Last time, I posted an article about a Creative COW article written by Brian Gardner on the 3D process. In it, he touched on something I didn't recognize that he claims to have invented: floating windows. The topic fascinated me, which may be showing some of my inexperience in the field of 3D film making. I've been unable to experiment with creating them myself yet, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I've since been watching content with 3D windows, and I think I can explain what they are, why they're used, and why they work.
Basically, the problem they're meant to solve is 3D window violations. This is when a portion of a scene has an object that pops partially outside the screen. This will cause half of an image to be floating there outside the screen, ruining the immersion of the image by calling attention to the fact that 3D is an illusion (the first 3D film I ever saw was Clash of the Titans, which had this problem frequently, initially turning me off of 3D in general). Basically, this will happen any time that an object is partially obscured by the screen.
But Brian Gardener once mistakenly discovered that in 3D cinema, the screen doesn't necessarily need to be fixated in one place. So what if we used 3D cinema to actually move the visible theater screen outward, overcoming window violations because things popping out of the screen aren't popping out of this digital screen anymore?
Apparently, you can do this by cropping the edge of the screen in one frame (either by adding black triangles to a corner, or by adding a black line down the side of a screen). 3D creates depth by creating a physical distance separation between an image sent to the left eye, and one sent to the right eye. By adding a triangle to the corner of the screen in only one frame, or by cropping away a portion of it, the screen itself seems to float out into the audience as well (because the corner is now separated by as much . If you separate the edge of the screen as much as the window violation pops out, then it'll seem like the window violation fits nicely inside the screen. And according to Brian Gardener, if you're changing this effect throughout the film, nobody will notice that it's there.
This seems like a very effective way to fix poorly framed footage, or scenes that couldn't be framed differently due to physical limitations (e.g. a documentary, where you can't move the objects in the scene). It also seems like a useful tool in the tool-belt of someone converting a 2D film to 3D (ala Finding Nemo, Star Wars ep. 1, Titanic, where 3D considerations couldn't be made for the film beforehand).
Anyway, that's what I've been learning about 3D imaging recently. I still need to actually use this technique in my own 3D editing in order to understand all the effects here. It seems like it would be a downgrade, since it's literally removing image information. Although, that's not necessarily always a bad thing. But it seems like something that needs to be understood and considered appropriately for that aspect when you're going to use it, and just frame things for 3D in other situations. Also, I'm not sure how to end this post, since I'm mostly just pondering out loud at this point, but I just did it.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Brain Gardner Is Doing It Right
I recently read an article by Brian Gardener for Creative Cow Magazine. It's an amazing article that does a lot to explain some of the things I've been unable to adequately explain in previous posts on this blog. But more than just establishing himself as a very competent authority on 3D film-making, the article also brought up a very interesting concept about dynamic floating windows. I'm not entirely sure what he means, so I intend to watch more of his work and pay attention for this concept.
What's particularly interesting to me is his filmography includes two movies thought to be masterpieces of stereoscopic cinema: Coraline and Life of Pi. The article references a live action film in the planning stages that utilizes a technique he pioneered, and given the recent release of Life of Pi and how long the article has been up, I think that may be referencing Life of Pi, which so successful that even 3D critic Roger Ebert praised the use of 3D in it. Having not personally seen Life of Pi yet (and I may have to wait until the Bluray is released to see it, because it's no longer playing in 3D in my area), I am indeed very curious of how important that technique is.
What he describes is something he calls a "Dynamic Floating Window," which because I haven't seen it is something of a mystery to me. He talks about a short film called The Black Swan that tried to keep the audience separate from the onscreen action by creating a floating black screen, effectively creating a new theater screen in front of the actual screen. In that way, it would fix something called a "window violation," where only a portion of an object protrudes from the screen. The problem was audiences noticed this new screen and found it ridiculously distracting, causing more problems than it solved.
Brian Gardener says he tried using this idea with a moving screen instead of a flat one, and suddenly nobody noticed the floating screen anymore. It was still solving problems, but it wasn't causing them anymore. To be honest, it sounds too good to be true, so I'm very curious if I'm just misunderstanding what he's describing, or if what he's describing really accomplishes all he says it does without being distracting. Based on the reviews given to the 3D in his work, it's promising.
What's particularly interesting to me is his filmography includes two movies thought to be masterpieces of stereoscopic cinema: Coraline and Life of Pi. The article references a live action film in the planning stages that utilizes a technique he pioneered, and given the recent release of Life of Pi and how long the article has been up, I think that may be referencing Life of Pi, which so successful that even 3D critic Roger Ebert praised the use of 3D in it. Having not personally seen Life of Pi yet (and I may have to wait until the Bluray is released to see it, because it's no longer playing in 3D in my area), I am indeed very curious of how important that technique is.
What he describes is something he calls a "Dynamic Floating Window," which because I haven't seen it is something of a mystery to me. He talks about a short film called The Black Swan that tried to keep the audience separate from the onscreen action by creating a floating black screen, effectively creating a new theater screen in front of the actual screen. In that way, it would fix something called a "window violation," where only a portion of an object protrudes from the screen. The problem was audiences noticed this new screen and found it ridiculously distracting, causing more problems than it solved.
Brian Gardener says he tried using this idea with a moving screen instead of a flat one, and suddenly nobody noticed the floating screen anymore. It was still solving problems, but it wasn't causing them anymore. To be honest, it sounds too good to be true, so I'm very curious if I'm just misunderstanding what he's describing, or if what he's describing really accomplishes all he says it does without being distracting. Based on the reviews given to the 3D in his work, it's promising.
Friday, December 21, 2012
3D TVs Are Confusing
This blog is mostly meant to be an opinion blog. This post will probably be a little different. I'm going to get into my opinion on things a bit later, but to start off I need to just explain the technical details of how 3D TV works, because to understand my opinion on them, you need to first understand how unnecessarily complicated 3D TV buying is.
