Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 13, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Hollywood studio DreamWorks announced that from 2009 it would produce all animated films only in 3D. Studios such as 20th Century Fox are also using 3D for live-action films, including Avatar by Titanic director James Cameron, due in cinemas for Christmas 2009. Filmmakers Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), George Lucas (Star Wars), and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) are likewise working on 3D film projects. A special platform for 3D productions, the “3DX: 3D Film & Entertainment Technology Festival,” was scheduled to take place for the first time in Singapore on November 19, 2008.
Television broadcasters also need special events to remain competitive in the long term alongside internet platforms such as YouTube and online games such as Second Life. Electronics manufacturers are already bringing the first 3D home devices to market. “Television will become a primary medium again through 3D,” assured Mark Horton, Quantel’s head of strategic development. Stereo 3D sporting and music events in particular have great potential because they give viewers the feeling of attending an event live. “At a sporting event filmed in stereo 3D, cameras get the best view from the best position on the field and look where viewers look,” Horton emphasized. “This creates the impression of sitting directly in the audience.” NBA basketball games filmed using the stereo-3D method provided impressive evidence of this.
In this modern stereo-recording technique, two HD cameras are mounted on a special camera rig and synchronized so that they record images simultaneously. The distance between the lenses corresponds to the distance between human eyes. To direct viewers’ attention, for example from foreground to background, one camera is panned so the eye is directed toward different areas. A major advantage of this digital 3D recording technique is that the camera operator can check the result immediately during shooting. Previously, film had to be developed in a laboratory first, often giving viewers a different impression from the “camera eye.”
Digital post-production of stereo-3D projects offers considerably more flexibility than optical or chemical processes, where the result could never be viewed immediately, causing errors and delays. Quantel addressed this issue with new stereoscopic 3D post-production systems for iQ and Pablo. The stereo option for Pablo and iQ lets users edit and output two simultaneous HD or 2K video streams in sync and without rendering. Editing, colour correction, and mastering take place in one system. Because both streams are processed simultaneously in real time, the final result is immediately visible and can be changed as required.
3D projects generate twice as much source material as 2D projects and therefore require twice the storage space and rendering capacity. Drawing on its experience with HD post-production systems, Quantel addresses this with an approach unavailable in other systems. Through its Frame Magic principle—storage management based on individual frames—the source material is held only once rather than in another form on the server. Because rendering processes are limited to the affected frames, the system can edit two synchronized video streams in real time.
Interactive post-production allows precise comparison of whether both image streams match in colour, position, and synchronization. Quantel combined its new stereoscopic 3D software with Pablo and iQ to permit practical real-time 3D post-production without proxies. Customers see the final result immediately, saving hours, days, or weeks of valuable time.
Among the first cinema productions to benefit from the technology was Disney’s first 3D concert film, Hannah Montana, which displaced former record holder Titanic at the US box office over Super Bowl weekend. All post-production on the Quantel 3D-stereo system in Pablo was completed in only eleven weeks at FotoKem’s Burbank post-production studios. “Never before could a concert film with live recordings and current backstage information be realized in 3D so promptly while a tour was still underway,” said executive producer Vincent Pace.
One of the key 3D pioneers, Pace had worked with James Cameron for the previous seven years on developing stereoscopic camera systems for 3D recording. “Why should films not reproduce information in the same way we process it visually?” Cameron asked. “For more than a hundred years, we have watched films recorded with one lens and therefore only one eye.”
