3D NAB 08: Day one
"The show opened this morning, and this is the first year I'm benefiting of a press accreditation. To some extend, mostly culinary, it's comfortable. On the other hand, I can actually feel a deep change in the tone of my interlocutors. Convincing me is not just an option, it seems to be the task of the day. No more easy chat on the booths, every talk is quite serious now. I'll have to figure out a simple pitch to deactivate the PR talk by tomorrow.
Today, I just spend the day inside the “Content Central” theater with a all-day 3D session. 400 seats were not enough to host all the tentative attendees. We heard about 3D, from 9 to 5, and had a live 3D demo from 3Ality studios in L.A. The 3D expert crowd is that small that many speakers were participating in two or more sessions. Peter Anderson, Steve Schklair and Eric Brewig were at least appearing twice in the day.
I was pleased to hear from highly experimented 3D experts what I'm saying to the people consulting me on their 3D projects. Which is: “There is no one-fit-all answer to most questions about 3D. I can't tell you what I'll recommend for your project. We'll have to search for every answer. We'll learn together and that will take time and you'll pay me for that time”.
The most obvious reaction would be to do not hire an expert who claims not to have any pre-formated answer to your questions. This is one of many 3D paradoxes. But if you encounter a 3D expert who knows all about 3D, most likely it's a fake or a megalomaniac. Real guys know they don't know. That's likely why most studios prefers develop their 3d knowledge internally rather than hire an experimented stereographer to conduct the education. Too bad. They loose time and money while we sit idle. At last, today's attendees were educated on the shortness of such approach.
Later in the day I went to a demo of TDVision's 3D Bluray system, They put the second eye in an enhancement layer in a MPEG2 stream. Clever and well done. A regular 2D player would discard the second eye data, when a 3D player would combine both eyes to play the 3D content. The player could be a TDVision software on a PC, or a Bluray with a firmware upgrade. They claim to be able to upgrade a bluray 2.0 using the internet link. It looks nice on the paper and on the TV. The question being: is their patent really enforceable for such a system ? I had the feeling the 3D embedded in the enhancement layer was in the original blue prints of the MPEG standard. We'll see. Go have a look at it on the Booth C9042.
I had just a few minutes on the show floor and I already have two more 3D camera and a couple 3D screens. One camera is Jason's beam splitter from 21st century 3D, on TDVision booth, the other is “Red Rover” parallel rig on Eyeon's Booth, along with three 3D screens in mirror-mount configuration. The guy who designed it was explaining me that he would not have any problem zooming because he uses a lanc shepherd. It tried twice to explain him the zoom's optical axis and progressivity issues, and eventually nooded passively to his anthousiams. Let's wish him good luck with the 3D learning wall.
The 3D learning wall is my version of the 3D learning curve. It starts like this : It's dead easy to make 3D. Just shoot two pictures and you're done. This is the flat section of the learning curve. Then you eventually try to do something interesting. Like a cut, a zoom, a pan, a title... and it's not working at all. That's the vertical section of the 3D learning curve. Usually, the encounter is as painful as you were sliding fast on the flat section.
If you survives the blast and climb over the wall, you'll eventually find the “plateau” at the top. That's where you've figured out the biggest issues, and are careful with framing and moving. Phill “Captain 3D” McNally says that a smart and motivated 3D candid takes only one to two months to go past the wall and become an experienced 3D artist. And a resistive person will never get pass it, whatever time and energy you spend on educating him.
Tomorrow is the Big Day, I'm scouting the south floor for 3D stuffs. I'll bring you pictures, sorry, 2D pictures..."
Bernard Mendiburu is a visual effects artist and digital cinema engineer working in Los Angeles. He started working on 3D in the mid 1990s as R&D engineer in Paris, where he developed HDTV and 3DTV interactive advertising. As the production company CTO, he built a production pipeline for auto-stereoscopic displays, from acquisition to playback computers, including visual effects and interactive players. In 2003 he moved to the US, and worked as scientific visualization engineer at the UCLA School of Medicine. He worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation on the stereoscopy of “Meet The Robinsons” and is writing a book on 3D movie making. He is an active member of the SMPTE 3-D Cinema group, ISU (International Stereoscopic Union), and writes for the French stereoscopic magazine "Images en Relief".