3D is usually done in one of 4 different ways on TV: anaglyph, active shutter, passive, or auto-stereoscopic.
There are other less common ways to make 3D images (such as the insanely weird ChromaDepth glasses technology that Nickelodeon used in the 1990s) but those 4 are the only 3D TV technologies you're likely to run into today. Most people, when buying a 3D TV, will be trying to decide between Active Shutter and Passive 3D TVs. I would suggest the passive 3D TVs, because most 3D content is broadcast in half-resolution anyway (makes it easier to send the information), and that flicker can be really annoying. There are those who would argue that you should never get passive because you're destroying the image by halfing the resolution. The thing is, most 3D content is already half-resolution. For example, YouTube requires you to upload images in the same resolution that they were originally in, so that they can stretch them. Here's an example I made myself:
The reason YouTube does this is because it matches the standards of television broadcasts. Television broadcasts do this because they literally cannot send two 1080p images across cable lines constantly. They're just too big. So they figure since at least half of the 3D TVs in existence are shrinking the image anyway, shrinking the image is the best way to deal with this.
Admittedly, this leaves Blurays and Video Games, both of which are more or less controlled by Sony, who have bet on Active Shutter 3D technologies for their own implementations. Playstation 3's and other Bluray Players don't have to transport the image over large distances through many cables, so they aren't limited physically by the size of the image as much, allowing them to send two 1080p images to your TV without issue. But the images still work on a Passive 3D TV, so getting one won't prevent you from playing a game or watching your Bluray in 3D.
What I'm basically saying is if you're going to buy a 3D TV, buy a passive 3D TV. Any of its disadvantages will be shared by an active 3D TV in most circumstances, but Active 3D's disadvantages will never be shared with a Passive 3D TV. There are, however, Passive 3D TVs with high refresh rates that will work for both standards, so it's not like you always have to choose (if you're made of money). The difficulty is trying to decide whether or not your TV is, in fact, a passive 3D TV. They call it all sorts of things when it goes to marketing (Theater 3D, Cinema 3D, etc.), which makes it unnecessarily confusing. Basically, the way to tell is to look at the glasses that they want you to use with the TV. If they don't have them there, ask a store rep to show them to you. If they look like they'd work without batteries, you're getting a passive 3D TV.
3D is usually done in one of 4 different ways on TV: anaglyph, active shutter, passive, or auto-stereoscopic.
- Anaglyph. For starters, I'll be talking about anaglyph, since it's the cheapest and most familiar form of 3D that people are aware of. Heck, this blog's name is a reference to the anaglyph method of creating 3D images, and my blog's background (at the time of writing this post) is an anaglyph image. Anaglyph takes an image, and filters its colors so that you can use colored lenses to separate the images and send one to each eye. The way it works is that the colored lenses filter out all the light of a specific color set (usually red for one eye, and the combined blue-green color, "cyan," for the other eye), making it so that only one color goes to one eye, and all the other colors go to the other. The advantages of this method are that it is dirt cheap. You can buy red/cyan glasses on Amazon for around $3, and even that's ridiculously overpriced since many 3D DVDs will give away colored 3D glasses with the movie for free (e.g. Coraline, Ice Age 4, Journey to the Center of the Earth). Aside from being utterly expendable, anaglyph 3D also allows full resolution images to be sent to each eye. Anaglyph images are also the most mobile, as they don't require a special TV to use, or for that matter a TV at all (Anaglyph is the only form of stereoscopic 3D that works on printed paper, for reasons I'll get into later). The disadvantages are that this format stresses your eyes in ways other formats don't, since it's sending conflicting images (due to the different colors) to each eye. Also, because it's filtering colors, it makes the final image appear to be colored differently. It also means that the effect can be ruined and cause excessive ghosting (seeing double images) if the color on your monitor/TV are a little off. Wherever possible, people today avoid using this type of 3D imagery for TVs.
- Active Shutter Active Shutter TVs were the first 3D TVs to start appearing on the market. The exact date depends on what you want to say qualifies, but these became something regular people could buy without specifically looking for them around 2009, in response to the popularity of Avatar. The TVs themselves are different than regular TVs because, rather than the standard 60 Hz refresh rate that regular TVs have, which means they max out at being able to display 60 images per second, 3D TVs have a refresh rate of at least 120 Hz, which means they can display 120 images per second. Active Shutter 3D TVs get their name from the type of glasses they use. These glasses have liquid crystal displays that switch between dark and light, making it so only one eye is actually looking through the glasses at any given time. It then displays images on the screen with every other frame going to your right eye, and the other frames going to the left eye. The net effect is that this gives you a full resolution, full color 3D image, but with a slight flicker (lasting for 1/120th of a second and occurring 60 times each second). The advantage is that this gives the clearest 3D picture out of all of the 3D technologies available, since it offers a full resolution picture and doesn't filter color or light. It's also advantageous to 2D gamers, because that higher framerate gives you a competitive visual advantage (as well as a clearer picture). The biggest disadvantage is that flicker, which is both distracting and can induce headaches. It also increases the risk of a photosensitive reaction, so you'll want to use Active Shutter TVs with caution if you're prone to seizures. Another big disadvantage is that these TVs are expensive due to the higher framerate, and the glasses are expensive due to the liquid crystals and electronics needed to sync it with the TV.
