Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai labeled made in Chinese. 

In Hollywood, as elsewhere, technology decision are made based on incomplete information and herd instinct rather than on common sense, and science and engineering are basically common sense. It’s the scientific method that is the hope of mankind, not emotion and prejudice. There are many in the industry who reject projecting on a silver screen, and they have good reasons.  But how substantive are these reasons? 

The silver screen, actually an aluminum surfaced screen, is not only an enabler for the best method of projecting 3D images but it is the weakest link in the optical system for that method: polarized-light-image-selection.  While the Dolby system produces good images and does not require a silver screen it is not bright enough for the biggest screens (unless two projectors are used) and it uses dauntingly expensive eyewear that must be cleaned in the theater.  (Ditto XPand.) Most theaters projecting 3D use the polarization selection method whether of the circular variety (RealD and Master Image) or the linear variety (IMAX and most theme parks). 

In the past four years or so silver projection screens have improved.  When the first screens were installed for Chicken Little, the studio and exhibitor complaints centered on two issues: visibility of seams and mottling and a textured appearance on the surface of the screen.  People in the industry were also greatly concerned about how well these screens performed for 2D projection, not just because of the defects mentioned, but because their colorimetric characteristics are different from matte screens. And in this town technical and creative people will go bonkers if the images they have so painstakingly created aren’t accurately reproduced.  They can go as bonkers as they want but outside of LA the projection of movies is sometimes a smack in the face to every DP, art director, and colorist who cares about the movies. (And let’s not get started on what happened to that image quality on LCD TVs.) 

Silver screens are designed to conserve polarized light and have gain.  When polarized light is projected onto a nonmetallic surface, a matte screen, it is depolarized.  The reflected rays no longer have the orderly orientation of the electric vector (a component of the electro-magnetic wave construct that describes the physics of light) that defines polarized light.  When polarized light is reflected by a nonmetallic (a dielectric surface) it is depolarized and no longer useful for image selection.  A dielectric is a material that has closely-bound electrons.  It is a poor conductor of heat and electricity. It’s an insulator. So the same kind of material that has difficulty conducting electricity and heat will not preserve the characteristics of polarized light. Matte screens, usually made of vinyl, are dielectrics. 

Dielectrics, which do not preserve polarization characteristics, have reflection characteristics explained by Brewster’s Law that says that light rays that are at glancing angle to the surface undergo some degree of polarization. But the material that is most interesting for making silver screens is a metal (or a conductor).  Silver screens are manufactured by painting or coating matte screens with an aluminum pigment mixed into some kind of a binder or medium to be coated or sprayed onto the screen surface.  Motion picture screens are usually made of vinyl plastic 54 inches wide.  These sheets are welded together in vertical sections.   The vinyl is welded together and then painted with aluminum pigment. The weld is accomplished in a different ways but however it is done the weld has to be invisible because nobody wants to look at them.  They are easily as distracting as the guy sitting in front of you wearing a Dodgers baseball cap.

Before we dig deeper into the characteristics of the silver screen a word or two about matte screens: Matte screens are perfectly fine for 2D if the projector has a bright enough source of illumination, and they have a more or less “Lambertian surface” so that the incoming light is reflected or distributed evenly in space with pretty much the same brightness for any seat in the house. 

In addition they have very little shading.  As you look across the surface of the screen from your seat you will see very brightness change from corner to corner.  Much of the shading you will see is a result of the projector optical system and that’s called vignetting, but you can’t see it unless you are looking for it and the movie happens to be shots of the sky or a close up of a sheet.  So when you’re off in the corner in the worst seats in the house –in the front row, way over on the left or the right side – illumination holds up pretty well across the screen.  The closest part of the screen and the furthest part of the screen are pretty equal in brightness. Of course you are looking at a distorted image, but that’s another problem.  Some people seem to like sitting in the front row and some people like pickle parfait pie or chicken mint ice-cream.  Do you really subscribe to the seemingly enlightened old saw that says there’s no accounting for the other guy’s taste?  In your heart of hearts you know that if other guy doesn’t agree with you he’s warped. 

Burt we are interested in the silver screen. With the surface of the screen coated with metal it now has the ability to conserve polarization.  If polarized light is projected on it polarized light will be reflected because the metallic atoms of the surface have free electrons, and when light shines on its surface those electrons are able to vibrate in any which way to reflect polarized light.  

These screens ought to get pretty good conservation of polarization even at steep angles for the worst seats in the house but the ability to conserve polarization falls off with at the side seats.  Why does it happen?  I think it probably has to do with the binder which may be a dielectric or even (heaven forbid) birefingent.  I have heard it described in terms of diffusion, but I don’t think that’s right because a diffused metallic surface is still a metallic surface that has free electrons.  

