The image quality of 3D televisions has improved significantly over the last three generations, but it is still difficult to get the right material to feed the home cinema system. The ultimate show production, the Megaerfolg Avatar, was only available exclusively from Panasonic in combination with 3D devices and is only now released for the normal 3D Blu-ray market.
Good 3D conversion is expensive
We wrote two years ago that the entire film world was caught so coldly by the unexpectedly great success of this film that no one could oppose this phenomenon, nor even swim on its wave. In Hollywood, new production equipment had to be invented and camera personnel trained. Worse still, there were still no top trainings to the stereographers. Avatar director James Cameron was years ahead of his colleagues, and so it has taken so far, that slowly real films and not just animation films are created in 3D.
Cheap mass production
If you wanted a really good conversion of 2D material in 3D, everything had to be implemented by a few expert firms in lengthy manual work. This will cost up to $ 70,000 per movie, and it's only worthwhile for new films to make money, such as Transformers 3, The Avengers, Men in Black 3, Alice in Wonderland, and the last Harry Potter Was. This year it looks a bit better, as new releases such as Prometheus, Amazing Spiderman, Resident Evil, Retribution, Underworld Awakening and of course the little Hobbit have been shot in 3D.
Cooperation between Fox and JVC
The three musketeers and Werner Herzog's cave of the forgotten dreams can not be forgotten as American highlights. Both productions were produced in technically excellent 3D-realization in 2011.
The costs are crucial
We Germans, by the way, are, in a different aspect, world champion in 3D - namely the number of published 3D Blu-rays. Over 400 titles will be available, which are now available to us. And here is a big problem of the 3D boom. The market has been recognized and flooded with ill-made 3D conversions, which almost make your eyes bleed when you enjoy the fun for more than a few minutes.
Even in cheap 3D TVs, a feature is now built that converts 2D content to the third dimension, and the quality of the algorithms in the respective authoring studios appears hardly better than that. One can only hope that not a whole technology Is demonized when one encounters these black sheep of 3D Blu-rays. But in comparison to the few really good 3D-productions it is unfortunately incredibly many.
For years, it is clear that every good TV can be 3D and that the interest and the willingness to buy even for older films in 3D will grow strongly - of course only if the quality is right. Therefore, it is very unfortunate that there are obviously no good and inexpensive tools with which you can convert great films, which have still been produced conventionally, into the visual 3D quality. The development of such procedures and devices takes time, but now there is light on the horizon for 3D fans.
In April, VideoTech, a company from the JVC's professional production division, and the 20th Century Fox, announced that they wanted to convert the film i, Robot as the first joint project to 3D. And so that this new production will not be lost in the many badly made films, a handful of journalists from the 3D high castings of the United States, England and Australia were invited to the headquarters of Fox to Hollywood in order to demonstrate the advantages and details of the process exclusively get. Roland Seibt, the technology engineer, represented the three-day Horrortrip in the heart of the film industry
The 3D conversion must be a business model with profit, otherwise it has no chance. And it only stops with public successes such as Titanic, to manually bury them for three years with immense human and technical effort, in order to achieve an incredibly good 3D result. The trick in JVC's new 3D workstation is that many parts of the process can be automated in decent quality, but a trained stereographer can intervene at any intensity and optimize the result.
Ian Harvey is Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, responsible for analyzing and developing the new technologies of the film company. He has devoted himself intensively to 3D for many years and has presented his high quality requirements point by point to the Japanese software developers of VideoTech (JVC). As the person responsible for the project, he was heavily involved in building the reference system in Tokyo. The first conversion has also been accompanied by a film image and pixel by pixel, so that the quality of this flagship project will be outstanding.
But what happens exactly when a film is converted and where do the quality differences come from? First, a depth analysis must be made of each scene. Which objects are relevant to one another and where do they belong in space? Here, the system takes a lot of work for the operator. With the help of sharpness, escape lines, concealments, speed of movement, and many other indications, it is necessary to decide how far an object should penetrate into the depth of the TV or exit it.
Then objects must be exactly cut off at their edges. The process is called "Rotoscoping" in the film jargon, based on an early drawing technique, in which the outlines of real films were traced on a projectorbank in order to get particularly realistic movement sequences in comic films. Again, JVC's system has been trimmed for maximum intelligence, since this process takes a lot of time for each individual image. The following critical step is currently being performed by expert hand. In order to avoid the familiar effect of the 3D cardboard, the impression that the 3D objects are flat in themselves, each mask gets a three-dimensional shape. Only in this way are people and larger objects really realistic in space. This is one of the strongest criticisms so far and is a huge, important step forward.
If the objects are captured and their depth is determined, they must only be moved to the right and left, so that each eye gets a different view. A major problem with the 3D conversion is that this displacement creates holes at the old positions of the objects. And this tries to fill the new system by stretching and copying so that one does not see them anymore. This does not always work, here well-trained operators and supervisors must intervene and decide where to manually trace. This is expensive expert work done in Hollywood by the specialist company 3D-Paint / FX, and very critical for the business model 3D conversion. Thanks to JVC's intelligent software, the effort is manageable.
How the 3D conversion works
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Actually, the 3D version is finished, but as an icing on cake, real 3D computer effects can be added for important film moments, such as flying glass chips, bullets or cartridge cases. Only these can get really far out of the screen, because then the eye actually has to capture two different views of an object.
The first impression
Fox is using 3D Blu-ray technology in the back of his head to create the 3D image unbalanced. This means that the image for the left eye remains unchanged and a new one is generated on the right. Also a Blu-ray stores the image information for the left eye full and from the right only the difference information. Thus the 2D quality is maintained, because a player then only the left eye takes into account. 3D quality degradation by scaling and stretching is not distributed to both eyes, but may be more critical.
Unfortunately we did not have the final Blu-ray of i, Robot to the editorial deadline and we can only evaluate the quarter-hour, which we were allowed to look at the Fox Studios. The 3D impression was absolutely flawless in terms of depth gradation and edge distortions. The action takes place on the screen, which avoids conversations, and the spatial depth is more distant from the viewer - but not too deeply and without exaggerated gimmicks. The scenarios are therefore quite natural but never maximized or tiring.
For Fox, i, Robot is the first reference publication, further titles will follow. Which will be, is still secret. And VideoTech is already thinking about setting up several workstations for the 3D conversion and then using them in 4K quality. These are good news for fans of 3D and older movies.
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