3D Interesting article on why 3D may never work (I happen to completely agree) (1 Viewer)

[urbo73]

Originally Posted by GregK


Roger Ebert has hated 3-D for decades. There's been just a few 3-D titles where he's praised the 3-D efforts. But when the next 3-D film rolls out that he dislikes, it's then back to bashing the process entirely. I'm pretty sure the World 3-D Film Expo (I don't remember if it was the first or second Expo) tried to get him to attend, just to be able to have him sample the Golden Age 3-D titles of the 1950s, but he never showed. Leonard Maltin attended, had a wonderful time, and has written a lot of positive comments on the process. I saw over 40 hours of 3-D features in ten days and never suffered eyestrain.


There's a few areas where current stereoscopic shot features can be improved on in the theatrical chain. The main one in my book is light output. This is one of a few advantages of dual projection IMAX 3-D, when compared to single projection Real-D or Dolby.

I wonder why he's not liked it....Hmm.. On the other hand, is there something Leonard Maltin doesn't like? I can't even begin to compare the two...Ebert is a critic. Maltin is commercialism. Just because YOU didn't suffer eyestrain doesn't mean anything. There are plenty that do. Explain that. Until you can, then 3D is indeed a failure. I knew one kid years ago who played these RPG games and claimed they never bothered him. All that fake up/down/sideways movement that is not real. Then he started getting tired, restless, etc. Ultimately he couldn't play them anymore without experiencing fatigue and headaches. So be careful. While some are sensitive right off the bat and others may be fine, in the end its unhealthy. It just makes common sense.

 

[Will_B]

Originally Posted by Douglas Monce


You are still converging on a point beyond where you are focusing. The focus plain being the surface of the screen, and the convergence point being some distance past it.

I'm suggesting that at a certain distance, there is no more "convergence" of the eyes taking place anymore. I don't know where the cut off is, but clearly there's no difference in convergence between, say, a hundred feet and a mile. It's all pretty much looking straight ahead, eyes parallel.


So the question is, where is this spot when convergence is no longer relevant? In a big movie theater it might not be a problem. In a living room with a 3D tv close by, it may be.

 

[Will_B]

Originally Posted by Douglas Monce


Black and White doesn't force our eyes to do something they don't do naturally. Nor do films themselves. Seeing motion through persistence of vision is a normal human process. Now if the frame rate were too slow, that would be fatiguing and again people would get head aches. The camera changing focus has no effect on what our eyes are doing, which is focusing on the screen. Again nothing unnatural there.



Doug

But it is unnatural. You'd expect our brains would be trying to fill in colors when it sees a black and white basket of fruit. And when a camera is focused on something close up, and the background is thrown into a nice bokeh of blurriness, there should be a conflict in our eyes and brain if we try to "focus" that background -- which we cannot do. Yet somehow we accept that we cannot pull it into focus, and we are not fatigued. It would be interesting to know if people adapted, or if there was never any fatigue to begin with.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Originally Posted by Richard--W

His experience on Captain Eo may be discounted because that film was limited in its technology and does not represent the technology available today.

In reality he was working under the best possible conditions, even better than 3D today. First of all Captain EO was shot in 65mm, meaning higher resolution and much more light output from the projectors. Secondly the film was shown in a theater that was designed and built only to show that film. Again the best possible conditions. I must say that Captain EO was by far the best 3D I've ever seen, and even by the end of that film, I had a head ache.


Doug

 

[Douglas Monce]

Originally Posted by Will_B



But it is unnatural. You'd expect our brains would be trying to fill in colors when it sees a black and white basket of fruit. And when a camera is focused on something close up, and the background is thrown into a nice bokeh of blurriness, there should be a conflict in our eyes and brain if we try to "focus" that background -- which we cannot do. Yet somehow we accept that we cannot pull it into focus, and we are not fatigued. It would be interesting to know if people adapted, or if there was never any fatigue to begin with.

The brain doesn't work that way.


