“What Real-D is focused on is combining the best technology in the digital world with pretty sound business practises. For us, this involves specially formulated circular polarized eyewear. To the layman, this means being able to tilt your head and forget you’re wearing them after a couple of minutes. We also use a specially formulated silver cinema screen, which not only preserves the 3D, but allows for much brighter and bigger images. It’s also cost-effective for theater operators because they save energy using these screens. The system uses standard digital projectors, with our technology sitting on top, so you can switch back and forth between 2D and 3D in about two seconds.”
Types of 3D creation
“There are really three ways you can create a stereoscopic motion picture,” he continues. “One of the easiest is to use animation, because most animation is already built in 3D space – it’s very easy to put a second virtual camera to capture left eye and right eye. Another choice would be to shoot live in 3D, in which case you’re shooting with cameras, only now you’re shooting with two cameras instead of one. Then there’s 2D-to-3D conversion – or dimensionalization – where you take a finished 2D film and synthesize the 3D out of it, such as with Nightmare Before Christmas. We prefer the pure approach of either capturing it in true 3D or generating it in true 3D, but in fact we’ve seen tremendous improvements on the conversions front as well.”
So how would he describe Beowulf? “Hmm,” he says, “it gets a little complicated with Beowulf because what we’re finding is that the real top-of-the-line filmmakers are really not only inventing what kind of films you’re going to see, but how those films are made. In the case of Beowulf, they used performance capture, which means they used live actors, but rather than shooting the action with cameras, the information is motion captured digitally. And I don’t mean just the gross movements – every eye motion down to the eyeballs is tracked; every breath is tracked, and as a result they were able to then take that data, move it into the computer world and create this hyper-realistic universe.
“We worked very closely with Sony Imageworks, which did all the imagery on the Beowulf. The way we typically support a production is to provide our tools so that when they’re creating the 3D, they can view what they’re working on in 3D. It sounds like a little thing, but in the past you’d go to all this trouble to create a 3D shot, and you couldn’t look at it until a day later, after you’d developed it. So now they can see it how it’s going to be shown in a theater right there on set.
“We also work very closely with the stereographers and filmmakers, helping them understand what the various strengths and weaknesses of 3D are, and we spend a tremendous amount of energy on education and community outreach, to make sure that everyone understands that this isn’t your grandfather’s 3D any more. There’s a much higher level of sophistication, quality and, even more importantly, subtlety in what you can bring to 3D now.
“Later, we supported Beowulf throughout the early test screenings and on all their premiers. So again, our business is very straightforward – we’re there to make sure that whatever the filmmaker wants, they see it on our screens the way they intended it to look. That’s the important thing. At the end of the day, the technology is cool and we’ve built some really neat stuff, but until you’ve got Bob Zemeckis showing Beowulf on it, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the art that brings it to life, and for that reason we spend a tremendous amount of time with filmmakers making sure they’re happy.”
Converting theaters to 3D
So how much pain is involved in converting a cinema to 3D using the Real-D system? “You first have to start out with a digital projector,” says Josh, “and the digital projector conversion is happening in the industry right now, very quickly. We have about 5000 theaters already converted to digital. Although that’s still a very small number, there are about 125,000 theaters around the world that will potentially upgrade in the next few years. So once they have a digital projector, we have two steps. Step one is we put in a specially formulated screen. This is a higher gain silver screen, very important for the 3D and the light levels. The second thing we do is turbocharge the digital projector; we provide a number of technologies, both hardware and software, and that upgrade itself takes about 25 minutes. The screen takes about three or four hours to convert out – typically, we come in after the last show of the evening, and by the time first doors open, you’d never know we’d been there. The screen has been replaced and all anyone knows is that the images look a lot brighter and a lot crisper. Within about an hour we’ve trained the operators and they’re running 3D perfectly – and that’s no small feat.”
Things weren’t always so easy. “When we first started doing this, it would take us two-to-three hours of set-up time just to get things going, and every day you would have to spend five or ten minutes realigning and rebalancing the projectors, but all that has gone away now. Most multiplexes are not looking to bring in more people; they don’t want people to have to deal with glass management or extra people to run the technology. Typically, one guy runs 15 or 16 theaters, and if you’re lucky it’s not the same guy who’s selling popcorn downstairs, so we really had to make this system as simple and as elegant as possible.
Projection technology
“We make 3D technology for every type of display device in the world, but what has had the most traction in digital cinema has been the DLP digital projection light-based technologies from Texas Instruments. Currently, there are three major manufacturers producing projectors with this technology: Christie, Barco and NEC, and we work with all of them. We’ve also now designed and built the first 3D systems around the Sony 4K projectors, so we really are agnostic in terms of the underlying delivery technology.
“What’s been fascinating with the last five 3D films is that we’ve seen on average about a 3x revenue increase on our 3D screens versus our 2D screens. That was true when we had 100 screens; it was true when we had 250 screens, and was true when we had 600 screens. It will be interesting now to see if it holds up at 1000 screens. Beowulf is probably the most beautifully realized stereoscopic film ever produced, so we’re hoping this will really capture the imagination, not just of the audience, but of other filmmakers as well. We’ll have between 4000 and 5000 theaters deployed by spring 2009, in time to support filmmakers and studios such as DreamWorks and what Jeffrey Katzenberg (Shrek) is trying to produce – and also be ready for Avatar from James Cameron and Bob Zemeckis’s next film, A Christmas Carol.
“It’s very important that the marketplace is big and robust enough to support those films, but we think eventually all films will go this way. We don’t know if that’s three or five years away, but like all technologies, once they become simple and elegant enough and high quality enough, they typically get integrated into the system very quickly. Usually less than five years. That was true for sound, that was true for color, that was true for surround sound, and we believe it will be true for 3D too.”
3D in the home
So when will the world of 3D content hit the home? “It’s not now a question of whether can you get 3D in the home,” explains Josh, “it’s whether you afford to put it in the home. For a real home market to take off, we’re not talking about a few hundred or a few thousand theaters, we need to be talking about millions of televisions. Right now, there are a couple of TVs that are essentially 3D ready, but they are still missing a few key components. I think we’ll start to see a significant increase in 3D televisions in probably late 2009, and 2010 will probably be the first big year for the home market. But like all technologies, predicting that far is always a sketchy business.”