OVER-AND-UNDER AND OUT

In the early 1980s, when I founded StereoGraphics Corporation, the first bit of revenue income we had came from a venture with Chris Condon of StereoVision International.  Chris was a pioneer in the projection of stereoscopic movies using a single 35mm projector.  He founded the company Century Precision Optics, which is now a part of Schneider; but he moved on from there, sold it, and created StereoVision International because he had a big hit with the ‘70s movie The Stewardesses.  The success of that film set him to work on perfecting a single film approach to stereoscopic projection and photographic techniques.  He settled on the above-and-below (also called over and under or over/under) format based on two two-perforation high subframes with the Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio occupying the area of the academy aperture. 

LIVE-ACTION STEREOSCOPIC FEATURES

 

As reported in Daily Variety Jeffrey Katzenberg was recently heard decrying the lack of live-action stereoscopic features.  He exhorted the industry to correct this situation.  He was also quoted as musing about his motivation for going beyond the mandate of his own particular self interest, animation, by taking on the live-action cause.  But if there were more live action stereoscopic features in the theaters it will also be good for people who make feature-length animated films, like Katezenberg. 

THE DIGITAL RELIGION

The announcement by Technicolor of a film-based 3D system, which would cost exhibitors comparatively little money to install, was provocative to say the least.

Email to a Producer

 This is opinionated but backed by reason. This is not at all like the debate on health care reform. It’s better to shoot parallel because you will not incur asymmetrical trapezoid distortion which shows up most often in wide angle in close shots. The zero parallax plane can then be set in post by horizontally shifting the left and right images. The downside of that approach is that you will have to crop image area to maintain the aspect ratio.

When shooting your IMAX films parallel was just fine without having to laterally shift because IMAX uses a different compositional theory — different from that used for the usual theatrical cinema. IMAX strives for a so-called immersive effect and the background points are set to be at a fixed 2.5 inches — at least for many IMAX films. Shooting with toe-in will create the geometrical distortion I alluded to but it can be fixed in post with a Pablo — for example. Most stereo rigs do not allow for shooting parallel to control the desired zero parallax setting. They depend on toe-in. Parallel going lens axes can only have a zero parallax control if the sensors or lenses are horizontally shifted at the time of photogrpahy.

The overriding aesthetic concern has to do with what I call stereo timing — the analogue of color timing. There is no way to set the zero parallax plane with complete confidence during cienamtogrpahy because it is impossible to understand how the shots will finally go together at the time of photography. Therefore, no matter what method used, tweaking in post is necessary to get the right stereo timing — or proper image flow and look.

The Truth about 3D TV, Part 3

Stereoscopic television must exist within the broadcast and other delivery systems infrastructures.  Stereoscopic TV developers can’t reinvent the wheel.  There are pipelines that transmit the signal to your home and they must remain in place without change.  They can be terrestrial, they can be disc-based, they can be from the Internet, they can be from cable, or whatever – even on means for getting a signal to a handheld device.  If the world is going to have stereoscopic television, and it’s going to be commercially successful, it’s going to have to fit within the bandwidth of those pipelines and it’s going to have to have similar characteristics to the 2-D (planar) signal, or all bets are off in terms of having a commercial product.

The Truth about 3D TV, Part 2

We ought to consider the stakeholders in this new universe of stereoscopic TV.  Stakeholders has become a cliché term, and in this case it’s meaningless if it doesn’t include the public.  I refuse to call us “consumers” – an utterly revolting and demeaning term that reduces human beings to a maw chomping on products turned out by the capitalist mill.

Reality and Illusion

To paraphrase Einstein:  Space is what keeps everything from happening at the same place, and stereoscopic imaging helps us visualize space.  The concept of space, or distance, is so fundamental, that a tentative understanding of our perception of it has taken the human race centuries. Stereoscopic imaging heightens our perception of space and it is so fundamental to our existence that any idea that the stereoscopic cinema is a passing fad is ridiculous.

Stereoscopic Movies: Conventional Wisdom

People are now learning how to look at stereoscopic moving images just as there was a time, a century ago, when people learned how to look at movies.  I’ve read that when motion pictures were first projected, if the composition didn’t include the entire actor – say they were cut off at the knees – people were taken aback by the effect, thinking that this was an image of an amputee. It took a bit of time to get away from composing a shot to look like the entire theater stage. There are stories about the Lumières projecting a movie of a locomotive headed towards the camera with the audience fleeing the projection in terror. 

Glossary

In any discipline, nomenclature turns out to be of obvious importance.  It’s crucial for all the people who are doing the thing to agree on the same set of definitions.  Without that, it’s impossible to communicate – or it’s impossible to communicate without ambiguity. 

Raw Stereo Data, Part Two

In the first part of this article I articulated the concept of raw stereo data, an analog of that which is now common practice with regard to electronic cinematography or for exposing camera negative.  This approach allows for more extensive manipulation in post than exposures that bake in the final effect. This last part of Part One discussed beamsplitter rigs.