- Passive Lens Passive 3D TVs are TVs that use the same kinds of glasses as the ones you receive in a RealD 3D showing of a movie (and work on most passive 3D TVs if you take those glasses home with you). The way this works is that half of the pixels (single dots on the TV screen) are polarizing light one way, and the other half are polarizing it another way. That's a very complicated procedure that I admit I don't have a 100% concrete grasp on, but the way I was told that it works is that is actually spins the individual wavelets of light so that light spinning clockwise goes to one of your eyes, while light spinning counter-clockwise goes to the other eye after being filtered by the glasses. This eliminates the flicker of Active Shutter 3D TVs, and eliminates most of the color filtering of anaglyph (although because there is some light filtration going on, it's not as little color filtering as with Active Shutter 3D TVs). The glasses are cheap to obtain these days, and since there's not a 2D market for these TVs as well, the sets themselves also tend to be priced lower than their active shutter counterparts. The disadvantages of this format are, because only half of the pixels are used in either one of the 3D images, the images themselves are half-resolution when you see them (although I admit, I've never noticed that effect in my own viewings on my passive 3D monitor).
- Autostereoscopic Last is the Autostereoscopic TV. Autostereoscopic is a large word that basically means you don't need glasses to see 3D on it. What these do is, on the TV level, filter the images so that they go to either eye, kind of like those hologram stickers that animate or appear 3D based on how you tilt your head. If you've ever seen items like the Nintendo 3DS, the Fujifilm W3 3D camera, or the HTC EVO 3D, this is what those devices use to create their 3D effect. And yes, there are 3D TVs that use autostereoscopic screens. The biggest advantage is no glasses, and no color filtration. The disadvantages are that it also uses half-resolution because each image is using half the pixels, just like with Passive TVs. It also requires you to be in the very specific spot where your eyes can see both images, with even small alterations to your position ruining the image. Makes it impossible to use autostereoscopic 3D TVs for group viewings, and difficult for individual viewings. Usually these screens are only on handheld devices (like the 3DS) as a result, and the TVs that do use this technology are very expensive.
There are other less common ways to make 3D images (such as the insanely weird ChromaDepth glasses technology that Nickelodeon used in the 1990s) but those 4 are the only 3D TV technologies you're likely to run into today. Most people, when buying a 3D TV, will be trying to decide between Active Shutter and Passive 3D TVs. I would suggest the passive 3D TVs, because most 3D content is broadcast in half-resolution anyway (makes it easier to send the information), and that flicker can be really annoying. There are those who would argue that you should never get passive because you're destroying the image by halfing the resolution. The thing is, most 3D content is already half-resolution. For example, YouTube requires you to upload images in the same resolution that they were originally in, so that they can stretch them. Here's an example I made myself:
The reason YouTube does this is because it matches the standards of television broadcasts. Television broadcasts do this because they literally cannot send two 1080p images across cable lines constantly. They're just too big. So they figure since at least half of the 3D TVs in existence are shrinking the image anyway, shrinking the image is the best way to deal with this.
Admittedly, this leaves Blurays and Video Games, both of which are more or less controlled by Sony, who have bet on Active Shutter 3D technologies for their own implementations. Playstation 3's and other Bluray Players don't have to transport the image over large distances through many cables, so they aren't limited physically by the size of the image as much, allowing them to send two 1080p images to your TV without issue. But the images still work on a Passive 3D TV, so getting one won't prevent you from playing a game or watching your Bluray in 3D.
What I'm basically saying is if you're going to buy a 3D TV, buy a passive 3D TV. Any of its disadvantages will be shared by an active 3D TV in most circumstances, but Active 3D's disadvantages will never be shared with a Passive 3D TV. There are, however, Passive 3D TVs with high refresh rates that will work for both standards, so it's not like you always have to choose (if you're made of money). The difficulty is trying to decide whether or not your TV is, in fact, a passive 3D TV. They call it all sorts of things when it goes to marketing (Theater 3D, Cinema 3D, etc.), which makes it unnecessarily confusing. Basically, the way to tell is to look at the glasses that they want you to use with the TV. If they don't have them there, ask a store rep to show them to you. If they look like they'd work without batteries, you're getting a passive 3D TV.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
The Hobbit In Review
Before I begin, I need to tell some stories about my life. It'll seem off topic at first, but they help me put what I noticed about The Hobbit in perspective. When I was 16, and learning to drive a car for the first time, my mother and I were driving on the highway for the first time: my first time driving over 40 mph. At one point, she had me turn right into what turned out to be a dead end (why there was a dead end so close to a traffic light on the highway, I'll never know). She claims she thought it was complete when she originally told me to turn that way, but I digress. The point is that we were sitting at a light, just watching for the light to turn so that we could re-enter the road. As we were watching, however, a truck took that very same turn way too fast. It rolled, scraping the side of the truck after landing in a magnificent crash, only coming to a stop after landing across 3 lanes of traffic. After watching this scene, it took me around 30 seconds to fully internalize the excitement of what I had witnessed, and realize that something abnormal had just happened.
The reason I say this is because when watching The Hobbit, I remember feeling that same feeling I felt in those two situations. I could tell I was watching an epic Orc battle, or an epic rock-flinging fight between Stone Giants, but when watching it in 48 fps it felt so real that until after they happened, just like the truck tipping in my real life, I had no real concept of how epic these scenes were. But there was something more life-like to how the images on the screen were moving. It was jarring, and I can see why people would mistake that feeling for things looking fake. But they don't. They look so real that you're forced to react to them differently, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
First off, HFR didn't make the costumes look any faker, nor did it make is possible to see Gandalf's contact lenses (I specifically looked at his eyes trying to see this because of that claim, and never noticed a thing). While it didn't make anything look faker, however, it did make them look anachronistic. Because the motion of the images was so lifelike, you feel like they should be following the rules of reality when they're far from doing so. Nobody seriously dresses like the Wizard Gandalf, and nobody has a kingdom of dwarves. But what you're seeing on the screen is what they would really look like if they did exist. You're being transported to middle earth, and it will take a little while (a few movies) for us to accept that such transportation is possible.