Doug

 

[Richard--W]

Originally Posted by Douglas Monce

His experience on Captain Eo may be discounted because that film was limited in its technology and does not represent the technology available today.

In reality he was working under the best possible conditions, even better than 3D today. First of all Captain EO was shot in 65mm, meaning higher resolution and much more light output from the projectors. Secondly the film was shown in a theater that was designed and built only to show that film. Again the best possible conditions. I must say that Captain EO was by far the best 3D I've ever seen, and even by the end of that film, I had a head ache.


Doug

[/QUOTE]


You make a valid point about the best of conditions. I saw it a few times as well. It's a good 3-D film but by no means the best I've ever seen. The sections shot with the old SpaceVision lens were the most impressive for depth. Different methods of capture were implemented, and they were not consistent, according to one of the 3-D engineers on the film who works for me. As I recall it was only 18 minutes long? There were some jarring moments, but it did not induce a headache or eyestrain in this viewer. After 20 + years I would like to see it again.


Several of the best -- the best as in the most submersive experience -- stereoscopic films are documentary shorts (45-52 minutes) by Imax, which, like Captain Eo, are in 65mm.


3-D is a deep-focus discipline. Do not blur the backgrounds. Do not cut from a blurred background to a focused background. The background should be in focus during every shot, whether it be a close-up or a long angle. There are other ways of leading the viewers' eye into the frame, or toward the subject of the frame, without blurring backgrounds. To blur the background in a stereoscopic film is to induce eyestrain, eye-jarring, headaches, and to screw up.

Will-B

I'm suggesting that at a certain distance, there is no more "convergence" of the eyes taking place anymore. I don't know where the cut off is, but clearly there's no difference in convergence between, say, a hundred feet and a mile. It's all pretty much looking straight ahead, eyes parallel.


So the question is, where is this spot when convergence is no longer relevant? In a big movie theater it might not be a problem. In a living room with a 3D tv close by, it may be.

Depends on the shot. It will be the same shot whether you sitting in a theater or watching at home. Eventually, long distance shots flatten out in 3-D. You can set the lenses to infinity just like in 2-d, but the depth flattens out in the distance just like 2-d. The point is to maintain depth where it matters. Using matched lenses on two interlocked cameras facilitates the greatest depth and provides the most latitude in convergence. It is possible to adjust the convergence during the shot, leading the eye toward or away from the distance. You can accomplish almost any shot that requires a long-distance focus. For example, that famous shot in Lawrence of Arabia of Omar Sharif riding the toward the camera over a great distance could be accomplished nicely in 3-D, but you would perceive the most depth the closer he gets, and the least depth the further back he is, even if you are adjusting convergence as he travels. I'm sure the floating-on-the-haze effect would be palpably enhanced. I'd love to try a shot like that in 3-D.

 

[Yorkshire]

Shall we tell the truth about 3-D. We appear to be beating around the bush, skirting around the edges, and not getting to the core of the matter.


3-D doesn't work.


Let me clarify that, because you might bethinking "Hold on, I don't like 3-D, but I see things flying off the screen. It'd definitely 3-D and it definitely works".


Okay, what is 3-D for? Is 3-D designed for 3-D's own sake? No, not at all. The whole idea is that real life is 3-D. We have stereoscopic vision, we see slightly different things with each eye, and that gives us a sense of depth. So the whole idea behind 3-D is that it is supposed to be more like what we see in real life.


And it isn't.


If I watch a 3-D film, yes it's 3-D. But no, it doesn't look more like the real world. If anything it looks less natural than 2-D. I don't ever remember watching a 2-D film and feeling it didn't look natural, or that the image was lacking real world depth. Not once. Not for a second. Not even a hint of it. But watching a 3-D film it just looks like a series of layers placed on top of each other. Real life doesn't have that 'layered' appearence.


And that's the real problem. Even though the real world is in 3-D, films made in 3-D is less like real vision than 2-D.