Motion picture screens are a tradeoff between reflection and diffusion. If you were to look into a mirror that’s being used as a projection screen you will see a bright glob of light where the projection lens is.  If you add some diffusion to the surface you are able to form an image on the surface of the screen and you get rid of the so-called hot spot.  A silver screens has to be the right balance between reflection and diffusion and just like a mirror it can also have a hot spot.  But if the screen is curved the hot spot can be spread out over its surface so it cease to be visible.  Silver screens are typically curved into a section of a cylinder and this tends to mitigate the hot spot.  

Hot-spotting depends on the geometry.  For a long narrow auditorium with a long throw – in other words, the distance from the lens to the screen is great – when sitting in the middle of the auditorium, you will see very little hot-spotting.  But that’s not the way modern auditoria are designed.  They are designed to be more square-ish and have large screens.  A theater in a modern multiplex is the toughest geometry for a silver screen.

Lately there has been a lot of interest in two formats for stereoscopic multiplexing:  The above-and-below, resurrected by Technicolor for theatrical projection using film, and the side-by-side for multiplexing left and right images for television.  Here’s some background from a personal perspective. 

In the early 1970s Chris Condon of StereoVision International introduced the side-by-side format on 35mm motion picture film for the projection of a 3D feature film, The House of Wax.  Prior to this there are instances of the side-by-side format being used on 35mm film for still cameras; Leitz and Zeiss offered stereo lenses that produced a version of the format for their Leica and Contax cameras decades before Condon’s implementation.  And in the fifties Paillard sold such a product (both taking and projection lenses, which I used) for their Bolex 16mm cameras. 

Condon added a 2X anamorphic squeeze to restore the aspect ratio of the image.  Since the aspect ratio of the full Academy aperture is about 1.3:1, if the frame is split into two portions with a vertical line between the two halves, and each half is squeezed by a factor of 2:1, when it is unsqueezed by the same factor it will restore the image to 1.3:1.  I saw a screening of Condon’s version of House of Wax in this format in the early 1970s, and the projection, although a bit dark, was good. The screening was at a theater in San Francisco and I don’t know if the fault was attributable to the format or the optics, or whether the problem was the lamp because some theaters run their lamps too long and they get dimmer with age. For all I know they were using a carbon arc so this was not a factor. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was at StereoGraphics, I was thinking about multiplexing techniques for video, like the above-and-below and the side-by-side. I had used a video version of the above-and-below format (see prior article) that Colonel Bernier and others, including Condon, had used for motion picture film.  

I was able to use the above-and-below idea applied to video for the first 120Hz flicker free stereo system by dividing the television frame into two squeezed subfields, above and below each other, and (unfortunately) halving the resolution to produce a 120Hz signal played back on a modified monitor.  We injected a synch pulse to the video signal between the subfield blanking, and with a monitor running at 120Hz, with the proper selection device, one could see a stereo image. Speeding up the monitor wasn’t all that hard to do (for some monitors) because the bandwidth was not being doubled, only the vertical refresh rate.  (Lhary Meyer, the first StereoGraphics hire, developed a circuit that could be added to some monitors to do the trick.) The picture was okay but only okay because the raster lines were visible. There were only half of them (240 for NTSC) to fill up the image on the screen. We then tried line-doubling, but the image was never great.  It remained soft but without visible raster lines.  

The above-and-below technique could also be used for computer graphics but for this application it produced much better looking images because of the higher vertical resolution, so halving the number of lines in the image was less detrimental.  Computer graphics users might object that the pixels were no longer square, but rather rectangular.  But, big deal, because the image looked good; for the first time people could see decent quality stereo images on a computer screen. Although stereoscopic computer graphics were born in my lab the early 1980s I never take for granted looking at a stereo monitor or movie screen; I never crease to marvel at the images.  

Soon computer companies like Evans and Sutherland and Silicon Graphics adopted StereoGraphics’ technology and because they controlled the graphics card’s output they could offer square pixels and because of their relationships with their vendors they were able to supply their customers with monitors that ran at a high refresh rate. The value of the above/below technique was that it allowed me to demonstrate 120Hz flicker free images, not because it was implemented as part of products (but sometimes it was). The selection device was either the ZScreen which placed over the monitor screen and used with passive glasses starting in 1987, or by 1989, for those who preferred it, we had CrystalEyes shuttering. The first ZScreen we developed was of the same type that is used in today’s cinemas. 

