Close enough!
Posted on 04/30/2010 6:11:48 PM PDT by re_tail20
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.
That's my position. I know it's heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year's top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they're only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O's you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes. The heretics' case, point by point:
1. IT'S THE WASTE OF A DIMENSION. When you look at a 2-D movie, it's already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned. When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, "Look how slowly he grows against the horizon" or "I wish this were 3D?"
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Hell, Roger Ebert cases nausea.
correction, causes nausea.
I guess, I’ll be digging 3-D then..
Well bully for you, Roger. Though I couldn't care less regarding 3-D movies, now that I know you've taken a position against them, I'm all for them. The thought of agreeing with you on anything turns my stomach.
True but in this case he is right.
Ebert is full of crap on politics but on this movie item, I’m in full agreement.
I don’t care what he says. Anytime I’ve ever seen 3-D, I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
>> It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience.
I bet all the Roger Eberts of the silent films era said the same thing about movie soundtracks.
I’ve never seen a 3-D movie and I can’t stand Ebert, but he makes a convincing case on this one.
This is what Roger Ebert was like before he went insane.
BTW, I’m seeing Deathly Hallows and Tron Legacy in 2D, thank you very much.
Why I Hate 3-D Roger Ebert (And You Should Too)
The puke was transfixed
on 4 November 2008.
The free market should decide
I’m nearly blind in my right eye and I feel that I should be compensated......generously.
The “3D” you see in movies, including ones like Avatar, is fake 3D - that is, traditional 2D captures edited on computers to artificially create the illusion of the third dimension.
All that flickering is mostly because of that.
People still go to theaters???? What the heck is an “ebert”? Ain’t it one of those Atari video game creatures?
I like watching 3D movies at the theater. I used to have a usable B&W television but color tvs made it obsolete. I used to have a VCR recorder/player but DVDs made them obsolete. Now I’m told my new big flat screen High-def LCD tv is obsolete because of the new 3-D tvs. I’m always behind the technology curve and can’t afford any more “advances”.
For once, I agree with Ebert. Been there, done that. Not interested.
Close enough!
I go with the kids to a lot of 3D. They give me a headache, and so far, no one has come up with a good way to wear the glasses over prescription glasses.
“q” is only one letter off on a qwerty keyboard.
Yer right, Close enough!
I enjoyed seeing “Kiss Me, Kate” in 3-D. I felt like ducking when Ann Miller threw a pot at the audience. However, most of those who saw this film didn’t have that experience, as it was released in 2-D in most theaters.
What about those 3D HDTV’s?
What would he use it for so it wouldn’t be wasted?
Go see Clash of the Titans in 3D if you want to be cured of this paticular fad.
I agree with Roger.
I suffer form motion sickness and migraines.
There is no way I will be watching anything in 3D, besides my 2D HDTV is just awesome.
Also, until Hollywood learns to make a good 2D movie, there is no point whatsoever in making a 3D movie.
I’m just glad John Holmes isn’t around to make 3D movies.
More like one of those hairy Trolls from the 1960s.
My sister still has one on her dresser. I will know she is a fully assimilated conservative when she throws it away. LOL!
For the first time in my life I can agree with the guy.
He’s right on all nine counts. The whole thing is going off a false push, the human eye doesn’t actually see in 3D unless the object is very close to your face (like near your nose). Our eyes are too close together to get 3D at any real distance, you can tell just by looking past your focus, that which you’re not focusing on is blurry, that’s 2D vision. We have 2 eyes for redundancy, not dimension. 3D is actually an unnatural way of seeing, it gives many a headache, and the extra they’re charging is pretty silly.
PJ-Comix, ping er rouskie!! PJ-Comix already did a DUmmie FUnnies thread on this today!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2504020/posts
The free market is deciding, it’s decided before. 3D is a gadget, a trick, but in the long run people don’t tend to like it.
LLS
breasts look bigger in 3D
Uh, no. Look up "parallax", which is how our brain gets depth clues from two eyes. The reason a lot of people get headaches and nausea from 3D films is that the sensory data from the eyes is conflicting with the sensory data from the inner ear.
“
When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward
you across the desert, are you thinking, “Look how slowly he grows
against the horizon” or “I wish this were 3D?”
“
I do relate to this, seeing how I have a “lazy” left eye.
