Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ohhh thank god.. 3d becoming a joke!

Tom Lowe said:
I bet 90% of the "3D Haters" out there who will see TRON will see it in 3D, not 2D.

How many 3D haters who saw Avatar twice in the theater chose to see it the second time in 2D? I bet not many.
Click to expand...

To be perfectly honest, the Avatar blu ray release (2D) is probably the best blu ray release I have ever seen. It looks damn good, much better than it did even in Imax 3D.

I saw avatar 6 times in theatres, 3 times in 3D, 3 in 2D, though the 2D was on a shitty projector. As cool as the 3D is and all, it adds nothing to the story. It doesn't take anything away, but adds nothing.

TROn on the other hand, is something that could work extremely well in 3D given the nature of the story and the setting.
 
Tom Lowe said:
I bet 90% of the "3D Haters" out there who will see TRON will see it in 3D, not 2D.

How many 3D haters who saw Avatar twice in the theater chose to see it the second time in 2D? I bet not many.
Click to expand...

I admit I will see Tron in 3D... And then 2D...

I preferred Avatar in 2D...

Rudi Herbert said:
Man, you better chill a little...
Click to expand...

Or what? Seriously? If I don't stop typing my thoughts about "3D", what's gonna happen? The OP is about NOT liking 3D... My responses go along with it, it is JUST MY OPINION (which is shared by a lot more people than those who have invested in the "gimmick"...).

Rudi Herbert said:
, but if you think eliminating 3D and every other "gimmick" will pave the way for a return to quality cinema, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.
Click to expand...

Not what I'm saying. I am saying that if the powers that decide decided to focus more on quality stories rather than using gimmicks to promote ticket sales, we'd have better cinema and no need for glasses...
 
Gimmicks are still there whether you shoot on some sort of revolving black and white polaroid gatling camera or whatever is best at the time. There are also gimmicks in the story.

There are virtually no movies produced without gimmicks written in to keep the attention of the audience regardless of whether the art is good, or to try to keep them even if the material happens to be completely alien to them. And when you do find one with no gimmicks, you would always be able to run into someone who could point at something you didn't consider a gimmick yourself.

3D is just like color, or sound. It isn't bad. It isn't good. It is a layer, or a medium in and of itself.

Someone can chose to create with nothing but marble. Someone else may chose to create with a slew of different paints. You may chose to create with a piano, or an orchestra, or so many different things that you end up needing... a movie's budget. Yet in the end nobody gives half a flying poopie what you decided you were going to create with. The only thing we are drawn to is beauty, which is balance, which is truth. Can you create beauty?
 
I'm all for movies that are SHOT in 3-D. It's the crappy post conversion that bugs me Hollywood could have really milked this cash cow for years by having 1 big 3D event movie every month or so that could have really maximized it's box office with that 3D. Instead they tried to cram every P.O.S into 3D to shake out a bunch of quick easy money, while killing off their cash cow by completely diluting what was originally a special thing.

Now a 3D movie isn't an incredible innovation, it's a gimmick again,and slew of craptastic 3D flicks have left a bad taste in the consumers mouth.
 
All I know is that in Avatar when Sam Worthington held up his Avatar hands after getting plugged in my brain took about 3 full seconds to process the fact that I wasn't looking at my own Avatar hands.

Never had that happen in a 2D movie before. To me that enhanced the story.

There is a lot of research into VR immersion and how much more intense 3D + head tracking can be in tricking the brain into thinking what it sees actually is real. It's an entire new field of VR Psychology to treat things like phobias and PTSD.

Stereo Conversion doesn't do it for me yet in its current state. It's like a bad composite. It gets the job done and delivers the effect but my brain doesn't believe it or accept it like a film shot in stereo. One of the most amazing parts of Avatar for me was seeing stubble on someone's chin. You could imperceptibly detect depth even in the chin stubble. It's that level of precision and immersion which let my brain just lose itself in the film.

There's a difference between "not noticing" a film is 2D and the deeper more reptilian bits of the brain firing "all clear it's real" signals.

