A few words about...™ Hugo 3D -- in Blu-ray

What makes Hugo special in 3D is not things coming out at the audience as in 1953, but rather the atmosphere, and the fact that you can see and "feel" dust in the air of the Paris train station.

Let me get this out there.



I'm not a fan of 3D.



Never have been.



While I do find it very interesting for its technical attributes, I feel that the loss of brightness is generally not worth the price of admission, especially for something that is fun, yet imperfect. Some of the Disney Blu-rays have been interesting. And a couple of documentaries.



I enjoyed Avatar in 3D because of the overall atmosphere. There was real living depth.

THR: In an age when it seems like anything is possible, where’s the threshold for what’s achievable and what isn’t?

Trumbull: My experience has shown me that in spite of the fact that there’s incredible genius in this room, with these master craftsmen that are really holding up the tentpoles and making these amazing visions that everybody wants to see, the latest amazing thing, amazing monster, amazing place, whatever it is, there are some structural problems inside the motion picture industry and the entertainment industry, which is that the studios who are producing and distributing the content have virtually no technological infrastructure inside their management structure. They rely entirely on third-party purveyors of special services, whether they’re actors, directors, or special effects people, and so they don’t really understand the technology of their own medium. I think it would be not difficult to talk to the management of any major studio and ask them what a double-bladed shutter is in a 35mm projector and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. If you asked them how many foot-lamberts of brightness they see on the screen, they might not know what you’re talking about. On the exhibition side, we have a similar problem in that the owners and operators of theaters all over the country and all over the world also have no technical infrastructure and rely on their purveyors, their sound-system purveyors, to deliver projectors to their theaters. So there’s no continuity and no connective tissue that’s saying, how do we make movies better? How do we make this experience more spectacular? And I’ve been after this holy grail all my life of trying to say, well, we can do higher frame rates, we can do brighter images, we can do bigger screens, we can do all of these things, and it’s been largely falling on deaf ears because it’s largely a status quo industry. It’s a cookie-packing, manufacturing and production industry that doesn’t realize that the $200 million production value that they’re putting into a movie is actually not getting to the audience for various reasons that they don’t understand...

THR: Does the kind of spectacle you’re aiming for come at a conceptual level?

...And I was doing that with ShowScan 35 years ago. Peter [Anderson] mentioned it, and we did some really far-out experiments and even fooled people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who came into my studio and they thought that what was on the screen was really a real event, and that’s still not recognized within the main industry. The Academy is trying to archive my ShowScan negatives, but I want to demonstrate that’s all completely feasible. And the wonderful thing about digital technology now is that there’s no really substantial meaningful add of cost. People don’t know that the projectors sitting in these theaters are running at 144 frames a second, but they’re just showing every frame over and over and over. I’m just trying to say, well, give the projectors some new frames? It’s like brainless to make it brighter; it means you do have to spend some more in the lamphouse, but there’s a whole new era of laser projectors that’s entering the marketplace now that very few people have seen. I witnessed it about a month ago and it’s mind-boggling. The quality of image that we can project on screens with laser projectors is incredible color gamut, absolutely even field of light, very bright, very big, and when I increase the frame rate, it’s going to be like a window. So it’s a movie that’s more like a live show, and I want to see what that’s going to be like. I think it’s going to be really fun.

Originally Posted by Robert Harris 

Let me get this out there.

 

I'm not a fan of 3D.

 

Never have been.

 

While I do find it very interesting for its technical attributes, I feel that the loss of brightness is generally not worth the price of admission, especially for something that is fun, yet imperfect..

 

RAH

Originally Posted by Paul Hillenbrand 

Existing and future 3D movies benefit from technological advances. Although there is a loss of brightness viewing 3D in theaters, when the media is released on Blu-ray 3D, the artistic intention can be appreciated as intended like any 2D counterpart by being viewed directly without glasses. The recent availability of discrete-3D via hmd allows a very refreshing experience, giving the illusion of 3D a boost to more natural realistic perception. It also negates any filter problems that would cause dark atmospheric scenes to be degraded.
Paul

THR: Are there filmmakers working today that you feel like are even close to tapping into that kind of spectacle that you would like to see?

Trumbull: There’s only a few filmmakers that I know and I hang out with who are really in what we call the “special venue” business – it’s the kind of IMAX, science museum, historical museum. [And] there’s a small group of people who make these 4K, extremely high-resolution films, shooting 65mm negative and scanning it at 8K and putting it out digitally at 4K - a tremendous amount of detail, particularly for very large screens, which are in science museums. But in the theatrical movie industry, I’ve seen almost nothing, except people that I know and admire like Jim Cameron and Peter Jackson, who are very aware that 24 frames a second is not good enough for 3D. There’s a real fundamental technical problem that’s hard to explain, but 3D is just a slight difference between the left and right eye, and when the motion from one frame to the next becomes more than the difference, the 3D effect is destroyed in blur and strobing. And so they’ve recognized that we have to increase the frame rate if we want 3D to survive. But other people like Michael Bay have really been pounding on the industry [saying] we have got to get it brighter. These images are so dim that the audience is disappointed; they’re getting headaches and they’re getting turned off. You look at your television at home and it’s at least 50-foot lamberts, but if you look at a movie theater, the average is two and a half - it’s shockingly dim, and theater owners don’t seem to care very much about it. So I feel that it’s in the process of imploding right now, and a lot of people in this industry are very worried about that. So I’ve just take it upon myself as my mission to try to figure out how to solve that problem.

Originally Posted by Bob Furmanek 

One benefit 3-D movies had in the 1950's was brightness and resolution: you were seeing two 35mm prints interlocked with high powered carbon arc lamphouses supplying the illumination. When properly aligned and calibrated, brightness for dual-strip was not a problem.
The issue he describes as "blur and strobing" occurs when shutters are out of phase. Just the slight differential will produce an image that while not out of sync, still exhibits an un-natural look to movement. In the Fall of 1953, the Polaroid Corporation developed a set of controls which enabled theaters to correct any out of phase issue during projection. I installed one of these units in my screening room and it worked like a charm!

Originally Posted by JParker 

Thanks for this, I learned something. I'd be interested in what Mr. Harris thinks of the new Laser projectors, though. Has anyone, like Trumbull, seen them in action?

I've not seen it, but did see Showscan.

As a believer in anything Trumbull, I'm willing to follow his lead anywhere...almost.

One of the problems of achieving a high level of reproduction via projection in 70mm is based (obviously) upon the hardware. We're given a huge hole through which to send our image, but many theatres don't feel the necessity to push the correct amount of light through it.

And when they do, the screens are wrong.

I'm looking at digital as a great potential equalizer, as long as everyone follows the rules and keeps hardware running properly.

There's nothing worse than seeing Lawrence on a huge curved screen, in 70mm, at 8 footlamberts, and cross-illumination.

All best,

RAH