What HFR didn't do was make the CGI look fake. You have no idea how scary real Gollum, the Great Goblin, or the white Orc Azog look in 4K HFR 3D unless you go and see it yourself. Is there room for improvement? Of course. But it's not the jarring experience people are reporting. The thing is, with the exception of Gollum (whose scene critics are raving about), these CGI events were all war driven. But, this is one case where I theorize the lack of blur was actually a legitimately bad thing. Blur ads confusion to the scene as you're unable to completely make out what's happening. And that confusion makes the scene more terrifying, and therefore more exciting. In 48 fps, much of that sense of confusion was gone. It's possible that I'm extrapolating here from that same sense of reality disconnect from excitement that I was talking about from two paragraphs ago. But I have no idea how to experiment with a control against that, so I thought I'd just put that out there as another way HFR may have been affecting the scene.
The sense of speed-up that I was talking about before happened to me, but it also subsided no later than 30 minutes in. It wasn't a huge deal (and I'm sure I'll get used to it so it never happens if I see enough 48 fps viewings). There were others in my viewing group for whom the footage never slowed down, though. There were also some for whom it never once presented that problem. So it's impossible for me to predict how you will react to it.
But all in all, I think this is probably a very positive move. The movie felt so real! As James Cameron put it, "When you author and project a movie at 48 or 60, it becomes a different movie. The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality. It is really stunning," The glass he's referring to is that sense of separation, or the idea that you aren't really there. And that's completely true, and utterly amazing.
A lot of people would suggest that you see The Hobbit in 24 fps first and then see it in 48 fps so you can just see the new technology. I don't agree. I think you should just see the 48 fps, but only if you're looking to be completely immersed in middle earth. If you just want to experience the story without feeling what it would have been like to be there, I suggest finding a showing that's not labeled HFR. But I really hope the BluRay has an HFR copy for my own personal viewings.
Regarding the 3D, it's really good 3D, though not perfect (there were one or two instances of ghosting that I noticed, especially around subtitles and once when Bilbo stuck his sword out too far). It was used primarily as a means of bringing you into the world of The Hobbit. That's certainly not a bad thing, and the 3D is very easy on your eyes (backing up Peter Jackson's claims that 48 fps will improve the viewability of 3D). I do suggest seeing this film in 3D. While it doesn't reveal new meaning to the film, it adds a quality to the image that is very beautiful.
The story itself is the same story from J.R.R. Tolkein's book. Jackson doesn't embellish much, often taking prose directly from the book and inserting it directly into the lines of the film. I hope I'm not insulting him if I say this is the nerdiest adaption of The Hobbit that there possibly could have been. What I mean by that is that he took samples from the Lord of the Rings footnotes and inserted them into the movie in places that they weren't in The Hobbit originally. It's still a faithful adaption, but it makes the film come across so much more prequel-ish than I was expecting. It also feels like it's telling the Hobbit more from Gandalf's perspective, with all the allusions to the events that would unfold in The Lord of the Rings that Tokein's appendixes describe to account for Gandalf's frequent absences from the Dwarves. The only complaint I have about their inclusion is that they clash with the intro showing the story being written from Bilbo's perspective. But I found them to be interesting and things that helped me get absorbed in the story a similar way to how HFR got be absorbed in the visuals. But it does take a certain kind of nerd to get that involved in a fantasy world, so I can understand it not appealing to everyone. I loved every minute of it.
First off, HFR didn't make the costumes look any faker, nor did it make is possible to see Gandalf's contact lenses (I specifically looked at his eyes trying to see this because of that claim, and never noticed a thing). While it didn't make anything look faker, however, it did make them look anachronistic. Because the motion of the images was so lifelike, you feel like they should be following the rules of reality when they're far from doing so. Nobody seriously dresses like the Wizard Gandalf, and nobody has a kingdom of dwarves. But what you're seeing on the screen is what they would really look like if they did exist. You're being transported to middle earth, and it will take a little while (a few movies) for us to accept that such transportation is possible.
What HFR didn't do was make the CGI look fake. You have no idea how scary real Gollum, the Great Goblin, or the white Orc Azog look in 4K HFR 3D unless you go and see it yourself. Is there room for improvement? Of course. But it's not the jarring experience people are reporting. The thing is, with the exception of Gollum (whose scene critics are raving about), these CGI events were all war driven. But, this is one case where I theorize the lack of blur was actually a legitimately bad thing. Blur ads confusion to the scene as you're unable to completely make out what's happening. And that confusion makes the scene more terrifying, and therefore more exciting. In 48 fps, much of that sense of confusion was gone. It's possible that I'm extrapolating here from that same sense of reality disconnect from excitement that I was talking about from two paragraphs ago. But I have no idea how to experiment with a control against that, so I thought I'd just put that out there as another way HFR may have been affecting the scene.
The sense of speed-up that I was talking about before happened to me, but it also subsided no later than 30 minutes in. It wasn't a huge deal (and I'm sure I'll get used to it so it never happens if I see enough 48 fps viewings). There were others in my viewing group for whom the footage never slowed down, though. There were also some for whom it never once presented that problem. So it's impossible for me to predict how you will react to it.
But all in all, I think this is probably a very positive move. The movie felt so real! As James Cameron put it, "When you author and project a movie at 48 or 60, it becomes a different movie. The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality. It is really stunning," The glass he's referring to is that sense of separation, or the idea that you aren't really there. And that's completely true, and utterly amazing.
A lot of people would suggest that you see The Hobbit in 24 fps first and then see it in 48 fps so you can just see the new technology. I don't agree. I think you should just see the 48 fps, but only if you're looking to be completely immersed in middle earth. If you just want to experience the story without feeling what it would have been like to be there, I suggest finding a showing that's not labeled HFR. But I really hope the BluRay has an HFR copy for my own personal viewings.
Regarding the 3D, it's really good 3D, though not perfect (there were one or two instances of ghosting that I noticed, especially around subtitles and once when Bilbo stuck his sword out too far). It was used primarily as a means of bringing you into the world of The Hobbit. That's certainly not a bad thing, and the 3D is very easy on your eyes (backing up Peter Jackson's claims that 48 fps will improve the viewability of 3D). I do suggest seeing this film in 3D. While it doesn't reveal new meaning to the film, it adds a quality to the image that is very beautiful.
