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Although the summer of 2007 didn’t see quite the explosion of stereoscopic 3D movies that the studios predicted, the enthusiasm for the format has continued to gain massive momentum and has helped to fuel gigantic leaps and bounds in the development of the technologies involved in the acquisition, post production and screening of the stereo 3D format. All of which is helping stereo 3D slowly shift out of its traditional experiential, event niche and move closer to a mainstream audience. The release of several big budget movies in 2007 in 2D in regular cinemas and 3D at IMAX, including Chicken Little, Monster House and, most recently, Beowulf, has meant a lot of the developments in the technology have been US-centric, but companies and businesses around the globe are beginning to see the potential of the format’s ability to draw an audience deeper into the experience of the film.

Axis Post, a sub-division of Axis Films, based at the heart of the British film industry in Shepperton Studios, has become the first company in Europe to install the new 3D software upgrade to its Quantel iQ 4K Pablo system. This upgrade will permit users to make real time adjustments in color correction, convergence and stereo strength to stereo 3D projects. The new set-up will be housed at Concrete Post in Soho and will become operational from early in 2008. Together with production company Can Communicate and experts in all things 3D, Inition, the four companies hope to drive the development of 3D content in the UK across all fields, from low-end corporate to sports, commercials, advertising and high-end stereo cinema production. Driven by the buzz around stereo 3D and its creative and business potential, the UK companies are keen to get in on the act. But how far behind are they?

“We’re certainly behind the States in terms of the acceptance of 3D,” says Paul Carter, “but I don’t think it will take us long to catch up. We feel there is a growing groundswell of opinion that is going to keep 3D moving now, and that it isn’t just for the mavericks and the people trying to do something quirky. The thing that has been holding it back has been post, but that now seems to be achievable and affordable. We’re not trying to put something out there that is going to cost double the price of 2D. It’s going to be mainstream, and one feels that the ITVs, BBCs and the SKYs are all jostling for position in the 3D market. It does feel a bit like the Wild West, with everyone rushing to stake a claim”

3D post-production

Concrete Post brings a wide experience of high-end post production, including editing, graphics, visual effects, 3D animation and audio post, to the set up. The facility was formed in June 2007 by combining the creative talents of Baraka, Metropolis and London Post. Of its involvement, joint-MD David Cox says: “We have been looking at a close alliance with a camera facility for some time. Axis Films seemed to be the perfect match, with its interest in post production coming from many years of camera rental experience in both film and HD.” A high speed data link from Axis in Shepperton Studios to Concrete in Soho, via Soho Net, will offer a workflow for productions that may require feedback from dailies at Shepperton, but who wish to continue their post in the West End. Concrete’s Chris Gilbert explains: “It’s all very well being based at Shepperton, where you can be looking at your material while shooting, but as soon as the production side has finished and packed up, London’s Soho is the natural place to go. I believe there’ll be a lot of call for 3D post, from a lot of different sectors. It’s a bigger leap than going HD. It’s something completely different. I think there’s a huge potential for 3D content.”

Post production in stereo 3D has always relied heavily on the experienced eyes of the editor or colorist, but whereas once that also involved a lot of educated guesswork and a certain amount of luck, with the assistance of the Quantel stereo 3D system, those experienced eyes can receive immediate feedback. Gone are the days of trial and error, with no way of checking the continuity of convergence until the two images are integrated. Now, thanks to the adaptation of this DI process, it is possible to sync both eyes perfectly in real time and check and adjust convergence with live feedback on a monitor in 3D – and in full resolution.

Vic Riva of Axis Post explains: “What the software does is turn the two camera views into two video streams, left eye and right eye, which you can view on an HD monitor or project in real time; you have to be quite sensitive when setting your convergence points. It’s down to you, as you are looking at it, to decide whether it’s looking comfortable.”

The conversion of the Quantel Pablo system for stereo 3D color correction and editing was possible because from its inception, it has been designed and built with a dual output. The original purpose for this feature was to allow users to output HD and SD versions of the same DI project. But doubling the amount of data hasn’t slowed the system. FrameMagic Disk Management means no copying of media when editing and no need to defrag or consolidate, resulting in reliable stereo 3D playback without stuttering or loss of eye synchronization. While TimeMagic processing reduces or eliminates rendering time, the Genetic Engineering shared workflow manages data between users and third-party software while avoiding the creation of unnecessary new media. “It’s just like working on two projects at the same time,” says Vic Riva. “It’s so smooth. Once you’ve done something on one of those layers, you can just go to the next layer and apply the same settings. It hasn’t slowed down; it’s just the way Quantel has looked at their data management. It’s very, very quick.”

The sports factor

Stereo 3D content is not only limited to cinema. Other areas to consider are computer games (nVidia already has a driver forces games to run in 3D), digital signage for advertising, promotional events, live theater, music concerts, nightclubs and, of course, broadcast; which is where Can Communicate comes in, with its experience of shooting sports footage. Sports rights are already one of the major weapons in the cable, satellite, digital war for viewers. Sports channels are enormous business. They not only help sell hardware, but via pay-per-view special events generate huge financial income. Imagine a channel specializing in stereo 3D sports coverage. This could really encourage the uptake of home cinema stereo 3D displays as they become available to the public, and help bring the format to the mainstream.

