Almost any pinhead can tell you that some of the hardest decisions in business today are not about technologies but how to monetize them. Summer movies this year are dominated by 3D titles. In April, Warner Bros. and IMAX announced an agreement to release 20 films in IMAX 3D between now and 2013, including two new Harry Potter movies. Other studios are following suit. Is this “next big thing” in entertainment a lasting trend or a fad generating an economic bubble?
The release of Avatar last December provided much of the impetus for cinemas to convert to 3D screens. The extra $3-5 per ticket that movie-goers paid for seeing the 3D version proved that the investment would pay off. Now a large number of 3D screens are available and consumers are hungry for more 3D content. With the momentum created by the enormous financial success of Avatar ($2.7 billion in worldwide box office), studios are shooting everything they can in 3D and also planning to retrofit their 2D titles into 3D. At home, flat screen 3D TV’s and players that play 3D Blu Ray and DVDs are also on the market. 3D game consoles (e.g. Nintendo’s 3DS) and 3D upgrades for existing consoles (e.g. Sony PS-3) are on the way. Financially and aristically successful animated works created for 3D include Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After and Pixar’s Toy Story 3.
While April’s NAB show was replete with 3D technologies, reviews are mixed. Many in the industry think that the current stereoscopic filmmaking renaissance is just a recurrence of a fad, and some go so far to say that it is nothing short of a con. Even 3D’s proponents believe that making stereoscopic films require some special care. Buzz Hays of the Sony 3D Technology Center is quoted as saying, “making 3D is easy, but making good 3D is hard.” James Cameron, director of Avatar, is very vocal about the need for care and quality in making 3D films. Given that, his basic point of view is, “We’ve demonstrated that the 3D market is an extremely lucrative market and this is not a fad, this is not something that is going to go away.”
In stereographic filmmaking the stereo camera rig captures two images for each frame to allow the human visual system to perceive depth (for “in depth” understanding of how humans perceive three visual dimensions try Seeing in Depth by Ian Howard). One of the most interesting presentations at this week’s 2010 SMPTE International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media and Entertainment was the Proton-X spatial phase imaging camera system which claims to be able to take 3D video with a single sensor and single lens. If perfected, this system could solve sensor/lens matching and image synchronization problems while reducing the size and complexity of 3D cameras. The size of the data files associated with 3D are twice as large as for 2D productions, which of course makes faster networks (see Networking’s Home Run) even more important in the post production process. 3D is hastening the demise of “sneakernet” in favor of fat network pipes for moving data (see Sneakernet or Fat Pipes?).
In films like Avatar, the 3D nature of the film is designed into every shot and the results are carefully crafted. Today many films are being released with a 3D version when this was not originally anticipated when the film was shot. Converting a film shot in 2D to 3D is a complex process that frequently involves generating images that then can be placed in varying positions within a 3D camera’s world. Again, James Cameron on the conversion process, “It’s never going to be as good as if you shot it in 3D, but think of it as sort of 2.8D. If you use some automated process … its going to look like crap.”
Clash of the Titans 3D is an example of a film which was converted from 2D to 3D. The hope for the conversion processes is that they will allow a large catalogue of 3D content to be made available quickly to consumers. It is estimated that converting a feature film to 3D in post production costs on the order of $5-$10 million, but perhaps “doing it right” might cost more like $20-30 million. Conversion technologies such as stereoscopic image warping and dense depth reconstruction are limited in the level of 3D depth that they can generate, and research on new techniques continues. The situation is better for certain animated productions, as there is a lot of digital artwork which was generated from 3D models for the original movie.
To display 3D, different images are received by each eye through special glasses which either polarize light, alternatively shutter one eye and then the other or through color filters. Research is underway and some prototypes have been demonstrated displaying 3D without glasses, but these techniques are not currently ready for prime time. The human brain puts the two images together provided that the right cues are there. If the 3D cinematography and associated visual cues are slightly off, people feel tired and may even experience headaches watching 3D films. Problems include potential divergence of the eyes when objects in 3D space are in front of the screen and binocular rivalry when those objects cross the boundaries of the screen. Either of these problems is fatiguing and potentially painful. Older viewers fatigue faster as they are less able to change focus quickly due to lost elasticity in the lens of the eye. Because the projected light is split into two images, there is also a loss of brightness and color saturation that comes along with 3D. This makes problems focusing worse, as darker images result in dilated pupils which naturally reduces the eye’s optical depth of field. These factors contribute to negative opinions regarding 3D and its staying power in the market.
Regardless of opinion, the bottom line in business is profits. Now that so many cinemas have converted to 3D, Avatar is being re-released on August 27, 2010. After all, even if you have the highest grossing movie in history, why leave a couple of hundred million on the table? Back in March, Panasonic Corp announced that they sold out of their 3D TVs in the U.S. in their first week. This demand does not appear to be solely driven by movies, as there are not that many 3D titles available, but also by live 3D events. The 2010 FIFA World Cup was broadcast in 3D this summer and ESPN will broadcast 85 live events 3D over the next 12 months. Discovery, Disney, Sony are all on board with their own plans. According to California-based researcher iSuppli Corp, worldwide shipments of 3-D TVs are expected to be 4.2 million units this year and 12.9 million in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. That is a small percentage of the overall market, but it still represents 300% year-over-year growth. 3D is more expensive to make than 2D, but the difference in cost is not as significant as the difference in profit potential. On the plus side, 3D is harder to pirate (for the moment). Although the quality of the end product varies, more and more production and post production teams are learning the ropes and fewer and fewer end-products will be cheesy-looking. Whether or not the 3D trend continues or eventually peters out, all I have to say is, “Yow, are we having fun yet?”
