State of the art: 3D and the “AVATAR effect”

State of the art: 3D and the “AVATAR effect”

Feb 07

The disappointing but inevitable box office success of James Cameron’s lacklustre return to fantasy filmmaking has, for better or worse, solidified 3D movies as financially viable in the minds of those cold, distant studio execs whose only apparent concern is the bottom line. After the unprecedented success of Avatar in standard 3D as well as Imax 3D venues, many studios appear to be jumping on the 3D bandwagon. Clash Of The Titans is reportedly undergoing a last-minute 3D transfer; pressure from Sony to shoot Spider-Man 4 in 3D apparently contributed to Sam Raimi’s eventual departure from the project; Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Parts 1 and 2 are supposedly going ahead in 3D; Michael Bay is attempting to resist Paramount’s demands to shoot Transformers 3 in 3D; mediocre horror films continue to be shot in the format (Piranha 3D); and of course the glut of 3D animated films continues unabated (Toy Story 3, Shrek 4, How To Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, Puss In Boots, Kung-Fu Panda 2, oh god it just goes on).

But as if that wasn’t enough, Slash report that Sony has announced plans to re-release old movies in 3D on blu-ray. This plan is so strange, so incredibly dull and calculated, that it couldn’t possibly have been fabricated by the trades. Sony apparently has its sights set specifically on the likes of Ghostbusters, Men In Black, Spider-Man, and Gladiator, as well as more recent flicks such as District 9, 2012 and Zombieland. Don’t forget, Sony doesn’t just make movies, they make … well, just about anything electronics / entertainment related. As such they are planning to push 3D kicking and screaming into your living room: at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Sony unveiled a series of 3D-capable tellies, as well as announcing that Sony’s PlayStation 3 can be updated via a forthcoming patch to play 3D-encoded blu-rays. Super.

In fact, 3D was the main star of CES 2010, with all the major TV companies (LG, Samsung, etc.) showing off their own lines of 3D TVs, as well as talking about future 3D-playback-enabled blu-ray players. All of this development was planned years in advance of Avatar’s success, but the show’s timing was suspiciously fortuitous– 3D was on everyone’s minds after Avatar, and I’m quite sure a great many people were interested in taking that immersive 3D experience back home with them, so showing the consumers exactly how to do this could not have come at a better time.

Six months ago if you’d asked me about 3D I would have sounded cautiously optimistic. I would have been anticipating Avatar‘s release, waiting to see whether or not it would disprove the traditional public understanding that 3D is just a flash-in-the-pan gimmick, but I would have sounded much more interested in 3D in a different arena: gaming. The vast majority of games these days are rendered in 3D, and the technology to render the action from two slightly different viewpoints, thereby tricking the brain into seeing depth, was already ready for public consumption six months ago. The trick was to find a 3D-capable monitor — up until this year’s CES, there were only two (precisely two) LCD monitors capable of outputting 3D. You see, to avoid shuddering during motion, the monitor would have to refresh 120 times a second (60 for each eye), and there were only a couple of monitor models in the world that could do it, and they were expensive. Plus you would have to invest in your very own pair of polarised glasses.

The glasses designed for home use by graphics company nVidia are a bit different from the ones you were given at the cinema. For one thing they’re sturdier, and for another a bit more stylish. The most important thing is that they communicate via infra-red beams with a receiver plugged directly into your PC, so the glasses can time the flickering in each eye to coincide with the 120hz flickering of the image on the screen, alternating 60 times per second between each eye, resulting in — you guessed it — 3D. Six months ago I was very excited at this new, intriguing technology, until every Tom, Dick and Harry jumped on the 3D bandwagon and started flooding the burgeoning market with dross. It used to be novel and exclusive, but now everybody in the TV business is jostling the market with their new toys, to the point of saturation. But I digress. How will this affect you, the curious blu-ray buyer?

Well, that 60-inch 200hz LED TV that you bought for ten thousand dollars six months ago isn’t good enough for 3D. Sorry. Up until now, LCD and LED TVs boasting smooth motion at 200hz have just been interpolating 50hZ footage into 200hz. I don’t really know what “interpolating” means in terms of programs and processes, but it sounds a lot like “bullshit” to me. So the new 3D-enabled TVs unveiled at CES are actually capable of displaying 120hz, really, this time, for real, meaning that, yes, we can go out and buy a 3D blu-ray and put it in and enjoy the immersion. Ah, but wait, the blu-ray player! That’s right, current blu-ray players are incapable of outputting a 120hz dual image! Drat!

After forking out a not inconsiderable amount for a brand spanking new LED/LCD 120hz telly, you will then be forced to do one of several things, depending on what (if any) blu-ray player you currently own. If you own a PS3, you will have to download the firmware update that enables 3D codecs — which hasn’t been released yet … If you don’t own a PS3, you’d better hope you own a duck’s nuts Sony blu-ray player hooked up to the internet, or another, lesser brand of blu-ray player with internet connectivity and solid support systems so you can download a firmware update that way (again, these firmware updates still don’t exist as far as the consumer is concerned). If you have a garden variety blu-ray player with no data transfer or internet connection, you’re up the creek.

Another thing you’ll have to look into is the glasses. I imagine home theatre glasses will work a lot more like the cinema ones than the 3D gaming ones — they’ll be generic polarised lenses that don’t require any of that infra-red nonsense to separate the fields. Where do you get the glasses? How many do you get? How much do they cost? Can four people sit in one room with four pairs of glasses and all watch a 3D movie together? Wouldn’t that look freakin’ weird? Will Sony glasses work with LG blu-ray players? The mind boggles with questions.

I expect that by this paragraph you will be totally and utterly turned off by the very concept of bringing home the 3D experience. The amount of money required to upgrade your existing home theatre system is, as I mentioned before, hefty enough to dissuade the majority of punters from investing in the tech. The blu-ray format is already unpopular, expensive and misunderstood enough as it is; how is adding to the complexity and price of the format going to convince consumers to invest in a technology they have so far avoided like the plague? Blu-ray is like the new, rich kid that nobody wants to play with. Why, as his parent, would you send him to school on a segway with a new pair of shoes and a lunchbox full of caviar? There is no way this kid is going to get through the day without getting bullied and / or ignored.

Releasing every single blockbuster movie over the next few years in 3D is all well and good, but remember that the home theatre market is just as massive as the box office, and it’s often where ignored or forgotten films find their niche. If your movie is only designed to be viewed in 3D, what does that say about it as a film? It was a cash-grab, a 3D clone of Avatar, and by the time it hits DVD shelves everyone will have forgotten it was in 3D and will suddenly realise the movie is actually very mediocre. The fact that major electornics companies are putting their considerable weight behind this iteration of the 3D fad means that it won’t die quite as easily as the last few; and it might be that in 10, 20, or 50 years 3D entertainment will penetrate the market to the extent that 3D in your home is not prohibitively expensive. But until then, until the time comes that watching Letterman late at night on the couch in 3D is the norm, every movie released in cinemas in 3D is just a gimmick.