<<<-- Originally posted by Robert Knecht Schmidt : Out of respect for Christopher's closing of the thread, I'll say nothing more of my own, but I'll let George Lucas respond to Joshua's latest. (Quoting here from the Sally Kline Interviews book. All remarks are from 1994.)

"We did a shot in the TV series [The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles] for $1,500 that would have cost a studio $30,000 if they were doing the same shot for a feature film. Radioland Murders, the movie we're working on right now, is an experiment for us in that we're applying the cost-saving technology we learned on the TV series to the big screen. I don't think we can get that same shot done for $1,500, but we may be able to get it for $10,000 or $12,000. But even going to $12,000 from $30,000 is a major leap. And this is just the first step. We're inventing new technology that I feel very confident will allow us to cut that cost in half again. Within the next couple of years, we'll be able to take what was a $30,000 shot and do it on the big screen in full resolution for $6,000 or $7,000."

"...the techniques that we pioneered in the TV series that we're now using in features are going to be one of the major differences about the way movies are made. And we are obviously moving that forward considerably to develop 3-D sets and build less and less and be able to fill in more extras of people and surroundings and that sort of thing. We'll do that all digitally... Shot-wise, there are around 100 effects shots in the picture, which doesn't seem like much. But when you consider something like Jurassic Park, for which ILM did all of the dinosaur-generated shots, there were less than that. So it's a fairly high rate of special effects for a movie." -->>>

That doesn't make the movie merely an experiment in compositing and nothing else. No one makes a movie to test one particular filmmaking technique. It's too complex, to expensive, and too time consuming. The difference between Murders and Jurassic Park is that the Park's effects (and there were more effects shots than 100 in Park, they just weren't digital ones done by ILM, but there were plenty of effects shots in it) are pretty out in the open and a major part of the story and the film experience, and the Radioland Murder's effects are not.

He's not saying Radioland Muders is an experiment for them. He's saying Radioland Murders is an experiment for them in that they are trying some new production techniques. That's two different things. I might try some new lenses on the next short I make to see if I get a different look. Am I experimenting with a new technique on my new film? Yes. Am I making my film mainly in order to experiment with new lenses? No. Some people do it with shorts, I concede. No one does it with multi-million dollar feature films. Did they experiment with new production techniques on the set of Radioland Murders? Yes. Is that the same thing as making a movie specifically to experiment with new production techniques? No. You can't confuse how a film was made with the reasons why it was made.

I believe Joshua is correct.

Indiana Jones IV may be 3D feature!
 

Indiana Jones IV may be 3D feature!

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/viewpoin...005/03_21.html

That may help off set the age thing with Ford...they need to have a little extra to draw in the crowds. He's not holding onto his youthful looks to well...he looks his age!

This article talks a little more dollars and cents than we have done here:

http://www.variety.com/index.asp?lay...117919744&cs=1

I don't at all relish the role of enthusiasm-curber, but on the other hand I'd be remiss if I didn't take a moment to address the somewhat overly optimistic claims propagated by exaggerated press releases and inexpert media accounts.

This statement and the no less exclamatory ones that follow aim to imply that some magical automated algorithm can now perfectly recover Z-depth data from 2D images for all cases with no additional cues (such as information about light source position and intensity). Were this actually true, the company would have on their hands the most significant computer vision achievement in the history of the field. Especially where the camera is static (rendering unhelpful photogrammetry techniques as are used in matchmoving), alas, there is no magic wand to the depth problem, though there are a number of tools available for achieving photometric stereo, especially where the assumption of smoothness (on faces, for example), meaning that there are no discontinuities in depth or in the partial derivative, or even piecewise smoothness, provide a strong constraint. But most of these tools, even in combination, only provide good results under very specific lighting conditions--for example, a single point source like a keylight. (In addition, makeup work in films, especially on actresses, is invariably designed to thwart dimensionalization, "flattening" out facial features by attenuating shadow. This is one of the classic examples in any graduate-level CV class. Two images are shown of the same woman, one a Max Factor dollface and the other a homely Eliza Doolittle, and the class--or a computer shape-from-shading program assigned as a project--is asked is to recover the Z-depth of the face. The difference is, of course, remarkable, but I digress.)

