Polarized 3-D...does it work on dvd? (1 Viewer)

[ScottR]

If a film were encoded properly and all you had were the polarized glasses, would this work with today's television technology, especially if you have a projection screen. I wish the studios would release 3-D films this way.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

The only way polarized 3-D would work is with projection. You would also require silvered screen material because of the loss in brightness. The current spate of 3-D films use shuttered glasses with frame rates as high as 144 fps to reduce flicker and maintain brightness at current levels. Polarized 3-D would require a storage and playback system that could play both angles of the 3-D image simultaneously. If DVD were to be used, this would require either a massive memory buffer or dual laser pickups.

In short, unless it is some sort of shutter system, don't expect to see realistic 3-D on DVD or the HD formats anytime soon.

 

[TravisR]

I believe that's the 3-D format used for Friday The 13th Part III and that's why they can't do a 3-D version of that movie for home video.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Most 3-D films prior to "the digital revolution" were done in polarized format. For the record, Friday the 13th Part 3-D was released in field sequential on JVC's now-obsolete VHD format.

 

[Jack Theakston]

Technologically speaking, it's impossible to do exactly on TV what you're doing with film. Polaroid projection is a SUBTRACTIVE process, and television is an ADDITIVE one.

In Polaroid projection, Polaroid filters are held in front of each "eye" of the film (be it dual strip of single strip) at 90 degree angles, thus filtering the light of each eye in opposite polarizations (vertical or horizontal). Your glasses are filters, too, and cancel out the opposite eye than you should be seeing. The silver screen is necessary in order to maintain polarization of the light. White screens are "scatter" screens, not reflective, in nature.

In television, you have scan lines of information, made up of minute sets of red, green and blue lights (phosphors or LCD, whatever your system, this is the basic premise). There's no way to project one image on top of another, and even if there was, there would be no way to filter the information through Polarizers.

What you COULD do on a common CRT monitor (and what HAS been done in the past) is while running a field-sequential signal, use a complex series of Polaroid material on every scan line-- in effect, having a giant Polaroid filter in front of the set made up of hundreds of odd and even Polaroid filters. But this is uneconomical and, after being exposed to a certain amount of hours of light exposure, Polaroid filters have the tendency to lose their filtering quality, thus rendering them useless.