Interview with Steve Schklair

"Steve Schklair, the founder and CEO of 3ality, explained: “We are in the business of building content and technology to support this whole new world of 3D exhibition. We make movies, but we also build the technology that we make the movies with.”

He looked first at the background to the new enthusiasm for 3D. “There was a mandate for digital TV, and then digital cinema started moving into theatres for exhibition. So 3D became the clear choice of where visually this business was going. But 3D films have always had a lot of problems, which is why they have never worked in post,” he said.

“Most early films were never in exhibition. There were problems on the production side because it was just so time-consuming and so expensive. They were novelties, so they have lived for most of the last 30 years in theme parks, which is still a good market for 3D content,” he added.

The big barrier to wider acceptance was always viewer headaches, caused by misaligned left and right eye images — but digital technology has all the answers. “You create the illusion of depth, but if those left and right eye images aren’t perfectly balanced you will still put them together. It’s a strain to do so. If the colour is mismatched, if the geometry is mismatched, in fact anything that doesn’t have the same, identical images is not what you normally see so you start to get head pain,” said Schklair.

“And then there’s the biggest problem with 3D movies on the production side, which is editing. It’s inherent that we have to edit because it is a movie we are making. The problem with editing has always been that you are watching a shot, and in a 24th of a second you make a cut to a new shot,” he added. “The depth of the first shot is here, and the depth of the second shot is there, so your eyes are swinging around to see the depth of the different shots as they come up. After about 10 minutes you start to get a headache because it’s so fast. There are no transitions in depth, they just jump, and so the first problem we had to solve with our technology was to work around that.”

When vertical alignment goes off, the old answer was to fix it in post, but not now. “We spend more time tweaking the lenses and the camera so we don’t have that problem. We now have compensation for that with a built-in look-up table. It moves the camera’s optical centre as we zoom, and we stay perfectly aligned,” said Schklair. “One of the beauties of our rig is that we can now pick up a set of lenses without concern. Making this stuff work, we can take our prep time down to what it used to be. It should take a day or two to prep our show and put it on the road, instead of weeks. “We still want to get lenses that are close, and the less telcentricity built into a lens the happier we are, but we can compensate for it now,” he added.

Asked about the market potential he anticipates, Steve Schklair said “Sports and music look tremendous as stereoscopic 3D. Features too, but in the right hands. U2 was best because they have a wide fan base, they produce a visually amazing show, and everybody says they are not afraid of technology. We financed the film, and we produced it.”

Asked about the technical learning experiences accrued, he said, “We could do live gig events, and we would automate the live switching. If there are big gaps in depth, it takes more frames to do the transition. Compression is possible, but we need deterministic technology options.

“You get a little bit of change and you create false 3D moments. I hope 24fps D-Cinema will go. I hope if we do live to theatres stuff it will go out at 30fps. 48fps is the sweet spot, and the projectors would handle it,” he added. “Polarisation does impact, but there are no elegant enough answers yet. We count this on our wish list.”

When U2 3D was edited the director sat on Avid in 2D and 3ality got the EDLs and worked forwards from there. “We do the assembly and look to do the CGI as required on shots. Finally it goes to the 3D stations with the transitions. All data is gathered and rendered out,” said Schklair. “Our tools are very stereo aware, they see stereo as correct. “All processes are procedural so they are repeatable. We only put into the editorial environment what we are going to work with, so we do a selection process. We keep the original and a finished copy,” he added.

“3D is different. It is impossible to pirate with camcorders. 3D will drag you into talking about complex colour models and harmonic values, and one of the most interesting notes of experience from seeing U2 3D is the number of odd visuals that make it a pop concert and not a science project.”

As 3ality built its grader, it was able to put elements back into its film and saw the energy come roaring back. Any producer will get ‘false 3D’ moments, an example being a statuesque Bono, but in 3D this problem is solved by moving objects back at the post stage. In 2D it would simply have been a locked-off shot."

Source: TVBEurope