Steve W

 

[SilverWook]

Originally Posted by urbo73 /forum/thread/308207/interesting-ar...ork-i-happen-to-completely-agree#post_3775090

 

[urbo73]

Originally Posted by SilverWook

I'm afraid I can't follow this logic. To me it's common sense that if your eyes are working overtime (whatever the situation) you will eventually not feel well. Whatever the source. Some may be OK initially, some not, but it will affect all down the road. How much? It depends on each person. The topic here is 3D. As such, this source is bad IMHO all the time. Not all 2D films are shot with wild camera movements. Most in fact are not..

 

[Worth]

Originally Posted by Yorkshire

Shall we tell the truth about 3-D. We appear to be beating around the bush, skirting around the edges, and not getting to the core of the matter.


3-D doesn't work.


Let me clarify that, because you might bethinking "Hold on, I don't like 3-D, but I see things flying off the screen. It'd definitely 3-D and it definitely works".


Okay, what is 3-D for? Is 3-D designed for 3-D's own sake? No, not at all. The whole idea is that real life is 3-D. We have stereoscopic vision, we see slightly different things with each eye, and that gives us a sense of depth. So the whole idea behind 3-D is that it is supposed to be more like what we see in real life.


And it isn't.


If I watch a 3-D film, yes it's 3-D. But no, it doesn't look more like the real world. If anything it looks less natural than 2-D. I don't ever remember watching a 2-D film and feeling it didn't look natural, or that the image was lacking real world depth. Not once. Not for a second. Not even a hint of it. But watching a 3-D film it just looks like a series of layers placed on top of each other. Real life doesn't have that 'layered' appearence.


And that's the real problem. Even though the real world is in 3-D, films made in 3-D is less like real vision than 2-D.


Steve W

That's exactly my feeling. It's like watching a moving pop-up book.

 

[GregK]

Originally Posted by urbo73


Roger Ebert has hated 3-D for decades. There's been just a few 3-D titles where he's praised the 3-D efforts. But when the next 3-D film rolls out that he dislikes, it's then back to bashing the process entirely. I'm pretty sure the World 3-D Film Expo (I don't remember if it was the first or second Expo) tried to get him to attend, just to be able to have him sample the Golden Age 3-D titles of the 1950s, but he never showed. Leonard Maltin attended, had a wonderful time, and has written a lot of positive comments on the process. I saw over 40 hours of 3-D features in ten days and never suffered eyestrain.


There's a few areas where current stereoscopic shot features can be improved on in the theatrical chain. The main one in my book is light output. This is one of a few advantages of dual projection IMAX 3-D, when compared to single projection Real-D or Dolby.

I wonder why he's not liked it....Hmm.. On the other hand, is there something Leonard Maltin doesn't like? I can't even begin to compare the two...Ebert is a critic. Maltin is commercialism. Just because YOU didn't suffer eyestrain doesn't mean anything. There are plenty that do. Explain that. Until you can, then 3D is indeed a failure. I knew one kid years ago who played these RPG games and claimed they never bothered him. All that fake up/down/sideways movement that is not real. Then he started getting tired, restless, etc. Ultimately he couldn't play them anymore without experiencing fatigue and headaches. So be careful. While some are sensitive right off the bat and others may be fine, in the end its unhealthy. It just makes common sense.

[/QUOTE]

The thread topic is "Why 3D may never work". It can and does work for a large majority of the public. Its been widely known for decades there is also a number who will suffer eyestrain, or.. who don't have ideal stereoscopic vision. This is nothing new. You mentioned someone playing RPG games and getting sick from it.. Does that make it unhealthy for everyone? Is that common sense? How about rollercoasters?


I brought up the World 3D Film Expo because everyone there saw a wide variety of stereoscopic material .. and back to back as in morning to night 3D viewing. I brought up Ebert because he's mentioned in the starter thread and is bashing 3D publicly. So it's important to note he's also said the reverse and has LIKED 3-D in some of the features he's reviewed.