“Every single major sporting broadcaster is looking at it,” says Can Communicate’s Duncan Humphreys. “And they’d be mad not to. It’s coming. NHK in Japan is broadcasting 15 minutes of 3D every day. Broadcasting 3D is the Valhalla, and I think sport will be the biggest driver in that. So that’s one of the areas we are really testing at the moment. We’re doing an extensive study on how things work in a stadium and whether you should actually give people just one camera view – so it’s like they’re viewing it from a seat within the stadium – or whether you should intercut. If your eyes get used to looking at a rugby match or a football match from the best seat in the house, does intercutting become confusing? Should you then cut to action replays? I think the answer is yes, but obviously you have to be quite careful with the positioning of the cameras. Right at this moment, you can’t use any major close-ups or fast panning shots, because they create a huge amount of problems with strobing.”

Specialist 3D company Inition has been exploring and developing stereo 3D and interactive 3D for the past seven years. It represents a whole host of different manufacturers, offering all sorts of weird and wonderful 3D technologies, including 3D scanning, 3D printing, stereo 3D displays and motion capture, and is able to provide expert advice on all aspects of 3D production and screening (it also has a production side to the business, including 3D acquisition, conversion and stereo 3D CGI, which we’ll be looking at next issue). For stereo 3D projection the company favors the Duality system which, unlike Real-D or Dolby, uses a two projector set up.

“In terms of the result of the image you get,” believes Andy Millns of Inition, “using a single projector is not as good. The advantage of using two projectors is that you are seeing both eyes at the same time – there is no shuttering or flickering of slides. You just see two stable images and they’re both bang on in sync. The Real-D and Dolby systems deliver alternating images – left, right, left right – at 144 frames per second, so your eyes never actually see the whole image at the same time. Your brain does a good job of coping with that, but you do get to a point where one eye has advanced and the other hasn’t yet, so images can strobe and have an uncomfortable effect. It just doesn’t feel right.”

The projectors can be installed in a variety of configurations and set ups – side-by-side, one on top of the other, ceiling mounted, table mounted, and there are portable versions. “The idea is to get the lenses as close together as possible, then there’s less correction to do. We attach very high grade polarizing filters that are specifically designed for 3D. They allow about 60 per cent more light through than normal filters. That is one of the things you are always fighting against in 3D, because you lose a lot of light through the filters on the projector and even more from the filters on the glasses, so you’re throwing away about 78 per cent of the light. That’s another issue with the Real-D and Dolby systems, because they’ve got a single projector with blanking time in between left eye to right eye, they lose a tremendous amount of light, so are quite limited to the screen size they can do. IMAX has just announced that it are going to open 100 digital IMAX cinemas based on a dual projection system.”

The Duality system, like Real-D, also requires the use of a silvered screen to help maintain a polarized surface; the Dolby system uses the standard white cinema screen. While it might be wise to have a Duality projection system set up with your stereo 3D Quantel for end viewing, testing and for clients to watch, it doesn’t offer the most practical set-up for 3D editing and color correction. For this purpose the Planar HD monitor may offer the best solution. This set-up features two monitors joined at the top on a hinge with a clear screen hinged between them. Each monitor plays back one camera for each eye and the screen in the middle combines the images as a single 3D image when wearing passive glasses. It is the highest quality monitor currently available, with low cross talk and is very easy to view from any angle, and permits the user to work on a single camera view by simply flipping the screen out of the way. Another possible alternative is the Mirrorcube, which is a single monitor viewed using passive glasses. Because this combines two images, the resolution is lower and also requires the user to be in the ‘sweet-spot’ for best 3D. “You can imagine this display being very popular with gamers and also for people that watch features at home,” says Andy Millns. “There are dozens and dozens of stereo screens out there. We’re constantly evaluating new ones.”

But what about the mainstream home market or point-of-sales digital signage, where using glasses may be resisted or difficult or just plain impossible? Then we’re talking about autostereo displays, and the best and most popular on the market is the 42inch Philips WOWvx, says Andy. “These screens are called multi-view autostereo, which means stereo without glasses, but they send out more than two views. Imagine they sent out just a left eye and a right eye, as you move they’d swap, reverse and cause pseudo stereo. So the way to get around that is to send out nine views, which are effectively nine adjacent cameras. So basically you give it a normal 2D image with a depth map, so that every pixel in the 2D image has a depth value, which is interpreted by the monitor to extrude the image out and render these nine cameras internally. It’s a very convenient format, but to get a depth map out of live footage is not easy, as it requires an algorithm conversion; it’s much easier to do in CGI. It’s a very good monitor, but the thing it suffers from at the moment is the resolution because you’re sending out nine views, so you can effectively only see two-ninths of HD at a time, which is not particularly high. There will be quad HD 4K in the future, and it will look fantastic.”

Each decade, advancement in technology has brought audiences a fresh wave of stereo 3D films and new voices heralding that stereo 3D is the next evolution of cinema after color and sound. Whether the technology is finally advanced enough to maintain 3D past its initial experiential thrill factor to become a new narrative form for cinema remains to be seen. But certainly over the next few years we will continue to see an explosion in 3D technology, films and events, with companies from all over the world vying for their share of the marketplace.

• Axis Post will be hosting a two-day 3D event on 25 and 26 January 2008 at Shepperton Studios. More details at www.axisfilm.co.uk.

3D post-production

David Valentine.