3-D is here to stay as it always has been

There is nothing new about the current downward trend in popularity / exposure of 3-D film.  3-D has been there from the beginnings of film: the first film camera built by the Lumiere brothers was a stereoscopic camera and the first photo cameras were even stereoscopic ones.  As is happening today, 3-D has known ups and downs throughout the history of film and photography.  It is a medium that is not going to go away - it never has because it has always captivated audiences and will continue to do so as long as humans have two eyes.

A modern Lumiere 3D camera: 4K

The now: 4K


4K is the current talk of the town and as a format it is a matter of Moore's Law for it to become a mainstream reality.  The doubling of computing power every year dictates the possiblility and therefore the assured technological drive to go up in resolution and framerate in digital cinema and television systems.  Eventually, prices of higher spec technology go down as chips are produced en masse with these higher resolution capabilities.  4K TV is an unavoidable format that will happen eventually as dictated by the purchase and replacement cycle of consumers - about every decade and a half as observed with the transition from SD to HD.  Yes, adoption speed of new technology has been going up exponentially throughout history but recession and growth cycles have remained steady since the introduction of the stock market.

The first commercial 4K Television channel has lauched: High4K, pretty much following the model of Sky3D and 3Net in that it is a subscription channel with endless reruns of the current limited number of 4K content, let alone the content licenced by High4K.  As the big networks switch to 4K - probably by compressing the image to death to get closer to HD bandwidths and also by sacrificing a few +1 HD channels - that unique market position will disappear. 

Youtube 4K

Don't forget the early adopted 4K abilities of Youtube; besides being 3-D enabled, Youtube is 4K enabled.  Bandwidth?  A huge issue.  The 4K content has to fit in HD bitrate limitations so the very reason for being 4K will be quashed.  The same thing goes for IPTV channels such as Netflix and Lovefilm.  4K on an HD shoestring. 

Of course the same goes for real-time TV-set upscaling of HD content to 4K: might as well keep that old HD screen.  Real, specialized post production 2K or 3K to 4K upressing is a different matter.  For the huge difference in quality between real-time and specialized upscaling, visit 4KRender.com

As there is no 4K Bluray standard yet, the wait is for rogue Mpeg5 discs to flood the black markets. 5 Bucks for a 4K Disc of a cammed movie?  Perhaps cammed with a Blackmagic 4K camera. OK, not likely but we're thinking ahead here.  Reality always turns out to be stranger than fiction.  Straight 4K dumps coming from mastering houses are the more likely condidates and those pirated copies will probably be distributed using the old Mpeg4 (Divx or similar) but at 3K sizes.

Blackmagic 4K 'budget' camera: the Cammers' future choice?

The future of 3-D

So where does this leave 3-D and its prospects for the coming future?  Is 3-D 4K a logical marriage?  Not at all: the bitrates become so enormous that a double quad-core processor and a 10 terabyte RAID array in a TV will still overheat.  Perhaps that's an exaggeration but 4K will develop further on a 2D path, not a 3D one.  The proponent of 4K 3D are either looking at Side-By-Side anamorphic 3D on a 4K frame as employed by the Sony 4K cinema projectors already or 4K 3D for autostereoscopic screens - because of the resolution quartering-effect of lenticulars. 

Looking at trends in 3-D's checkered history it is safe to predict a new 3-D boom peak in 2039, with the boom starting in 2033.  Why those years?  Because it takes a new generation of film makers and hardware manufacturers unfamiliar with the previous exploits of 3-D to try their hands at the revolution that never seems to happen.  Is 3-D the Devil's Candy?  Perhaps, and as with all things sweet, powerful and dangerous it really is not going to go away.  By 2033, however, Moore's Law will also dictate an availability of bandwidth and computing power suitable for holographic film.  So at that point, stereoscopy may very well join the fate of forgotten demons of Ancient times.  Locked up in the Tantalus of unfulfilled cinematic promise.

What's more safe and realistic is to predict a photogrammic future, where depth information is drawn in real time from two or more image streams, creating a colour point cloud.  The real time computing power will be available in the future and it is predictable that the bandwidth issues will remain (because who is going to put fiberoptics in the streets and overhead telephone cables and wireless 5G won't outperform cables in the real world), so taking a game engine approach is a most tempting solution.

XBox 720 Concept

Contact 3-D Revolution Productions for more media predictions and consultancy on the subjects of 3-D, 4K, HFR, HDR in animation and live-action for feature film and television production alike.

3-D is here to stay as it always has been

Siggraph 2007 Next-Gen Displays

Neit 360 degree 3-D display

Two bits from a VFX Newswire article:

VFX Newswire article at
http://www.vfxworld.com/index.php?atype=articles&id=3369

SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies: Next-Gen Displays

J. Paul Peszko speaks with John Sibert, SIGGRAPH 2007 co-chair of Emerging Technologies, about this year's focus on display technology.


(...)
One category of displays centers on digital projection. "DLP-3D TV is new technology that T. I. (Texas Instruments) has developed that will enable you to do on a home television HD display 3-D stereo that you would normally see at a place like Disney or possibly in theaters," explains Sibert.

(...)
Another interesting display technology is the Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display being developed by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. "The thing about 3-D displays is that they don't show very well on a web page," states Sibert. "The cool thing about this display is that you don't have to wear glasses, and it's based on kind of an old idea of a rotating mirror that reflects the image, which appears to be three-dimensional. Usually 3-D images are hard to move around or change the shape of in realtime. This one works fast enough that it can actually do that. Also, people can stand around it in a group and see the full 3-D."

Holographic Display as illustrated in VFX Newswire

Our comments on the article:

It’s very exciting to see 3-D display technology taking leaps and bounds, headed for our homes very soon. So it’s time to create 3-D content for all these wonderful screens. Unless you’re happy to watch cooking programmes and quiz shows in 3-D all day, that is…
3-D recording and filming is still a specialization because its parameters can be very tricky. So you will want expert stereo 3D help. 3-Dimensional imagery is shot using two cameras and the look of the resulting 3-D effect is as mouldable and creatively controllable as the regular film and video image. The 3-D equivalents of focal length, aperture size, lens size, depth of field, and use of colour are seriously underemployed! An amazing amount of different things can be done with stereoscopic 3-D, while currently not much of all that potential is tapped into by 3-D filmmakers.
3-D stereoscopic content creation is something we can help you with, from script to screen. Your creative 3-D ideas on tomorrow’s screens, in the best possible way!



Of course, one has to make a clear distinction between stereo 3-D and holographic 3-D imagery. They are different mediums. Why? Because holographic 3-D (including the 360-Degree Light Field Display imagery) has no framing, as opposed to stereo 3-D.
3-D is filmed with two cameras, while holographics are recorded with light hitting an object from a very wide array of angles. A real or virtual actor on these displays will be looking in one direction, while you, the viewer, may be looking at his side, his front or even his back. So there is no controllable eye-line and your fellow-viewer will always see a different image from you. In this way, cinematography cannot be employed for these displays; rather these moving images have to be approaches as you would theatre or a stage show. This is a very important distinction to make, and once you recognise this, you can create the best possible entertainment for these displays rather than doing something that equals a ‘radio show on TV’.

Time to get creative in 3-Dimensions!

Siggraph 2007 Next-Gen Displays