 

[GregK]

One other sidenote that I should have mentioned in my above post:


For those who can't see 3-D properly .. or if it makes them sick, most if not all 3DTVs should have some way of forcing the image to 2-D monocular. So unlike strobes, rollercoasters, and crazy camera pans, 3-D should be easily defeatable. IF 3-D catches on in the long haul, (before holographics, multi-view displays, or some other system that may prove itself superior to two view stereoscopics) I'm sure for many, it will remain an unused feature, never to be activated. Just like many features on today's displays.

 

[Will_B]

"Walter Murch on the 3D debate is mistaken. Beyond about 20 feet our eyes are essentially parallel..."


http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/3d-does-work-with-our-brains.html

 

[Cees Alons]

Originally Posted by Will_B


But then the whole stereo effect is gone! The whole concept of 3-D movies is based on the concept that both (left- and right-) images are NOT equal and your eyes must converge to make them fuse. In fact, it's the amount of convergence that creates the whole effect. And nothing else.


I find it endlessly amusing when people enter discussions like that when they appear to have no understanding at all what is discussed in the first place.



Cees

 

[Will_B]

Cees, you are off the mark when you say that beyond 20 feet, the stereo effect is gone.


You are confusing real life with a screen. When you watched Avatar, on a screen that was about 40 feet away from your seat in the theater, you remember how everything was still in 3D? Yeah.


You have to get the distinction for this conversation to have any meaning to you.

Originally Posted by Mark Oates

Will B - the reason you see 3D on a screen forty feet away is because you're wearing glasses that produce that effect. If you go and stand outside and gaze down the street at the real world, you'll notice that you don't get any impression of depth beyond a certain distance.

Exactly my point!

 

[Mark Oates]

Sooner or later somebody is going to realise how we as humans use stereoscopic vision in the real world, and either give up the whole notion in disgust or start using the effect more sympathetic to our ability to see depth. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, beyond a certain focussing distance our eyes are practically parallel, so we don't see depth in the distance. We only see it close to. Fast-cutting has been mentioned, and I think I'm right in saying that in the real world's equivalent of fast-cutting - fight or flight - our brains give up on trying to process in 3D.


If filmmakers want to keep on with 3D, they'll come to terms with the need to collapse the effect to 2D for fast-cut scenes, and hopefully poking-the-audience-in-the-eye-with-a-stick will soon be discarded in favour of depth-of-foreground.


Will B - the reason you see 3D on a screen forty feet away is because you're wearing glasses that produce that effect. If you go and stand outside and gaze down the street at the real world, you'll notice that you don't get any impression of depth beyond a certain distance.

 

[Will_B]

Originally Posted by Cees Alons
The whole concept of 3-D movies is based on the concept that both (left- and right-) images are NOT equal and your eyes must converge to make them fuse. In fact, it's the amount of convergence that creates the whole effect. And nothing else.

Not the eyes converging (the muscular action of the eyes), the brain processing the different images (without any muscular action from the eyes needed at all).


The whole concern is that the eyes may be overworking the muscles (to converge on points that are not true) during the watching of 3D movies, when really they should just relax.


I don't think you understand.


...What this is essentially leading up to is the prospect that people who get tired eyes when watching 3D movies should take a muscle relaxant before the movie starts. Other people can just learn to relax their eyes.

 

[Will_B]

In fact, just to illustrate this in a rather grotesque manner, imagine that you eyes are on extension cords that enable you to remove them from your skull and to place them instead upon the top of your head, one atop the other, like a tower of eyes.


Now aim them at the movie screen. Try not to get butter from your buttered popcorn on them as you do this.


Stick the left-lens from the 3D glasses over the left eye (which is now on the bottom, directly on your hair), and stick the right-lens from the 3D glasses over the right eye (now on top, above the other).


Your brain would still see the movie in 3D, because it is not the convergence of your eyes at work at all. It is the processing (by your brain) of the images, which have already been separated into pairs of distinct images by each lens of the glasses being designed to pick up the left-camera and the right-camera image.