Were it simply a matter of setting a render farm to work on the prequel trilogy and allowing it to chug away for a few, the cost of "dimensionalizing" legacy footage would not amount to upwards of $5 million per feature film. Undoubtedly whatever "software" under development poses heavy reliance on a small army of human users (read: unpaid interns) to matte separate features, assign boundaries, and provide guesstimates on depth and specifics about other cues.

None of this is to downplay the tremendous feat on In-Three's part of successfully commercializing (and, their shareholders hope, capitalizing on) 30+ years worth of work by computer vision academia, nor the wonderful fruits that are sure to be passed down to the movie-going public, such as the forthcoming Howard the Duck 3D.

The details of In-Three's process will no doubt remain guarded for the next several years at least. The details of how In-Three Inc. was awarded and intends to defend a registered trademark on the dictionary word "Dimensionalization" are another matter entirely.

Those wishing to learn more are directed to the Forsyth and Ponce text Computer Vision and Horn's slightly older Robot Vision, particularly chapters 10 and 11. Ramakant Nevatia's books are also good primers but slightly outdated, and therefore, out-of-print and hard to find.

Last of all let me repeat my assertion that there is nothing that any such algorithms can do that is not already done by the human visual system when perceiving a 2D image, thus obviating the raison d'être for the Dimensionalization process.

The most advanced computer graphics system in the world is already built right inside your head, as you prove to yourself each time you dream and the complexity and verisimilitude of what you see convinces you that you are experiencing reality.

Hey Robert, I think the next reality show I'd like to see is you and Mullen together on a deserted island together.

Steve would win all the reward challenges, starving me into submission, but it would take a while: by the grace of Chris Hurd Probst, I have been granted immunity. However, this is sure to be revoked, as pedantry isn't the best way to achieve ratings in the coveted 12-18 demographic.

(Incidentally, Kuror survivor Caryn is an associate of my mom's. They room together at the national conference every year for their branch of law.)

hi folks,

looks like we're gonna run into some lawsuit problems before the 3D stuff is ratified:

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/arti...lm_resurgence/

"But before doing so, they came in towards us... then backed off away from us... then came in waaay close towards us again..."

Zombie thread alert
 

I have re-animated this once highly animated thread to return to a topic that has seen many prophecies come true, and a few not. It's been a half-decade since this thread was hot, but let's review:

- 3-D actually is catching on in American theaters. Audiences really are paying a premium to put on silly glasses and watch a darker picture for 2-3 hours.

- Indiana Jones 4 wasn't made in 3-D, nor have any of the Star Wars movies been three-deified. Various folks affiliated with Lucasfilm have hinted that at present the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work out in favor of the process, but that it may happen sometime in the distant future (presumably once the relevant patents have expired).

- 3D is coming to the home but home viewers will have to wear bulkier, heavier shutter glasses that will need to be recharged periodically.

- A large number of animated, action, and super-hero films have been mandated by their producers to be completed as 3-D films even though doing so was not contemplated at the beginning of the process (e.g., Up, Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans). Probably thanks at least in part to the success of 3-D with box office receipts, one studio (Disney) has said they're exiting the conventional movie business entirely to focus only on the types of kiddie movies that 3-D caters to.

- And I haven't changed my mind about 3-D. It's fun for certain films, and it's nice to have the option of seeing movies in 3-D, particularly Pixar movies, which are always great no matter what number of dimensions they're in. But it's still a gimmick; it didn't make Avatar a good movie; it's not the future of Hollywood (though it does seem to be a bigger sidetrack than I was expecting 5 years ago); and, like Roger Ebert writes, it is unlikely that "adult" films, or in other words the films typically considered Best Picture-worthy, will ever be produced in 3-D.

