Oatmeal and Ebert are correct, in my eyes. Funny stuff on that oatmeal page.