(and I love “Lawrence of Arabia” including that stunning opening scene
when Ali/Omar Shariff explains to Lawrence/O’Toole why he’s just blown
away a guy at long range);
RE: “He was not welcome. You are welcome”
I suffered through many embarassments of not being to really play a number
of sports that require depth-perception (binocular vision).
BUT NEVER would I trash folks that get a rush from 3-D films.
All that flickering is mostly because of that.
Actually, no.
The 3D in those movies is fully realized geometry, rendered in 3D from the first frame. You can quibble that it's presented on a 2D plane, but this is disingenuous.
It may well have been digitally projected at the theater (as opposed to film projection), and you may thus be witnessing a refresh lag onscreen.
Sorry but it’s true, we see in 2D, depth clues come primarily from size, which is how some favorite optical illusions work. Again, check your peripheral vision around what you’re looking at, notice how it’s out of focus, notice how things in 3D movies aren’t like that, that’s because you’re seeing in 2D. And no, nausea (specifically motion sickness) comes from conflict between the eyes and inner ear, the 3D movie headache comes from it being a simply unnatural way to see, our brains don’t see the world that way and some of us have optical centers that chose not to adjust.
It depends on the movie. Avatar was filmed in 3D, Clash of the Titans is a “translated” movie that was filmed in 2D and tweaked in post production.
So far, it’s a gimmick to distract you from what is otherwise a crap movie.
Are we ready for 3D? As CG supervisor and avid moviegoer, I'm sad to say that I'm not convinced we are. Yet. And the worse is yet to come, as studios try to milk us all for these half-baked goods.
The only time that I have felt it was worth it was Avatar and even then I wanted to yank the damn thick-rimmed glasses off my face every 3 minutes.
The good Avatar 3D experience happened because James Cameron is a technically savvy director, and thus the 3D aspect of Avatar was technically well executed. When done right it allows the viewer to more seamlessly enjoy a 3D film. Done poorly and all it does is get in the way. One of the reasons I'm not digging it is that many of the stereoscopic movies have been made 3D after they were shot, which can cause heaps of distractions in the final product. Even if the film was originally shot 3D it takes someone knowledgeable in the field to make it effective. Decisions on convergence between the left and right eyes are just as much a part of the visual storytelling as lens choices, lighting, rack focusing, etc. If you overlook that you get a sloppy 3D experience.
The process of making a movie 3D after it was shot is a complicated and time consuming process but can be somewhat convincing. The problem is it will never reflect the same results as if you were filming using two cameras, simultaneously, from slightly different perspectives. Endless rotoscoping provides layers that can be separated to fake a different perspective for the second eye, but that's what it looks like, layers. So yes, you can push things away and pull things forward and enhance the depth, but the content within each layer has no depth. We use our eyes everyday and whether you know the geek stuff or not it's just not what we are used to seeing. The stereo technicians involved in bringing the images to us in 3D in the best possible way have their hands tied in some ways, they're not often working with two true perspectives.
The problem is it's expensive and difficult to do it right. Double the camera gear means double the footage and often doubling the camera crew. It also doubles much of the visual effects work as you have to render everything twice. A lot of the old gags we once used to do our "movie magic" no longer work in stereo films.
But what you get is the real thing, a true stereo view of everything in the frame. Just like a director or cinematographer chooses to focus the camera to direct the viewers eye you must make the same decisions in 3D to direct the convergence of the two eyes. Not doing this right (or having to do it with a faked perspective in the second eye) is like overlooking composition or sound design, it's crummy movie making.
Avatar hit this right. They shot it stereo and kept all the depth within screen like it was a window into another world and never tried to wow you with shoving stuff into the theater at you. When you bring elements of the image into the room you run into the problem of the edge of frame cropping the content. During the end titles for Alice In Wonderland they created a false black edge to the screen so that when content did break frame and bring things into the theater they weren't cut off. But this isn't an option for the duration of the movie unless you're willing to give up valuable screen space. IMAX helps relieve this by filling your field of view but we are all far from having IMAX theaters at every cinema and you still have a limited view from within the frame of the glasses.
This problem will get even worse when you all get sucked into buying a 3D TV for your living room where the size of the screen fills even less of your view. And now there's talk on the rumor mill of re-releasing Titanic in 3D? Watch out for a flood of classics being shoved down the fake stereoscopic pipeline and into your Blu-ray player for an extra $10. Hopefully Cameron will continue to help set a higher standard.