The story itself is the same story from J.R.R. Tolkein's book. Jackson doesn't embellish much, often taking prose directly from the book and inserting it directly into the lines of the film. I hope I'm not insulting him if I say this is the nerdiest adaption of The Hobbit that there possibly could have been. What I mean by that is that he took samples from the Lord of the Rings footnotes and inserted them into the movie in places that they weren't in The Hobbit originally. It's still a faithful adaption, but it makes the film come across so much more prequel-ish than I was expecting. It also feels like it's telling the Hobbit more from Gandalf's perspective, with all the allusions to the events that would unfold in The Lord of the Rings that Tokein's appendixes describe to account for Gandalf's frequent absences from the Dwarves. The only complaint I have about their inclusion is that they clash with the intro showing the story being written from Bilbo's perspective. But I found them to be interesting and things that helped me get absorbed in the story a similar way to how HFR got be absorbed in the visuals. But it does take a certain kind of nerd to get that involved in a fantasy world, so I can understand it not appealing to everyone. I loved every minute of it.
Monday, December 17, 2012
HFR Testing Day
This post is a quick pre-show update. I'm planning on seeing The Hobbit tonight, in full 4K HFR 3D. I've still been reading up on the format, and I wanted to write my quick thoughts on HFR before I go. Right now, I'm cautiously optimistic about 48 fps. I've said previously that I think people are overstating the clarity HFR 3D causes. I think it's ridiculous to claim HFR 3D makes things look fake. However, reading another article, I came to the realization I may be underestimating how much motion blur shows up in 24 fps. I still think they're overstating things, but I concede that it's at least possible that minute actions the actors make could be blurring the image enough to make it look too real. I also done my own experiments, and found 48 fps to be less comfortable than both 24 and 60 fps. That could change in a 3 hour movie making it more tolerable or less, so I don't know how to interpret that data. Plus, my tests didn't take motion blur into effect (due to technical limitations in how I did it). I did notice that the jarring effect was lessened in 3D, so chances are good that I'll like it.
Regarding the movie itself, I've heard it moves slowly, but among non-critics it's been a runaway hit. To put it another way, I have this rule with few exceptions that the way to tell how much fun a movie is is to go to Rotten Tomatoes and see how different the critic score is from the audience score. If the critic score is higher, the film will be snobby trash. If the audience score is higher, then it's going to be amazing. The Hobbit scores 16 more points with the audience than the critics, and 5 is usually what I'm looking for. I admit, it's a trashy way of deciding whether a movie will be good. But it's too ingrained in me not to affect my perceptions. I suspect that my favorite scene will be the encounter with the Stone Giants, but most of the reviews say that the encounter with Gollum is the best scene.
I suspect that the 3D will be technically amazing, but not really do anything artistically relevant to communicate profound ideas. It's possible I could be wrong, and I'll be watching for emotions and ideas expressed either by the relative depth of objects, the increased negative space, and occlusions especially. I may have to see the movie again in 2D to be able to tell the differences completely, but I'll be watching closely anyway. I'll also try and determine if the HFR is doing anything special to the 3D.
Anyway, that's how I'm going to be reading the film, and what I intend to review on this blog. That is all.
Regarding the movie itself, I've heard it moves slowly, but among non-critics it's been a runaway hit. To put it another way, I have this rule with few exceptions that the way to tell how much fun a movie is is to go to Rotten Tomatoes and see how different the critic score is from the audience score. If the critic score is higher, the film will be snobby trash. If the audience score is higher, then it's going to be amazing. The Hobbit scores 16 more points with the audience than the critics, and 5 is usually what I'm looking for. I admit, it's a trashy way of deciding whether a movie will be good. But it's too ingrained in me not to affect my perceptions. I suspect that my favorite scene will be the encounter with the Stone Giants, but most of the reviews say that the encounter with Gollum is the best scene.
I suspect that the 3D will be technically amazing, but not really do anything artistically relevant to communicate profound ideas. It's possible I could be wrong, and I'll be watching for emotions and ideas expressed either by the relative depth of objects, the increased negative space, and occlusions especially. I may have to see the movie again in 2D to be able to tell the differences completely, but I'll be watching closely anyway. I'll also try and determine if the HFR is doing anything special to the 3D.
Anyway, that's how I'm going to be reading the film, and what I intend to review on this blog. That is all.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Common Anti-3D Arguments
I'm getting tired of hearing some of the same anti-3d arguments over and over again. Granted, one way that I could avoid that would be to stop seeking them out, but I've got a need for debate built into my soul, so I don't think that's going to happen. Consequently, I'm going to be addressing some of the arguments I hear against 3d most frequently that I don't think carry any weight.
One of the big ones that I keep hearing is the idea that somehow shooting a film in 3d draws the filmmaker's attention away from the story of the film. I believe that the logic go something like this: 3d is highly marketable, and therefore many filmmakers treated like a gimmick just to get people to see their film. Therefore, if they did not have access to the 3d gimmick, they would be forced to instead focus on the quality of their story. This makes two faulty assumptions. First is that the idea of that people who would be competent enough to create a good story are the same group of people who would substitute story for a gimmick in the first place. That is decidedly not the case. Second, you're making the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive.
Let's take an example of another purely visual aspect of film: color. Color is absolutely unnecessary in order to create a film with a substantial story. In fact, what is considered to be the best film of all time, Citizen Kane, does not employ the use of color at all. Yet it would be fool hardy to suggest that we should abandon the use of color at all, especially when cast against such masterful use as we see in The Wizard of Oz, where color was used to create the sense of magic evoked by being in Oz. That's the danger that we run into if we completely abandon 3d. There is potential for this medium to allow new forms of storytelling the way that color allowed the Wizard of Oz to create this new sense of wonder the could not have been accomplished without the use of color. Granted, we haven't seen very many examples of this kind of use yet (although, I do suggest picking up a copy of Batman: Arkham City to play in 3d if you want to see examples of how 3d can be used effectively, where the game put any object that controls the flow of fate, especially when it has to do with the life of a character, in front of the screen with the player can touch it, calling attention to the players inability to halt the march of death). The point is that 3d opens up new opportunities for storytelling that do not exist without it, so the potential to create a good story is greater when 3d is considered.