I don't get nervous looking at a film of a camera pushing out over a cliff looking down in 2D. In stereo I get that nervous vertigo feeling. That enhances the story in my opinion.

The moments where my subconscious loses itself into the movie are still rare. But it's very unique to stereo film making.
 
Nice post, Roberto.



Gavin Scott said:
I believe Stereo is a fundamentally different information channel from things like color, and that the way the brain processes it may suggest that it's going to be very difficult to leverage it to heighten the emotional experience or "move the story along".
Click to expand...

As long as stereo is perceived as just another information channel to current storytelling it will be difficult to leverage, and there will be a constant clash between two different mediums, which is currently the case.

This is why all the stereo play is still in immature phase.

Gavin Scott said:
A primary goal is to break apart the scene into the things it contains and their spatial relationships. Stereo vision is an input to this, but I don't think it's critical. Your brain uses lots of tricks to determine what's where, and the stereo information is used when it is available and makes sense, but a lot of the time I think it may simply be discarded in favor of other clues.
Click to expand...

You are trying to define 3D through 2D rules.


Gavin Scott said:
Beyond 10 meters or so, the amount of information you can get from stereo becomes much less too.
Click to expand...


It doesn't matter.

Depth perception has a falloff. This is how it's supposed to work. Made by nature.


Gavin Scott said:
So while adding color to a scene gives you new perception that you can't really get any other way, feeding the viewer stereo information doesn't necessarily let you "see" anything new. Thus people who compare color vs. B&W to 3D vs. 2D fail to consider that they are actually very different kinds of things. The resulting argument that "If color is better than B&W then OBVIOUSLY 3D must be better than 2D" seems completely unjustifiable.
Click to expand...


It is not about seeing anything "new", but seeing it more "immersed".
"Better than..." thinking is always too relative and partial.
 
Mark Collins said:
As cool as the 3D is and all, it adds nothing to the story. It doesn't take anything away, but adds nothing.
Click to expand...

What it can add to, done right, is the viewing experience. Tens of millions of people can attest to having an immersive experience watching AVATAR in 3D, almost as if they had sort of visited the planet. That's very powerful.... again, if it can be done right.
 
Tom Lowe said:
What it can add to, done right, is the viewing experience. Tens of millions of people can attest to having an immersive experience watching AVATAR in 3D, almost as if they had sort of visited the planet. That's very powerful....
Click to expand...

Precisely! I remember back in 1995 when Jim wrote the first draft of Avatar (way more powerful that what ended up onscreen btw) and he said "Can you imagine if I could film this in 3D?" and then of course he said, "which is the least of my problems since there's no way to create this world yet". But the truth is, 3D did add to the experience of discovering Pandora in a very powerful way, and I think it perhaps worked so well because it was an alien world, something without a parallel to compare against in our brains' image banks, so we were not drawn to ascertain whether what we were seeing was better served in 2D or 3D. In fact, when I did see Avatar on Bluray in 2D (yes, you were eight Tom, it is the crispest BD out there) I remember being overwhelmed by the exuberance of colors and textures due to how they get flattened and compressed in 2D, as opposed to how 3D sort of opens up and decompresses those layers. I got a headache watching the 2D version actually. On that note, I've been shooting the underwater world for 28 years now, in everything from 8mm, to Betacam, to IMAX to RED, and one of my favorite rewards is the amazement I get from those who've never dived as they discover that alien world. And in all these years, never have I seen such reactions come anywhere near close to how people get when they see my 3D footage, which is shot in little 1/3", AVCHD cameras. The sense of wonder I see in their eyes, and hear in their voices, as they "fly" with me over corals, through fish schools, inside caves, through tunnels, and float among sun rays filtering from the surface is the most amazing reaction I've ever seen to any footage. Ohhhs, Ahhhhs, Wows, Holy Sh..ts, hands reaching for fish, heads lurching back when a shark comes too close to the lens(es)...That is no gimmick, that is heightened sensory experience at its best.
 