I’ve related this history in part to highlight the shortcoming of the above-and-below format for video, because of its dearth of scan lines for NTSC, in order to explain what lead me to experiment with the side-by-side format. I worked on the side-by-side format for television because I felt it could produce a better result than above-below.  There are only 480 active lines in NTSC television so I thought that pixel doubling might look better than line doubling.  I did some experiments in a post-production suite in San Francisco and much to my delight, when run through the post-production facility’s excellent equipment (a Harry) the resultant reconstructed image, which had been vertically squeezed to occupy half the frame area and then unsqueezed to fill the entire frame area, looked very good from normal viewing distances.  It looked as good as the original from normal viewing distances. In fact, only the finest of fine details was lost.  I remember a test shot we had of a tennis match, and from normal viewing distances of several times the picture width, everything looked perfectly fine – but standing right up to the monitor (I’m nearsighted so I can stand eight inches from the screen and see it sharply) I could see there was some loss of detail in the tennis net itself.  But wow! I thought I was onto something. 

Working with Lhary (that’s how he spelled it), and with some outside help, we developed a couple of boxes that could squeeze and then unsqueeze television signals.  Another engineer, Bill McKee, and I designed a stereoscopic camera.  They were side-by-side cameras, and we used them to shoot some films.  Mort Heilig, who is the inventor of Sensorama and is considered to be one of the founders of augmented- or virtual-reality technology, shot a couple of the films one called Above and Below San Francisco, which consisted of aerial photography, and the other of a boxing matching in a San Francisco gym.  

As I said, we built two boxes – one that could mux and one that could demux – and these were the subject of two U.S. patents. We could never get the same image quality we got with the Harry in the post-production suite.  The image was always softer than I liked.  But the technology 20 years ago wasn’t what it is today, and squeezing and unsqueezing the signal now can be much more easily accomplished with digital circuitry.  

Both the side-by-side and above-and-below electronic formats have an attractive advantage in common:  They survive JPEG and MPEG compression.  Both need to piggyback on the existing compression schemes and they do so perfectly.  Only at the boundaries between sub- or sidefields is there any possibly of smearing or combining the two perspective views’ information but not to any visible extent.  They both do well because these topological transformations segregate all perspective information to within areas that preclude information pollution from the unwanted perspective. Other such geometrically isolating schemes might work as well:  Splitting the frames diagonally? 

As I said initially the side-by-side format has attracted attention recently.  It is now being offered as a viable candidate for stereoscopic multiplexing technique for video.  Perhaps it is, because the tests I have seen with it on stereo hi-def sets (DLP RPTV, fast LC, and plasma) look good.  It’s impressive what digital compression can do compared with the analogue (or hybrid) means we originally used at StereoGraphics.  People are now trying various tricks that to enhance side-by-side resolution, but for the images I have seen at the Entertainment Technology Center (which is part of USC) and other venues, on various television sets using versions of the side-by-side, they all look pretty much the same, that is to say, good.  And I should add that one of the curious things about the current stereoscopic television efforts is that when looking at various types of monitors using various multiplexing techniques there are many combinations that give a good-looking pictures.  The major difference is the selection technique rather than the multiplexing technique; whether one is looking at a Micropol or XPol (interdigitated polarizer) image or one is looking through shuttering eyewear. Some people like one, some the other. 

Improvements to side-by-side include one by Sensio which I think would be classified as a mezzanine muxing scheme designed to add back high frequency information.  I think they use side-by-side but they don’t mention it in their patents and I don’t know much more about it.  I worked on various other approaches with other workers at Real D but unless I got up close to the screen it was hard to see the difference between these variations and unadorned side-by-side. 

We are now entering an age in which we will have smart stereoscopic televisions that will have stereo engines in them, that will be able to look at the incoming signal and, depending upon how it’s multiplexed, take that information and use it properly given the combination of the set’s display technology and selection technique. That’s the analogue of what happens today with the scaling engine used in a TV to massage the incoming signal into that required by the native resolution of the set’s display.  

The side-by-side format that I commandeered from Condon, and Condon took from Leitz, Zeiss, and Paillard, and who knows who else, still has legs.  It’s the darnedest thing but that’s the way of technology; people just won’t leave well enough alone.  Sometimes they make things better. 

I am presently working on a side-by-side variant for film at the company I recently cofounded, Oculus3D.  But that’s another story.

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. 

Two perf high frames are also known as the Techniscope format as were used for quite a few 2D movies.  The process that was used by Sergio Leone to shoot his engaging spaghetti westerns, and the Japanese version was known as Tohoscope and frequently used by the master Kurasawa.  Many a samurai movie did I watch at the Toho Cinema on the west side of Manhattan in my youth, but that’s another story.  

The format has been resurrected and is presently being hawked by Technicolor. Despite the fact that it failed ignobly in the 1980s it’s back.  It’s technically an interesting solution pregnant with possibilities but all pregnancies do not a healthy creature produce. Colonel Robert V. Bernier may be the first person to develop camera and projection optics for the format.  His competition was the Marks brothers, Mortimer and Alvin, of Whitestone, New York, who in turn worked with an inventor named Kent who also designed and made camera and projection optics for the above-and-below format.  By the early eighties there were other people working on it including Arriflex, Anthony Coogan, and the redoubtable Marty Sadoff. 

