Hollywood Goes Shopping for 3D Displays

"With 3D cinema production gaining momentum, the need for new 3D tools and equipment is getting more obvious every day. Until now, 3D movies were produced using makeshift solutions. You’d be surprised to know how many pairs of anaglyphic glasses are used right now at Sony Imageworks, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, 3Ality and Pacific FX.

When I was working on Meet The Robinsons 3D at Disney, everything was done in anaglyphic 3D until we screened our dailies in a full-sized Digital 3D Cinema with a Real D Z-Screen. That was also the case in every other post house working on a 3D project. There may be a couple of salvaged CRTs with liquid crystal shutter (LCS) active glasses, plus a number of dual projector passive stereo rigs, but that’s basically it. These displays are shared equipment but they require special servers and file formats, so the feedback loop from making a 3D adjustment in a computer graphics (CG) software to the actual screening can take up to a full day. Do this a few times and your week is gone.

You now understand why the studios’ stereographers were so enthusiastic when Samsung and Mitsubishi released their 3D-RPTV based on TI’s SmoothPicture technology. At last, it was possible to watch 3D with good frame rate, resolution, colorimetry and brightness, without walking to a digital theater. It was even possible to hook up these marvelous TVs to a computer and watch that 3D in real time - almost. The lack of any "checkerboard" display driver led the studios to build dedicated Linux boxes with HD-SDI inputs and DVI outputs to generate, on the fly, the 3D stream needed by their new 3D TVs.

Now that 3D is taking over the whole animation studio, the need for a new generation of 3D displays is even more obvious. Stereographers like me are still waiting for the solution. Based on discussions with some of Hollywood’s top stereographers, here’s the wish list for a perfect post-production 3D display:

1 - The display should be small enough to fit on a regular sized desk. Forget about dual LCD with a splitting mirror, or 60" giant TVs.

2 - If glasses are used, they should be lightweight: one does not want to wear heavy LCS glasses 9am to 5pm.

3 - The display should be 2D compatible to be able to read the GUI around the 3D picture. Here, some kind of 2D compatibility is needed. Anyone who ever tried to read a text box where each eye sees half of the letters’ pixels know how painful it is, leading to a reversion to anaglyphic 3D. The ability to switch just an area of the screen to 3D is a key function.

4 - The display should be multi-viewer compatible to be shared with colleagues or with the department supervisor when commenting on 3D settings. Forget about single-user head-tracking auto-stereoscopic screens.

5 - The 3D format used by the display should be straightforward enough to be implemented in an OpenGL wrapper.

Ultimately, there are not that many candidate technologies, and they usually fail on classic issues pertaining to price, availability or image quality.

The other 3D display solutions needed by 3D movie makers relate to on-set visual control and screen size simulation. On set, it is important to have a visual control of the 3D image. No director of photography (DP) will shoot color without a color monitor. So, why should a stereographer work with no 3D feedback? Some kind of HMD or stereoscopic viewfinder would fit the bill. If you’re currently designing one, please include a couple buttons. One button should set the virtual screen size at, say, 30 to 60 feet wide. Another button would set the virtual screen distance at, say, 20 to 80 feet.

At this year’s edition of the NAB Show, expect to see 3D camera rigs, 3D edit suites, 3D visual effect solutions, 3D digital intermediates (DI) and a fair amount of 3D footage. I bet you’ll see all of this on polarized projection or 3D RPTVs. Like other visitors, I’ll be looking for that simple, small, cute and efficient 3D display that will, at last, replace my antiquated CRT and its bulky active glasses.

Look for lots of coverage from NAB related to both 3D and 2D in future Insight Media newsletters and Display Daily columns."

By Bernard Mendiburu, DisplayDaily