- But above all, I'm surprised and impressed by how much things have changed in five years, and I have to hand it to James Cameron. Avatar and other recent films seem to have gone a long way in priming the format as something available in every town, if not quite yet every multiplex. So, bravo, and now I must off to work up an appetite, as I will be eating some off my words from five years ago.

Would you say sound is a gimmick? It seems like for a long time the film industry did just fine without it. And adding sound to a movie did not turn a bad movie into a good one. For that matter, the early sound was terrible: It was monophonic and did not cover the entire frequency of human hearing. Yet, we do not see many silent movies made anymore.

Would you say color is a gimmick? When it first came, it was terrible. It seemed unnecessary. The old school filmmakers (and photographers) thought it was taking something away. Even back in the sixties, a TV expert seriously told me not to watch color TV because it was going to hurt my ability to see colors in the real world.

Everything new that made us see and hear film and TV more like the way we see and hear the reality around us was considered a gimmick. And we cannot even think of film and TV without it these days.

The only reason that stereoscopy has not been widely accepted and even demanded yet is not because it is a gimmick but because of the need for those darn glasses.

Technological limitations are the only reason we do not have smell in the movies and do not change the temperature in the room for every scene and we do not feel the touch the actors feel. Technological limitations are preventing us from fully implementing 3D. But a gimmick it is not!

Adam and Robert,

I'd say 3D is both a great new tool (animation, some films) and a gimmick (Clash of the Titans, Piranha 3D, etc.). If filmmakers and studios can make more money, then they'll go for it.

About 2 years ago I wanted to make my next film (a superhero flick) as 3D. People kinda looked at me weird. Now, it's so overplayed that it's "another one?"

If done right, it's great. If it's done for the wrong reasons, it's a gimmick. And I'm all about making more money, just not at the expense of quality. Ie, Clash.

Heath

Adam, while I appreciate your points, your basic premise, that movies are bettered by perfecting the human sensory experience, and that only technological limitations prevent us from engaging more of the senses, is, no pun intended, nonsense.

Engaging our sense of smell is nauseating and nobody would watch crime procedurals or horror films if they had to endure smelling morgues and rotting bodies. Nobody would watch war films if it involved inhaling gunpowder and smoke for two hours. These are extreme examples, but scent-sory perception in the movies as nausea-inducing holds true even for osmic stimulants that are visually innocuous, like dogs and meadows and bubble baths. And this would be true even if the technology allowed the scents to be cleared as quickly as they could be introduced, rather than lingering and accumulating as with present technology.

Likewise, enaging our sense of touch is annoying and no one would tolerate watching movies that poked, pricked, rubbed or wetted them. Similarly, no one enjoys watching movies in the presence of perceptible electric fields. Are shaker table rides not gimmicks? Was Percepto! not a gimmick?

Sound and color are not gimmicks because the brain cannot in general accurately recreate missing sound or color, though this is more true for sound than for color, and in particular for music which is particularly effective and setting mood and eliciting emotion. It is no coincidence that music was paired with film long before synch sound, and synch sound long before color.

But the brain is perfectly capable of recreating depth information from 2-D images and this only fails in rare cases of certain optical illusions and trick images. Many perceptual cues (not just perspective, as Roger Ebert writes) contribute to this ability of ours, and 3-D doesn't really inform our brains in ways that 2-D doesn't. The sound of an actor's vocalization--whether a calm steady voice, or a shout, or whimper, or a whisper--may inform our brains in ways that are critical to the performance, and sound effects are almost as informative as to events on-screen as visual images. Color can help us vitally discriminate information that our brains in many cases would not be able to distinguish, but I don't maintain it is as important as sound in this respect, and for the most part color is similar to 3-D inasmuch as it is merely used to add versimilitude. But, especially in 2010, color does not come with additional expense or any significant disadvantages, so why not use it?