 

[Cees Alons]

Originally Posted by Will_B

Cees, you are off the mark when you say that beyond 20 feet, the stereo effect is gone.


...........

And therefore that's not what I said.


I said that the stereo effect (the effect of the "3-D" images) is gone when the eyes are purely parallel. Not the ability to see depth at 20 ft in normal life. Not the ability to see stereo when the "3-D" images itself are projected farther away than 20 ft. Meaning that the guy was talking about a situation that wasn't the one under discussion.


The "3-D" images force you to change the direction your eyes are looking in (crossing your eyes). It's different for different parts of the image, those differences being the depth cue. (The only depth cue relevant to the 3-D discussion. Camera directors have so many more skills and techniques to their disposal already, outside the 3-D technique, to offer different depth cues to the eyes of the viewer.)


In your (later) example: if the possibility to adjust the position of the eyes is gone because they are disconnected from the head, you will no longer be able to experience the effect of the stereo images, because you can no longer fuse all different parts of the respective right and left image.

That's how 3-D works, and is designed.


That guy who thinks he can dismiss Walter Much is terribly wrong. Your eyes are only parallel if looking at a single image at a distance of more than 20 feet (roughly, it is different for different people, and in practice more than at least 30 - 40 ft). You make them parallel, because the parts inside the images are (roughly) at the same relative place. You only cross your eyes if there is a difference between both images. But if there is, that's what you do (as long as you are actively looking at something). In normal life you are constantly busy fusing those two images of your right and left eye.


But the point, therefore, is that stereo image pairs aren't equal and are not designed to be. In a movie theater the shift of the two images needs to be adjusted to the average distance of the viewers to the screen (more if the distance is bigger) to achieve the desired effect. Viewers need to cross their eyes more and less to make different parts of the image fuse together.


Stereo images are (re-)constructed in the brain, but the process of fusing the parts of the image with our eyes is an important (essential) part of that reconstruction process.

And it certainly is what the stereoscopic images are designed for and how they work.


You say people need to learn to "relax" their eye-muscles. Probably under the (incorrect) assumption that totally relaxed eye-muscles mean: parallel eyes (that's not true). But if they would, they would probably see everything that's at the > 30 ft projection distance or more perfectly fused alright, but not the "3-D" images of the movie, that have elements that are supposed to be closer and thus have been shifted between the pairs. They would see partly-double images.


Test: if you watch your 3-D TV while lying on the couch (on your side), you won't see a proper 3-D image any more. You cannot fuse the images, because your head needs to be straight up to do that (both eyes in a roughly horizontal plane). If you tilt your head too much, double images are the result. When laying down like that you would need to put your TV screen on its side to continue watching the 3-D.



Also note that this is almost totally irrelevant to the discussion. The convergence is mainly mentioned to illustrate an effect: that the 3-D image elements are constructed to look like they are in another plane (on the line from the viewer to and through the screen) than the projected images actually are, and thus your lenses have to focus (stay focused) at another distance than where parts of the image are perceived to be. It's not the convergence that poses the possible problem. But having to focus both lenses somewhere else is.



And, BTW, another very important process/possibility to perceive depth (especially when objects are more than, say for the sake of this discussion, 20 feet away) is totally lacking in the "3-D" stereo images technique: namely the possibility to move the head sideways to perceive the relative distance of things. That's what we do (and yes, the brain is reconstructing the distances then) and it's totally absent for "3-D" projection: if you move your head sideways, the images stay the same as far as the elements inside it are concerned. In "3-D" you cannot look "around" something in front of something else, not in the least.



Cees

 

[stevenrun]

I'm really not down with the whole 3D thing. Personally, I think it's just a gimmick for studios to raise ticket prices substantially while claiming to offer more to the viewing public.


I will not buy into it, and I hope enough people think that 3D is a passing fad to make sure it IS a passing fad.