One of the big ones that I keep hearing is the idea that somehow shooting a film in 3d draws the filmmaker's attention away from the story of the film. I believe that the logic go something like this: 3d is highly marketable, and therefore many filmmakers treated like a gimmick just to get people to see their film. Therefore, if they did not have access to the 3d gimmick, they would be forced to instead focus on the quality of their story. This makes two faulty assumptions. First is that the idea of that people who would be competent enough to create a good story are the same group of people who would substitute story for a gimmick in the first place. That is decidedly not the case. Second, you're making the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive.
Let's take an example of another purely visual aspect of film: color. Color is absolutely unnecessary in order to create a film with a substantial story. In fact, what is considered to be the best film of all time, Citizen Kane, does not employ the use of color at all. Yet it would be fool hardy to suggest that we should abandon the use of color at all, especially when cast against such masterful use as we see in The Wizard of Oz, where color was used to create the sense of magic evoked by being in Oz. That's the danger that we run into if we completely abandon 3d. There is potential for this medium to allow new forms of storytelling the way that color allowed the Wizard of Oz to create this new sense of wonder the could not have been accomplished without the use of color. Granted, we haven't seen very many examples of this kind of use yet (although, I do suggest picking up a copy of Batman: Arkham City to play in 3d if you want to see examples of how 3d can be used effectively, where the game put any object that controls the flow of fate, especially when it has to do with the life of a character, in front of the screen with the player can touch it, calling attention to the players inability to halt the march of death). The point is that 3d opens up new opportunities for storytelling that do not exist without it, so the potential to create a good story is greater when 3d is considered.
That highlights the second primary complaint that I hear. People claim that the only difference between 3D and 2D film is the inclusion of objects that pop out of the screen at you. But that's a gross oversimplification of the 3D process and the advantages it allows. Let's look at the following picture for a moment, taken from a red/cyan anaglyph version of The Amazing Spiderman in 3D:
I'm actually going to specifically ask you not to look at this with 3D glasses on. There's a raindrop on the top right corner that's represented as a non-combined red and cyan streak. Basically, it's separating the image entirely, making it easy to tell that, when both eyes are combined, you're going to see through that raindrop, picking out the entirety of what's behind it. 3D gives you something of an X-ray vision. You can see the raindrop in 3D, but you can also literally see through the raindrop to objects behind it. Carnivores use this in nature hide themselves among leaves without it impairing their vision. Artists can use that to create occlusions that add to the ambiance of the film, with the opportunity to use them more heavily because they're not obscuring the image as much as they would be in 2D.
But even if that wasn't an advantage, by claiming pop-outs are the only advantage, you're overlooking the other obvious advantage: that images go into the screen as well. That has a lot of positive impacts that people overlook. It decreases the slowdown effect that happens when people walk toward or away from the camera, for example. It provides more negative space to work with when composing a shot. It causes subjects to stand out against their background, making them more easily visible. It's a new format with a much wider potential than people are willing to admit.
Another common complaint that I see is the insinuation that 3d glasses, by the mere nature of being glasses, call too much attention to the fact that you're watching a film and disallow immersion. That's incredibly subjective. In my case, I find the flatness of an image to be far more distracting than what I happen to be wearing in the theater. I'm not making that up. Because I watch more 3d movies mare than I watch 2d lately, it's gotten to the point where 2d images stick out like a sore thumb to me (I'm looking at you, the end of The Avengers). But of course that argument would also be subjective. That's kind of the point though. Both sides of this argument are entirely subjective, and substantively is equivalent to saying, "TVs are better than projectors, because you don't see a ray of light because your attention to the fact that a film is being projected." Everyone is capable of tuning out minor details like that, so pointing them out only exacerbates the problem.
Anyway, I know that most of the people complaining about this will never see my blog. But these arguments don't work. They're misinformed and logically contradictory. I'm willing to accept there are good reasons not to watch 3D, but those arguments are not them.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Don't Believe the YouTube 48 FPS Video
There's this video going around YouTube, and it's giving people the wrong impression about 48 fps. I want to address this video specifically.
Here it is, by the way:
This video claims to be an example of what the HFR video in The Hobbit will look like qualitatively. There's also a version shot at 24 fps so that you can compare. Unfortunately, this video is not 48 fps, nor is it comparable to the 24 fps version.
First things first, you will never find 48 fps video hosted on YouTube. This is because YouTube receives enormous traffic. According to their press statistics, over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on the website. That's a gigantic amount of data, which they have to find some way to keep manageable. Consequently, they will actually down-convert video to the fps limit of televised broadcasts in the United States, which is approximately 30 fps (for compatibility with old broadcast standards, it actually includes an occasional dip in framerate where one frame is displayed twice, called a drop frame, so it's often referred to 29.97 fps, but unless you're making broadcast television you only need to think of it as 30 fps). That saves them significant bandwidth (forces them to transfer less information between their website and your computer, letting them run their website faster and less expensively) without affecting the quality most people see in YouTube videos.
So how is the creator of this video getting around this? He has actually sped up the video. The increase in speed you're seeing in this video is not the increase in speed I was talking about in my previous post, but comes from the video actually being a few frames faster than its 24 fps counterpart.