And there's the final nail in this absurd 3D show: The eyeglasses. Simply, watching a $200+ million dollar movie with $.03 crappy plastic glasses is just silly. They are not only optically poor but they take almost a full stop of light out of the image. That's almost half the amount of light! None of the prints or projectors I have seen 3D movies in properly compensate to counteract that loss of light. When I saw Alice In Wonderland at one of the industry screenings—where you think it would be dialed in just right—the image was still painfully dark. The situation in a majority of theaters out there is as bad or worse.
In the end, do it right or just don't do it. Or more importantly, for all the studio execs out there, just because we can doesn't mean we should.
Alexander Murphy is the pseudonym of a top CG supervisor in a prominent visual effects studio in Los Angeles, CA.
That said, I agree that it would be cool to see Kiss Me Kate in 3-D.
A 2D image remains "flat" to our perception because, no matter how you move your head relative to it, items in the picture do not shift relative to one another. You can't move your head to "see" behind the tree. The only time that happens is if the camera moves. But, in a 3D stereopicture, moving your head changes the perceived relative positions between the planes that the objects exist on, by manipulating the parallax between your eyes.
The human eyes are too close together to get useful parallax beyond a few feet. From two inches apart the view of something 12 feet away is identical. And you’re still ignoring the focus problem, the human eye has a very shallow focus range, like a normal camera, 3D movies have a HUGE focus range completely different than the human eye.
No matter how you slice it 3D movies show us something that the human eye could never see in reality. Which give people headaches.
That’s funny, I must have super vision. I just tried looking at a doorway over 12 feet from me, and I can see the edge of a light fixture beyond with my right eye that I cannot see with my left.
What’s more, with a simple lateral movement of my head, I can cause a parallax shift to occur over a much wider space than two inches between eyes (closer to 4”, but who’s counting). When I do this shift, the relative size of objects are not changing, but their relative position to my eyes is. When objects closer to me appear to move more than objects farther away, I am cluing in on the shift, not the size. Watch a cat judging a leap; they will bob their head.
Now, granted, objects middling to far away don’t show that shift so dramatically, BUT two objects at, say, middle distance that are close to each other do shift relative to each other. An example might be a car parked 60’ away, and another next to it that is 61’. The human eyes can pick this sort of parallax shift up. It’s what lets our brain know the difference between seeing those cars in real space and seeing a photograph of them, held at the proper distance. A fake window with a live feed video of the outside will never fool the brain into believing it is a real view, because the objects do not shift in parallax as the viewer moves his head.
There was an interesting gizmo that a guy jury built out of a Wii set. He mounted the sensors to a headset, and rigged a program to change what a simple CGI drawing on the TV looked like as he walked around or moved his head. What he saw was 3D relative motion and apparent depth; what everyone else saw was the object moving about and distorting weirdly. I’d almost bet that those who report headaches are viewing the well made 3D films from a sub-optimal position relative to the “viewpoint” of the camera lens.
No what you have is a desire to see something you’re actually not seeing. Here, Card explains it better than I can:
Some of the problems have been solved. When I put on the glasses I did not get a headache within the first three minutes. I never got a headache at all, though it was certainly a relief to take the glasses off.
Also, the filmmakers used restraint — there were almost no leap-from-the-screen gotcha moments, which always break the audience’s trance and destroy believability. The 3D is mostly taken for granted, which is the only effective way to use it.
Because each lens of the special glasses filters out a portion of the spectrum, the total amount of light reaching the eyes is significantly reduced — the film is darker and details are harder to see. Still, by filming with more saturated light, the result is still watchable.
Every Day’s So Special!
18-24 March 2010*
By Uncle Orson
Thursday, March 18th — Happy birthday, Queen Latifah!
Absolutely Incredible Kid Day, sponsored by Camp Fire USA — tell the kids you know and like that you think they’re great. Just make sure it’s true.
Awkward Moments Day. We celebrate the humor in life’s uncomfortable situations by remembering events that make us “feel unsure and embarrassed, then harness the power of humor, laughter, and fun to cope with them.”
Friday, 19th
Seven years since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. At present, Iraq is the freest Arab Muslim nation in the world, not in spite of U.S. occupation, but because of it. The only Arab Muslims who are more free are those who are citizens of Israel.