In the early eighties as part of a deal StereoGraphics had with Condon I worked on Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell at EO Studios in Shelby, North Carolina using his camera optics.  The producer of the film was Early Owensby, a good old boy and a good businessman, and the director was Worth Keeter, Jr., later of Power Rangers fame. Working for EO on Rottweiler was a grueling experience because of the fourteen hour days in extreme heat, not to mention that much of the crew wore sidearms – which they never had to use. 

Chris had worked out an optical system for taking images from two perspective views and placing them above and below each other on a single piece of 35mm film as described above (or is it below?).  This placed two 2.4:1-aspect-ratio images above and below each other within the Academy aperture – which is about the largest practical aperture you can have on 35mm, considering that one has to have room for soundtrack and one can’t bump into the adjacent frames or perforations.  If I recall correctly the left was on the top and the right on the bottom.  Which frame contains which perspective is, as it turns out, to be of some importance, as we shall see. 

If the taking optics don’t account for the vertical offset between the two subframes the result will be vertical parallax in every shot, which is unacceptable.  There has to be some way to shift the images a little bit up and a little bit down from the two lens axes position.  Chris came up with optics that could do just like Colonel Bernier whose lenses were used on Flesh for Frankenstein, also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, despite the fact that Warhol had not a thing to do with the production.  This version of Frankenstein is surely one of the oddest and blackest of comedies.  Imagine a liver hanging out on the end of a pole into audience space and you’ll get some idea. But for me the best part was Dr. Frankenstein’s Hitlerian rant extolling the virtues of a conquering race of supermen made from cobbled together body parts.  Bernier’s optics were damn sharp, and his projection system was good too.  But the camera lens didn’t work for reflex cameras. Condon’s did. 

I had occasion to help project above and below films in a few venues and I saw a number of stereoscopic films projected in the 1980s using his and other optics.  There were maybe a dozen bottom-of-the barrel films like Amityville 3-D, Jaws 3-D, Comin’ At Ya!, Metalstorm – not to forget Rottweiler, which did not achieved wide distribution.  (It’s available on DVD and I have a bit part as a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt.  My voice is dubbed because the generator truck made so much noise.) 

I think it was rare to see the above-and-below format properly projected.  It turned out, practically speaking, to be very hard to make it work.  The tragic flaw was the fact that it is next to impossible to tell which frame is the left and which is the right – even if index marks are used. That matters because the light that passes through those subframes becomes polarized by two sheet polarizers located in the projection optics, and if the left image is encoded with the right polarization orientation (and vice versa), the audience sees a pseudostereoscopic image – one that’s inside-out.  It doesn’t appear to be inside-out because there is a conflict of cues – a conflict of the stereoscopic cue and a conflict of the monocular cue – the image looks like a mess.  People can’t identify what’s going on, and I don’t blame them because they never seen a pseudostereoscopic image in the visual field; so there’s no way to connect with it, no way to articulate what it is.  But an expert can tell instantaneously that the projection is off.  The only cure is to wear the glasses upside-down. Try filing a patent disclosure on that one.  

So why can’t the projectionist do it right?  If there were index marks to identify the left or right frames the aperture and the gate of the projector will cover the index marks, so he can’t use that as a guide when threading.  Another problem – and it’s just as serious – is the fact that movies are assembled on a large platter.  It’s a closed-loop platter that holds the 10 or 12 or however many reels of film it takes to make up a feature, all spliced together end to end.  The film is fed into the projector using a series of rollers, and then returned to the center core of the platter so no rewinding required.  It’s an ingenious device, and almost as much fun to watch at work as a pool sweep.  

The problem is that if the splice is made at the subframe frameline rather than the frameline the image sequence, instead of being left-right-left-right-left-right, will become left-right-right-left-right so that the left subframe will appear in the right subframe position (and vice versa) so the subframes will be improperly polarized.  The result is that pseudostereoscopic image.  This can happen with alarming frequency.  Technicolor, by their own admission, hasn’t got a fix. The hallmark of a perfected stereoscopic projection system is that it ought to require little operator attention – not any more care than projecting a 2D movie.  The stereoscopic digital cinema has succeeded because it is almost foolproof. 