I bring this up because I just saw this video used in a film critique of The Hobbit, and I think that's dishonest. Because this video is actually sped up, it misrepresents the increased sense of speed I was talking about before, giving people a wrong impression of what 48 fps will look like. And that doesn't even consider that the 48 fps video in The Hobbit is supposed to be specifically enhancing the 3D video, which makes it another issue altogether than a 2D representation.
You know, perhaps I should post my own video experiments up here some time. I once actually performed a comparison of 24, 48 and 60 fps (the frame rate James Cameron claims he wants to use in Avatar 2) to see how they looked. To be thorough, I even did the experiments in both 2D and 3D. I couldn't reproduce the addition or lack of motion blur in my own experiments, so that's problematic. But perhaps I can find a way to work around that eventually. I just need to find a way to host this video on this blog.
Here it is, by the way:
This video claims to be an example of what the HFR video in The Hobbit will look like qualitatively. There's also a version shot at 24 fps so that you can compare. Unfortunately, this video is not 48 fps, nor is it comparable to the 24 fps version.
First things first, you will never find 48 fps video hosted on YouTube. This is because YouTube receives enormous traffic. According to their press statistics, over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on the website. That's a gigantic amount of data, which they have to find some way to keep manageable. Consequently, they will actually down-convert video to the fps limit of televised broadcasts in the United States, which is approximately 30 fps (for compatibility with old broadcast standards, it actually includes an occasional dip in framerate where one frame is displayed twice, called a drop frame, so it's often referred to 29.97 fps, but unless you're making broadcast television you only need to think of it as 30 fps). That saves them significant bandwidth (forces them to transfer less information between their website and your computer, letting them run their website faster and less expensively) without affecting the quality most people see in YouTube videos.
So how is the creator of this video getting around this? He has actually sped up the video. The increase in speed you're seeing in this video is not the increase in speed I was talking about in my previous post, but comes from the video actually being a few frames faster than its 24 fps counterpart.
I bring this up because I just saw this video used in a film critique of The Hobbit, and I think that's dishonest. Because this video is actually sped up, it misrepresents the increased sense of speed I was talking about before, giving people a wrong impression of what 48 fps will look like. And that doesn't even consider that the 48 fps video in The Hobbit is supposed to be specifically enhancing the 3D video, which makes it another issue altogether than a 2D representation.
You know, perhaps I should post my own video experiments up here some time. I once actually performed a comparison of 24, 48 and 60 fps (the frame rate James Cameron claims he wants to use in Avatar 2) to see how they looked. To be thorough, I even did the experiments in both 2D and 3D. I couldn't reproduce the addition or lack of motion blur in my own experiments, so that's problematic. But perhaps I can find a way to work around that eventually. I just need to find a way to host this video on this blog.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
48 FPS in the Hobbit Makes Things Look Fake... Uh No.
Before I begin this post, I need to clarify that I have not yet seen The Hobbit at all, much less at 48 fps. Everything I say is completely theoretical at this point. I may have to retract this when I actually watch The Hobbit.
That being said, until the film changes my mind I'm convinced that film reviewers are making up things about HFR in an effort to seem like they know what they're talking about, but they really don't. It's a big change in the way film is recorded / exhibited to be sure, so first a little background. Basically, film works by playing a lot of pictures back to back so quickly that they appear to be moving instead of isolated pictures. Back in the silent film days, they used to play at whatever speed they wanted, which was usually something low like 12 pictures every second (each picture is called a "frame," so that speed would be called 12 frames per second, or 12 fps). When sound was introduced, however, playing something that slow caused the sound on a film strip to jitter, but adding more frames per second would make it cost more to create a single film, so they settled on 24 fps, since that was the slowest you could go without messing up the sound. Film has been using that film speed for 80 years since.
But around the year 2000 or so, something changed. Slowly, people began to adopt digital cinemas, up until the point where film is no longer even used today in most theaters. Consequently, the worries about keeping the frame rate low to make it less expensive aren't as important as they used to be. Yet, for tradition's sake, we've been filming and playing movies at 24 fps anyway. It also doesn't help that higher frame rates have often been associated with non-film forms of media, like 30 fps for television or 60 fps for video games. Consequently, people subconsciously believe that things don't look like film when they're not shown at 24 fps.
The Hobbit wants to change that, both so that movement looks clearer in cinema and so that motion appears to be more fluid. Consequently, they shot the film at double film's normal frame rate, instead opting to shoot at 48 fps, calling this HFR (high frame rate). What's really problematic with that is simply that it's different to how we're used to seeing film. Initially, it will probably appear to be moving in fast motion. That should get better after time, but it may not. Other than that, things will not be as blurry anymore when they're moving. That's it. That's all that can change when you start displaying a movie at 48 fps.
The reason I say film reviewers are making up things about HFR in order to seem like they know what they're talking about is because film reviewers have been making some pretty fantastic claims about the format. In early screenings, people were reporting that it was making them feel nauseous. That went away as people realized that's impossible. But what persists is that people are claiming that The Hobbit feels like a hyper-reality because of the frame-rate increase, and that this is making it easier to tell that the actors are acting, in costume, etc. One reviewer even made the bold claim that HFR made it possible to tell that Gandalf is wearing contacts.
What's happening there is not what they're describing, because what they're describing is impossible. What's actually happening is that people feel like they're not watching a film when it's being exhibited, and because of that, they don't know exactly what's wrong. But it will stop feeling wrong with time. It's not possible that it can cause nausea, nor is it possible that it increases the overall picture quality in any way that makes it so you can do something ridiculous like see Gandalf's contact lenses.
Both of those symptoms can be described by a way that The Hobbit was shot, but not as a result of HFR. The film was shot using a Red Epic camera shooting at 5k resolution, far above normal cinema quality. That would explain seeing Gandalf's contacts if watched in, say, a Cinemark XD theater, because that actually is increasing the film resolution, and would let you see more details like that. The nausea can be described by the decision to film in 3D, because 3D and excessive motion don't mix (it makes you dizzy, kind of like if you were to actually shake your head). The first problem can be solved by watching in a normal theater (which I don't suggest, since that's actually reducing the picture quality), and the second problem might not actually be a problem, assuming they don't do any camera shaking during the actions scenes (which, since they made it from the ground up in 3D, I'm sure they were aware would be a problem and avoided).