Tom Lowe said:
What it can add to, done right, is the viewing experience. Tens of millions of people can attest to having an immersive experience watching AVATAR in 3D, almost as if they had sort of visited the planet. That's very powerful.... again, if it can be done right.
Click to expand...

Tom, you have a great point - when done right... That would be when we don't need glasses to enjoy...
And look how many can attest to hating the "Avatar 3D experience"... How can 3D add to the experience when I'm distracted by these enormous yellow glasses... How can I enjoy a completely fake world that was ruined by the 3D? I felt the 3D heightened the fact that the majority of the flick was fake and computer generated.

Immersive experience? There's no smell or peripheral vision... Maybe all of those people don't understand the word immersive? Kinda hard to feel like I'm on another planet when I can smell the farts from the dude in front of me, half the theatre is making fun of the blue guys, the acting is horrible, I'm wondering to myself - I thought this was live action not animated, I smell popcorn... Immersed my ass. (Yes, I did like Avatar... in 2D. Loved it at home on Blu-ray.)

3D is a fad that comes and goes. It is often times a misused layer of the medium. I wouldn't say it was a medium in and of itself. Film is a medium. Video is a medium. 3D is a visual effect within the medium.

To each their own. I hope those who like/love 3D get to view as many 3D flicks as they can and hopefully enjoy said flicks. But to all of you, respect the fact that those of us who hate the shit, hate the 3D... Big deal.

Then there's the infant holographic footage... It's the shit, I have shot it. The problem is capturing and holo'ing the environment. And at points, the image breaks down revealing it's fake... So, really all you can do now is watch people only... Rather limiting no?

(Off topic, Pirates $300 mil budget is mostly because of the 3D... One reason they're here rather than the actual Caribbean.)
 
Shawn Booth said:
How can I enjoy a completely fake world that was ruined by the 3D? I felt the 3D heightened the fact that the majority of the flick was fake and computer generated.

Immersive experience? There's no smell or peripheral vision... Maybe all of those people don't understand the word immersive? Kinda hard to feel like I'm on another planet when I can smell the farts from the dude in front of me, half the theatre is making fun of the blue guys, the acting is horrible, I'm wondering to myself - I thought this was live action not animated, I smell popcorn... Immersed my ass. (Yes, I did like Avatar... in 2D. Loved it at home on Blu-ray.)
Click to expand...

You could say this about any movie, regardless of extra dimensions.
 
My non-filmmaker friends, relatives, etc all LOVE 3D, yet about 50% of my filmmaker friends are against it.

The last time I experienced this divide in opinion was during the ol' "Digital vs film debate" years ago.

Filmmaker friends were emotional, derogatory and up in arms about how they couldn't stand to watch digitally-acquired stuff but less technical folks mostly couldn't care less.

Personally, I can't but help thinking that a lot of filmmakers feel threatened by 3D just as they used feel threatened by digital. Why could this be?

1. They need new gear in order to work with the format - a financial, technical and emotional hurdle (yes, emotional as in "darn it, those vintage primes I've been taking care for YEARS won't be good for 3D")

2. They hate the new hassles of shooting in 3D and are also worried they'll mess it up. A lot of filmmakers aren't that technically proficient. You can get away with doing something wrong in 2D by passing it off as an "artisic decision" - if you do something wrong in 3D, you just give people a headache.

3. If 3D becomes the "in thing", their current 2D projects become slightly less easy to sell.

Add this to the fact that there are genuine problems with the medium - heavy glasses, 24fps projection, an abundance of stupid tricks being pulled. These will be fixed in the future though.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Joe G. said:
Modern 3D:
Acquired through $250,000 of high end glass.

Viewed through $0.10 crappy, used, distorted, polarized PLASTIC lenses...
Click to expand...

Not to mention the two extremely distorted sensors behind crappy gelatin blobs that have grown out of your head.
 
Talking about 3D... The next Nintendo handheld will be the 3DS. It will have a 800x240 pixel screen and is supposed (in the long run) to play 3D movies (then in 400x240). I can't wait to see Avatar on it:

"Look!! That blue pixel might be half of an quarter of an inch closer than that green one there!!"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top