The above-and-below format was the inspiration for my first stereoscopic electronic display.  I invented the first electronic flicker-free field-sequential stereoscopic system, and it’s the basis for the vast majority of stereoscopic displays, including the DLP-based stereoscopic cinema.  Whether it’s Master Image, Real D, XpanD or Dolby, they all uses something I invented, namely that if you present left and right images rapidly in sequence at a sufficiently high field rate, when you look at them through an appropriate selection device, you will see a flicker-free stereoscopic image.  And it was the above and below format, its electronic or video version, that I used to get a flickerfree image.  StereoGraphics got started by tricking the 60Hz infrastructure into running at 120Hzs. And that’s how the new stereoscopic TV industry is going about it. 

It may not always be the specific invention that counts; it’s the infrastructure.  That’s something I learned as a boy reading about Thomas Edison.  It’s not the invention of the light bulb that’s the golden key, although it’s a pretty good invention.  It’s the invention of the electrical distribution system that enables light bulbs, toasters, and every other electrical appliance.  

In my life as an inventor Edison’s example has guided me.  I knew that I had to create a flicker-free system that worked with the existing computer graphics and television infrastructure, so I chose the above-and-below format.  The above-and-below format for video is an elegant solution, if I do say so myself.  That’s because subfield or subframes that are spatially sequential become temporally sequential if handled properly.  Looking at a above-and-below image on a 60Hz monitor one will see a left and a right image above and below each other.  But if the monitor is goosed to run at 120 fields per second those two subfields will play at 120 fields per second with 60 lefts and 60 rights concatenated.  Each subfield can occupy the entire height of the monitor’s screen – not half the height of the screen. A synchronization pulse must be added within the subfield vertical blanking area so that the monitor can synch to the signals, but once this is done, the image can be perceived to be stereoscopic when viewed through shuttering eyewear, for example.  

What worked wonderfully well for electronic stereoscopy turned out to be a flop for film projection.  Resurrecting it at this time springs from the recognition that at the film industry has a problem. There are not going to be enough stereoscopic digital projection theaters for some time to come.  There are too many shows being released and too few theaters.  That’s the problem but the over/under system 35mm film system is not the answer. It’s undependable.

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 stereoscopic cinema, as it has developed over the past four years, consists primarily of stereoscopic computer-generated animated features or, in plain English, 3-D cartoons.  There are a couple of reasons for this:  In terms of content this resurrection of the stereoscopic cinema is different from that which occurred in the past.  In the last half-century or so there have been two stereoscopic resurgences of note:  In the early ’50s 60 features were made, and they were all live-action shows.  (There were also a few animated shorts using cell animation.)  You are probably familiar with titles such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, Kiss Me Kate, Hondo, and Dial M for Murder.  

Then in the early ‘80s, some 20 years later, theaters projected in a single-strip 35mm projection method identical to the recent Iglourious Technicolor system.  What occurred in the ‘50s used interlocked 35mm projectors, repurposed from changeover, which were pressed into stereoscopic service.  But the 80’s single projector system, in an attempt to overcome the shortcomings of the two projector system, used prints with two subframes arranged above and below each other with each frame having a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Several kinds of optical devices were added to the projector or its lens to combined and polarized the subframe images to project movies like Amityville 3-D, Comin’ At Ya!, and Metalstorm .  Although far fewer titles than were released in the ‘50s, once again these were live-action shows.  

Now a little over 20 years later in 2004,  we had Real D in about 89 theaters in North America showing Chicken Little – a bad film that did well because of Disney marketing and because it was in 3-D.  It was brought into existence by the vision of Disney, who has been an innovator in everything from the stereoscopic cinema, to stereoscopic sound and theme parks.  

We can expect the great majority of CG animated features to be stereoscopic because those recently released this way have made money – more money in 2-D than in 3-D.  There will be a handful of such shows that aren’t, but those efforts may be financially ill-advised because the ticket price for a 3-D movie is higher, so the exhibitors and the studios can potentially make more money – which is one way this whole thing gets driven.  

This cycle there have been a relative handful of live-action stereoscopic features.   Initially we had kids’ films, which are animated cartoons, and now we’ve got horror movies: Scar, a movie that was released in Europe but not in the United States; My Bloody Valentine; and Final Destination 3; soon we will have Piranha 3-D, which is set for release; and another horror film called The Hole.  If horror movies follow the same pattern as CG animation we will have another genre that has succumbed to the stereoscopic cinema. We also had Journey to the Center of the Earth a family film, or a teen sci-fi movie I think supports the noting that the demographic is going up – from little kids to older kids. 

The other night at an Industry diner I heard people saying that Avatar was a make or break for the 3-D cinema. I don’t think that’s true, but people are eagerly awaking the film which will be a combination of live action, CG and performance capture.  Avatar can probably best be classified as a live-action film with a lot of CG.  I think you would classify King Kong as a live-action film with a lot of CG, so why not Avatar?  However it’s classified it raises the age of those who will be interested in the film.  In fact Avatar has a very broad demographic. 