150th anniversary of the birth of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). Three times the Democratic nominee for President, he won over the 1896 Democratic national convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech opposing the gold standard. Think of him as the first “Tea Party” candidate to capture a major national party. His main issue shifted in later elections to anti-imperialism, and though he became Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, he resigned when he saw Wilson was leading the nation to participation in Europe’s World War I. In the last month of his life, he spoke against Darwinism in the Scopes trial, having passed from economic rebel to pacifist to religious conservative.
Saturday, 20th
Holly Hunter and William Hurt, co-stars of Broadcast News, have the same birthday!
Great American Meatout — Since 1985, this has been designated as the one day a year when even non-vegetarians are to eat no meat at all. The idea is to “improve health, protect the environment and save animals.” I can already hear many of you making plans to go to a nice rib joint or steak house for dinner, you stubborn won’t-do-what-you’re-told-is-good-for-you Americans, you!
Sunday, 21st — Iranian New Year
45th anniversary of the Selma Civil Rights March in 1965
First round-the-world balloon flight ended on this day in 1999. Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard and British copilot Brian Jones landed in the Egyptian desert, having flown 29,056 miles nonstop in a hot air balloon.
Monday, 22nd
International Goof-Off Day. “A day of relaxation and a time to be oneself; a day for some good-natured fun and some good-natured silliness.” (If you don’t happen to have a good nature, you’re out of luck.)
Tuesday, 23rd
Anniversary of the first appearance of “O.K.” in print, in The Boston Morning Post in 1839. In the era when spelling was first being regularized in America, lots of people joked about other people’s bad spelling. “O.K.” stood for “Oll Korrect,” we’re told, a joke that spread like wildfire and persisted long after the original jest was forgotten. It already had so much currency that Martin Van Buren’s supporters used it to stand for his nickname “Old Kinderhook” in the election of 1836. It didn’t appear in print at that time because it was regarded as “slang” and newspapers were too stuffy to use it. Since then, “O.K.” (Or “OK,” “okey,” or “okay”) has spread to the languages of most of the world’s people.
Wednesday, 24th
In 1958, Elvis Presley entered the army, making America safer until 1960.
*Based on information in Chase’s Calendar of Events.
With most technical issues solved, it’s possible now to evaluate 3D on its own merits.
And my evaluation says: This is the most worthless film technology ever developed, with the possible exception of smell-a-vision.
The idea of 3D is to replace the flatness of the screen with something more akin to how we really see the world.
The gimmick of 3D is based on binocularity. Flat films have only one lens; 3D uses two, the way the human brain does, as it checks out the world through two eyes.
But the purpose of two eyes, evolutionarily speaking, is not binocularity, it’s redundancy. You can lose an eye and still see. By having two eyes, you double your chance of survival in a world where lack of vision can kill you.
The binocularity effect is, while mildly useful, fundamentally trivial. It’s a biproduct of the fact that two eyes cannot occupy the same spot. It might help you negotiate tricky grabs while swinging about in trees; but it is not the dominant feature of our vision.
We don’t see the world in 3D. We conceive the world in three dimensions, but images of the real world come flat to our retinas.
We perceive distance primarily through focus — when we focus on near things, far things blur a little; when we focus on far things, near things blur. Our peripheral vision does not have to be in focus; the spot where we’re looking is always in focus.
In a film, however, the focus has to be the same for all viewers, because you can’t control where people are going to look. Focus is embedded in the film. So every layer of the 3D film is in focus at the same time, no matter where you happen to look. This is so contradictory to our normal visual experience that 3D movies are more unreal than the pastel colors of filmed musical comedies.
You never for one instant think you’re seeing something real. You can’t — it’s slapping you in the face all the time that you are not. Whereas the old-fashioned 2D movie is much, much closer the way we see the real world, because the lens focuses the way our eyes do — when one thing is in focus, farther and nearer things are less in-focus.
In other words, we have a medium — flat film, even black and white film — that has always done a superb job of reproducing our visual experience of the world, yet in the name of “greater realism” we replace it with a fundamentally unreal worldview that turns everything artificial.
The facts are in, parallax is just not as big a deal as you’re making it. We do not see in 3D, no matter how easily you fool yourself.
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