If 3-D could be produced without the glasses and without significant added production expense, I would be cheering it on. There would be no reason not to use it, even if it wasn't especially informative.

I haven't yet seen or heard of a movie for which 3-D was important to understanding the story. That is not true of sound and color.

OK, I'll bite: Please explain how color is important to the understanding of the story? Especially when so many people watch movies on their horribly misconfigured TV sets! Would you not understand the story of most movies if you watched it on a black-and-white TV?

There are so many things that seemed like unnecessary gimmicks at first. We used to make movies (well, those before us did) without moving the camera, without using wide angle lenses, without closeups. Not so long ago, we did not change the view every 2-3 seconds (and in Asia and much of Europe they still do not).

Just take a look at the 1902 Le voyage dans la Lune to see how a great movie was produced without all the "gimmicks" we use today. So, none of them are really necessary. But they sure are useful and good. And so is 3D.

3D is not a gimmick. It is a way of presenting what we want to present. It certainly can be abused, especially in the hands of someone who does not know what he is doing. And it that case it is used in a gimmicky way, but that does not mean 3D itself is a gimmick.

I don't know if 3D is the future of the movie industry, but I sure hope not. I can't stand the format. I hate wearing the glasses. I hate how dim the picture is. Worse, the effect gives me a headache, and doesn't add one thing to the movie experience, it just takes away from it. I think those 3D televisions are just stupid. No way am I going to sit in my own house wearing those awful glasses. I can't believe anybody would.

Here's Roger Eberts view on 3d.

Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3-D Movies - Newsweek.com

Critic Mark Kermode has his view on the subject

BBC - Mark Kermode's film blog: How to Enjoy a 3D Movie

To be honest Avatar looks more impressive with the 3d glasses off.

??? I specifically said that for the most part color is not critical to understanding a story, but that it contributes to verisimilitude without drawback (no added cost, no special glasses, no headaches, no dimmer picture). Then I said "I haven't yet seen or heard of a movie for which 3-D was important to understanding the story. That is not true of sound and color." Perhaps you misunderstood this to mean that color is essential to the story of every film. Instead, it means only that there exists at least one example of such. The Wizard of Oz, Schindler's List and The Matrix come to mind as having stories that benefited from color, each for a different reason: one mood, one symbolism, one simple differentiation of a plot device. In The Wizard of Oz, color signals a whole different land, with different rules and worries. In Schindler's List, a color film shot entirely in black and white, color is employed to strikingly underline evil and its effect on a people as exemplified by one member of that people. In The Matrix, Neo's choice early in the film would carry less meaning if the blue pill and the red pill were indistinguishable from each other. I'm sure there are other examples, and better ones, but these are the ones that came to mind most quickly.

Very well, then, I misunderstood you. I need to add, though, that those few movies where color was essential to the story only appeared long after color was a standard.

Threediness is still very new. I am not talking about 3D as such here, since 3D movies have been coming and going since before color. I am talking about threediness, that special quality that exists only in 3D movies and that has not been used much (though it has been abused for all those gimmicks I also hate).

When 3D movies are made because the marketing guys think it is good, the results are usually disastrous. When 3D movies are made because the director feels the need to express his creativity through 3D and he actually knows what he is doing, the results are great.

For an example of a movie that used threediness nicely and creatively, take a look at the 2008 Journey to the Center of the Earth and watch the scene where Sean (played by Josh Hutcherson) is crossing over an abyss on floating magnetic rocks. That scene would never have the same impact in 2D. Too bad they released the DVD using green/magenta glasses, though.

And yes, I agree the glasses are a drawback. Indeed, I said they are the reason why 3D has not taken off. Robert Rodriguez has an interesting way of dealing with that. In The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D he shows the real world in 2D (and has a "glasses off" message when he switches to it) and the fantasy world in 3D (and has a "glasses on" message shortly before switching to it). You could not do that with every movie, but it worked for that one.