It’s too much to say that the fate of live-action stereoscopic cinema hangs in the balance, but if Avatar does well it’s surely going to be a good thing for the 3-D cinema.  And it can help inspire another genre on its way to becoming stereoscopic:  science-fiction.

 The Bruckheimer-Disney film G-Force is another sci-fi live-action film, albeit juvenal, with lots of CG effects. The technology behind G-Force is interesting because it wasn’t shot stereoscopically, and neither were two other live-action films, Alice in Wonderland, and Piranha 3-D.  These movies are being converted to 3-D from 2-D cinematography.  Alice is a big-budget major feature, and the produiction opted to shoot in 2-D.  The director of Piranha 3-D, Alex Aja, wanted to shoot in 35mm anamorphic.  That more or less ruled out shooting stereoscopically.  Conversion was also used for the successful rereleases of Nightmare Before Christmas. 

So we’ve got a handful of stereoscopic live action narrative feature films (the fantasy and horror elements are prevalent) and three concert films that I know of: the superb U2 film; the Hannah Montana film and the Jonas Brothers movie that bumped Coraline out of many theaters – Coraline being an interesting example of stop-motion animation, and quite an eye-dazzling film at that. 

The question remains unanswered, why aren’t there more live-action narrative stereoscopic movies?  There is no simple answer, but part of the answer may have to do with technology and part may have to do with aesthetics and filmmakers’ choices.  Paramount’s decision to make the latest Star Trek movie in 2-D may be a clue. For awhile the studio considered it to be a candidate for a stereoscopic release but Paramount decided not to, and it was a good decision.  It’s a strong franchise, I’m not sure they needed the stereoscopic medium, and at the time that the decision was made there were few stereoscopic theaters.  In fact, there still are comparatively few stereoscopic theaters; but when the decision was made there were hundreds of stereoscopic theaters, and now there are a few thousand – still not enough for a financially satisfying 3-D release of a major feature, and certainly not enough theaters if there are two major features coming out in the same time period. 

Could production technical limitations play a role? Let’s take a quick look at the state-of-the-art of production and post-production.  The current camera rigs are derived from a design by Floyd Ramsdell in the late 1940s.  A major issue with stereoscopic cinematography is that the cameras’ lenses have to be brought very close together – in fact, closer than the eyes are apart – to do a lot of successful stereoscopic cinematography.  That means you either have to use tiny cameras (which are not up to studio quality) or you have to find some clever way to get two big cameras optically closer together.   

The blimped studio cameras at the time that Ramsdell did his work were gigantic compared to today’s Arriflex and Panavision cameras, for example; but the digital cameras that are around today are not necessarily smaller than film cameras.  In any event, Ramsdell had the idea of placing two cameras at right angles to each other on a horizontal surface shooting through what is called a beamsplitter, or a pellicle, or a semi-silvered mirror.  In this way one camera sees a reflected image and the other camera sees through the semi-silvered mirror so the camera lens axes are brought close together.  

In the early 1950s Raymond and Nigel Spottiswoode had an idea for making the design more compact, and placed one camera on the top and the other on the bottom, the top camera shooting through a semi-silvered mirror and the bottom camera looking straight ahead.  That is the design used in the vast majority of extant stereoscopic camera rigs.  

There are three major vendors of these rigs.  I don’t want to sell the other guys short because there are many other people around like Kerner Optical, and Jason Goodman  at 21st Century 3-D, who also offer rigs, but the three major vendors are 3ality led by Steve Schklair, Pace Technology led by Vince Pace, and Paradise FX led by Max Penner.  These outfits are in the San Fernando Valley.  The camera rigs that these gentlemen have produced have been used to great effect for feature films.  When you see the result on the screen it looks good.  

But these are not easy cameras to use.  They’re complex rigs, they don’t look like normal movie cameras, and I know from talking to cinematographers that they are not completely convinced that they can use these instruments.  They are, as I said, based on a design that was cooked up by Raymond and Nigel Spottiswoode, two very important people in the history of stereoscopic cinematography because of their work in the Festival of Britain and also because of their invention of floating windows.  

Without going into all of the ins and outs of the differences between the various camera designs, as I said, they are all basically capable of good work.  They use two cameras that need to be coordinated, and making two cameras work like one camera – focusing and zooming and setting the stereoscopic controls – is not a trivial matter. They also, as far as I have been told, require extensive post-production correction.  But post-production sweetening or correction is the order of the day for producing digital intermediates, so this may not be so much out of line with what is the accepted practice. 

Fortunately, two post-production instruments have been placed in the hands of filmmakers in the last couple of years.  One is the Avid, which has the capability of allowing filmmakers to view stereoscopically.  This offline editing system has the capability of allowing footage to be viewed without it having been color timed without it having been stereo timed.  “Stereo timing” is the analogous function of color timing, in which the stereo parameters are set so that within a scene there is a good 3-d flow from shot to shot.  