The moral of this story is that HFR is not going to make The Hobbit a less effective movie. It can't. All it can do is weird you out a little when you first see it. But that will go away eventually. And it has to, because that's the only way to make film get better at this point. Well, that and developing a 3D film grammar.
That being said, until the film changes my mind I'm convinced that film reviewers are making up things about HFR in an effort to seem like they know what they're talking about, but they really don't. It's a big change in the way film is recorded / exhibited to be sure, so first a little background. Basically, film works by playing a lot of pictures back to back so quickly that they appear to be moving instead of isolated pictures. Back in the silent film days, they used to play at whatever speed they wanted, which was usually something low like 12 pictures every second (each picture is called a "frame," so that speed would be called 12 frames per second, or 12 fps). When sound was introduced, however, playing something that slow caused the sound on a film strip to jitter, but adding more frames per second would make it cost more to create a single film, so they settled on 24 fps, since that was the slowest you could go without messing up the sound. Film has been using that film speed for 80 years since.
But around the year 2000 or so, something changed. Slowly, people began to adopt digital cinemas, up until the point where film is no longer even used today in most theaters. Consequently, the worries about keeping the frame rate low to make it less expensive aren't as important as they used to be. Yet, for tradition's sake, we've been filming and playing movies at 24 fps anyway. It also doesn't help that higher frame rates have often been associated with non-film forms of media, like 30 fps for television or 60 fps for video games. Consequently, people subconsciously believe that things don't look like film when they're not shown at 24 fps.
The Hobbit wants to change that, both so that movement looks clearer in cinema and so that motion appears to be more fluid. Consequently, they shot the film at double film's normal frame rate, instead opting to shoot at 48 fps, calling this HFR (high frame rate). What's really problematic with that is simply that it's different to how we're used to seeing film. Initially, it will probably appear to be moving in fast motion. That should get better after time, but it may not. Other than that, things will not be as blurry anymore when they're moving. That's it. That's all that can change when you start displaying a movie at 48 fps.
The reason I say film reviewers are making up things about HFR in order to seem like they know what they're talking about is because film reviewers have been making some pretty fantastic claims about the format. In early screenings, people were reporting that it was making them feel nauseous. That went away as people realized that's impossible. But what persists is that people are claiming that The Hobbit feels like a hyper-reality because of the frame-rate increase, and that this is making it easier to tell that the actors are acting, in costume, etc. One reviewer even made the bold claim that HFR made it possible to tell that Gandalf is wearing contacts.
What's happening there is not what they're describing, because what they're describing is impossible. What's actually happening is that people feel like they're not watching a film when it's being exhibited, and because of that, they don't know exactly what's wrong. But it will stop feeling wrong with time. It's not possible that it can cause nausea, nor is it possible that it increases the overall picture quality in any way that makes it so you can do something ridiculous like see Gandalf's contact lenses.
Both of those symptoms can be described by a way that The Hobbit was shot, but not as a result of HFR. The film was shot using a Red Epic camera shooting at 5k resolution, far above normal cinema quality. That would explain seeing Gandalf's contacts if watched in, say, a Cinemark XD theater, because that actually is increasing the film resolution, and would let you see more details like that. The nausea can be described by the decision to film in 3D, because 3D and excessive motion don't mix (it makes you dizzy, kind of like if you were to actually shake your head). The first problem can be solved by watching in a normal theater (which I don't suggest, since that's actually reducing the picture quality), and the second problem might not actually be a problem, assuming they don't do any camera shaking during the actions scenes (which, since they made it from the ground up in 3D, I'm sure they were aware would be a problem and avoided).
The moral of this story is that HFR is not going to make The Hobbit a less effective movie. It can't. All it can do is weird you out a little when you first see it. But that will go away eventually. And it has to, because that's the only way to make film get better at this point. Well, that and developing a 3D film grammar.
Friday, December 7, 2012
People Still Like 3D?
I love 3D films. I also love 3D video games. Not everybody loves 3D, though, and I'm starting to think my Facebook friends are getting a little tired of my constant rantings to Facebook regarding all of my thoughts on the subject. So, at one of there requests, I am making this blog.
Granted, not everything I post on here will be 100% related to movies. And the things I post on here may not be 100% related to 3D either. Things may be loosely related, like the Hobbit's HFR release, which Peter Jackson insists is better for 3D movies. But the one thing I can 100% guarantee is that anything I post will be 100% opinionated biased in favor of 3D exhibition. So perfect for spamming to Roger Ebert if you have some sort of Vendetta against him.
So what's the point of this post? Squatting. Plain and simple squatting. I'm not gonna post to an ugly blog, nor am I going to decorate a blog if I have no idea what content it gonna look like on it. Actually, that ugly blog business probably isn't true. I'll rephrase that. I don't want to post to a blog that looks exactly like it did when I first registered the domain. That would be retarded. It needs to look uglier, with all sorts of nonsensical red/cyan background images and junk like that. Is that a good idea? Absolutely not. But I'm doing it anyway.
At this point in the paragraph, you probably think I've gone completely insane. That's only partially true. I'm actually writing down the first thing that pops into my mind, just so I can get a descent sized sample post. I may be self-depreciating of my ability to decorate a website, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do it.
But I digress. From what, I don't know. But 3D is absolutely amazing, isn't it? What's even more amazing to me is how ridiculously people have gotten the history of 3D cinema wrong. People seem to think polarized 3D was invented really recently. It wasn't.
That's probably going to need more time to go into than I'm willing to give it right now. Let's see, is that long enough? I'll guess there's only one way to find out! *posts*
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