The other tool is the Pablo by Quantel which provides for the actual stereoscopic sweetening itself.  The Pablo has gone a long way toward allowing filmmakers to control the image, but more work needs to be done. 

Why do I say that more work needs to be done?  Because the guys who are creating stereoscopic CG animation are masters and the camera people are just catching up.  The CG people have done fantastic work.  They are teachers, because the live-action work now has to be as good as what the CG stereo supervisor have accomplished in terms of images that are easy to view, are beautiful, and have the ability to further the story.  Stereoscopic CG animation is, in a sense, much easier than camera-derived images because the animators totally control the space.  They control the parameters of the virtual camera, and they can do all kinds of things that a live-action filmmaker can’t easily do, including changing the distance between foreground and background, and even using different interaxial separations for different objects in the scene that are different distances from the camera.  

These supervisors include Phil McNally (also known as “Captain 3-D”), of DreamWorks Animation, Robert Neuman at Disney, and Rob Engle at Sony Pictures Imageworks.  Also, Jayme Wilkinson at Blue Sky did a fantabulous job with Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which I enjoyed greatly. 

So I don’t have a simple answer to Jeffrey Katzenberg’s plaint, but I do think we’re going to see a genre-by-genre transition, the first being kids’ CG animated films and then live action horror films. I think science-fiction and action movies are next, and I we may see every genre fall to 3-D – or rise, as the case may be.  The reason for this is economic.  If you have a multiplex and 3-D movies are making, on average, $3 more per seat than 2-D movies, the exhibitor, the studios and the filmmakers take note. 

It’s hard for me to believe that all live action features are going to be synthesized or converted from 2-D.  That process certainly has its place. But once the effects producer breaks down the show shot-by-shot (and that’s the right person to do the job because 3-D is an effect) a decision will be made to determine which shots or scenes will be performance capture, which will be CG, which will be converted, and which will require stereoscopic cameras.  The reason will have to make sense and pass the usual effects tests:  Is this the way to do the shot that will look the best and cost the least? Most of the time, with the right instrument, the answer for live action features will be to use a 3-D camera. 

Full disclosure: My daughter calls me Poppy, and I’m working on a stereoscopic camera system.

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. According to what’s in print, it would cost about $5000 to $7000 for a lens.  In addition a so-called “silver screen” – say 40 by 20 feet – would be another $8000.  If you compare that to the cost of a digital system, it is approximately one-tenth of what such a system would cost over a five-year period.  That’s my calculation, and I’m sure that there are other ways to do the calculations that may or may not agree with mine.

I did see the Technicolor projection, which was at an unannounced one-week four-wall at the AMC 16 in Burbank, in theater number 4.  I thought what I saw might be good enough to sell tickets with a major reservation or two.  It was not as good as stereoscopic digital projection when up to spec. 

By spec I mean a 5.4-foot-lambert projection, which requires a great deal of care and effort on the part of the exhibitor.  For one thing, they have to use a fairly new lamp.  They can’t use a lamp that’s a thousand hours old, or past its rated life.  

What I did see on the screen at the AMC was an image that I thought would be acceptable to a lot of attendees, but did not have the same crispness, bounce, sharpness and brilliance of good digital 3-D projection.  Technicolor has identified a problem, and it’s a problem of not having enough screens for the stereoscopic feature releases, as has been noted in the Hollywood trades and in studio head tirades.  

When I came to Hollywood over four years ago and sat in meetings with people from the studios, digital projection had not gained traction.  In fact, many technical people from the studios were dead set against it.  In the ensuing four years there has been a sea change.  Digital projection has become accepted as part of the digital religion.  And as with any belief system it’s hard to have a straight up conversation with the believers, because questioning faith is a losing game.

As many of you know, the cinema has been going digital (or electronic, or whatever you want to call it) for the last decade or so.  Although most movies are shot on film, most use a digital intermediate mastering technique, which is a fine improvement over the old optical post technique.  It does produce what I consider to be very much better-looking release prints, generally speaking. 

However, the argument that is made for the financing of digital projection and its assumed proliferation are curious.  That’s because digital projectors are expensive, in the range of $40,000 to $80,000.  That means that when a new theater is built, a projector can be neatly financed as part of the installation, but  for retrofitting an existing cinema there has to be a way to finance the new projector that makes sense to the exhibitor.  

The digital cinema imperative is its stereoscopic capability.  It’s true that you can show live special events, but that’s a drop in the economic bucket compared to the return on investment offered by the stereoscopic cinema.  The public doesn’t care whether or not a show is digital or on film, but they do care whether it’s 3-D or 2-D, as the attendance and box office revenue numbers prove.  

With only a small fraction of the 130,000 theatrical screens converted to digital, and with a few 3-D movies coming out every month, there’s a log jam.  Movies can’t play long enough before they are bumped out. Everybody except the audience is leaving money on the table because many of these films are holding.  

Thus the studios have banded together in an attempt to create an initiative to help pay off the price of a projector; but that payoff takes between five and ten years, and it’s the theater-owner who pays it off slowly with something called a “digital print fee,” which is about $800 every time a new film is shown on his projector.  

The studios want to be able to distribute digitally because it’s allegedly less costly. But by the time they finish paying for the projector it may need to be replaced.  It’s the damn strangest financial strategy but hardly unique.  

Smart people recently brought our economy to the brink so I wouldn’t take this scheme for granted.  Just when the “old digital” projector is paid off you’d have to start the financing scheme all over again.  Maybe by that time a digital projector will be less expensive.  Maybe the exhibitor will buy a 35mm projector.  Maybe by that time we’ll see flat panel theater sized screens making projection obsolete. 

The roll-out of digital projectors has slowed because of the recession so a means for projecting 3-D using 35mm sounds even more interesting. As you may know, this studio financing initiative is, as of this moment, unfunded. Just like the Emperor’s new clothes the flaw will be found out sooner or later, but the executives who made the digital decision may very well be gone by the time that happens.  

Digital projection can be quite good. Whether or not digital projection is better than film projection depends on the theater.  Film projection can very good too. But you cannot assume that either is good in all cinemas across the country.  I’ve been in a lot of theaters and screening rooms in this town where somebody set the projector menu incorrectly and we had the wrong color space, the wrong this, the wrong that.  That doesn’t mean that this is a K.O. punch for the digital cinema, because digital projection can be quite beautiful – rock-solid steady and the prints don’t wear.  No scratches, no dirt. And film has its issues too, but it has done quite well for over a hundred years. 

A digital projector is hard to operate compared to a film projector.  There are too many choices, too many resolutions that are possible, too many color spaces.  When you load film on a film projector there’s no ambiguity.  You just thread it up, and away you go.  It’s a much simpler device to use.  

The marriage of 3-D with digital is accepted as a given today but it ain’t necessarily so.  Film projection, as Technicolor has hinted, could be extremely interesting if it’s done right.   

Technicolor in my opinion has got it wrong.  

I was the chairman of the SMPTE working group that recommended the standards for the system Technicolor is using – the over and under system.  The major problem with this technology is that improper threading of the film in the gate or splicing the reels together at the sub-frame line rather than the frame line causes the image (created by two Techniscope frames above and below each other) to go out of phase and also to become pseudostereoscopic (inside out). 

This is an unbearable experience for the audience (an impractical and partial cure is to turn the eyewear upside down) and it will happen frequently because it is such an easy mistake to make. When that happens in the field (and it will again and again) it’s going to be a turn off for film as a vehicle for the 3-D cinema. 

Technicolor has stated that their intention is for a system that is a stop gap or an interim system, because, as the conventional wisdom has it, film will eventually be replaced by digital technology.  The only trouble is, gee whiz, this is a self fulfilling prophecy since their system has a built in time bomb with a short fuse, the tragic pseudo flaw described above. (Inglourious Technicolor?)  

There is a need for a film based 3-D system.  For one thing there are lots of places in the world that might never convert to digital because of the low ticket prices they collect and because of the high cost of the projectors. 

Or there are places like some countries in South America where the import duty is so high there’s no way they can afford one. And if good quality 3-D movies could be projected with a 35mm film projector, the digital religion notwithstanding, the studios will go for it.  That’s because they are part of publically traded companies and report profits quarterly (film grosses are reported almost instantly) and the need for short-term profits will trump the strategic investment in those digital projectors. 

(Full disclosure – My kids easily beat me at chess and I am working on a new system for 3-D theatrical projection.)

 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.

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=117128

Monday and Tuesday I lay in bed,
Wishing I was very dead.
What I preferred to getting worse,
Was that final ride in a big black hearse.

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=116729

Yoda, a grungy puppet,

Demonstrates the worthlessness of charm and wisdom.

A shrill caricature of a wise man,

A shmata paper-maché piece of crap,

Who spouts cliché Eastern philosophy.

Yoda, I deplore your Lego lightsabre,

Your Jedi bullshit.

You punky poseur,

You mock the ephemeral nature of the path.

Of the dharma and the sanga.

You false squeaky voiced phony bodhisattva,

I stand before you naked.

I condemn you.

And you, corrupt puppeteer,

Remove your hand

To reveal the broken lifeless spirit of a doll

Without a spine.