Captain Jack wrote:
> I don't know if the current spate of 3D in cinema is going to be a fad or 
> not, but I think this movie did a really good job of showing how it can add 
> to the performance without being an in-your-face gimmick (well, mostly...). 
> I do wish there was some way to create a screen made up of semi-transparent 
> layers (or something) so that 3D films could be done without the glasses, 
> though.

I predict that every movie will eventually be 3D, whether we want them 
to or not.

Personally, Avatar was the first 3D film I saw since Disneyland, and I 
wasn't impressed by the technology.  It wasn't any better for showing 
movies than watching them on a 2D screen.

Now, if you could walk around inside a 3D movie, /that/ would be cool - 
though it would defeat the point of /watching/ a movie :)

...Chambers

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Darren New wrote:
> There's also apparently work on a 3D TV using jitter-3D like
> (link has a naked butt in one of the images, so NSFW maybe)
> http://www.well.com/~jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html
> to make for 3D you can view from wide angles. Apparently if you do it at 
> just the right speed, you can't see the wiggle.

Hey, that's pretty cool - I wonder what would happen if they upped the 
jitter rate to something like 120fps?

...Chambers

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Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Personally, I didn't.  The writing was so offensively bad that I almost 
> walked out in the middle.

  Maybe it was not a masterpiece of scriptwriting, but I didn't find it
so absolutely horrendous.

> Cameron's two best movies came out more than 20 years ago

  It has only been 19 years since Terminator 2.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:27:03 -0500, Captain Jack wrote:

> "Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote in message
> news:4b4faf1a$1@news.povray.org...
>> One thing that I'm wondering about this film in 3D - do they get the
>> focus right?  One of the problems I've read about current 3D
>> technologies (well, most of them going back in cinemas to the point it
>> was introduced) is that the focus is constant - things near and far are
>> in focus, and that can induce eye strain because your eyes tend to want
>> to focus on specific things, not everything (as I recall).
> 
> IMO, if there was an award for getting DOF right in a CG film, Avatar
> would win it. You really need to see it, it's really so well done that
> it's hard to describe, because I can't think of another film to compare
> it to. The film looks like it was shot with real lenses (which it sort
> of was... the built a special "camera" that let the Cameron walk through
> the CG set, "seeing" the plants and setting up his shots using simulated
> lenses).
> 
> There's some great "making of" articles at www.cgsociety.org that show
> some of the work that went into it.

Interesting, I may just have to go see it in 3D in the cinema if that's 
the case; I've heard rumour that projectors using DLP may be able to 
handle some 3D projection (and I've got one), but this is starting to 
intrigue me now.... :-)

Jim

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Chambers wrote:
> Hey, that's pretty cool - I wonder what would happen if they upped the 
> jitter rate to something like 120fps?

 From what I've read, there's a maximum speed you can jitter at, because 
your brain has to process the picture and break it down into objects (which 
happens about a third of the way along the visual path) before the scene 
changes, or the effect goes away.

I.e., your eyes pipeline processing tremendously, with whole lots of stuff 
being computed right in your retina (like outlines), and if you overwrite 
that before it gets to the infront/behind processing, the effect vanishes.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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Warp wrote:
> Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> Personally, I didn't.  The writing was so offensively bad that I almost 
>> walked out in the middle.
> 
>   Maybe it was not a masterpiece of scriptwriting, but I didn't find it
> so absolutely horrendous.
> 
>> Cameron's two best movies came out more than 20 years ago
> 
>   It has only been 19 years since Terminator 2.
> 

Yes, that would be his 3rd best :)

(I realize that such a ranking is, by it's very nature, contentious... 
but for me, Aliens was the best, with Terminator being second, followed 
by T2 and Titanic, and then The Abyss.  I have yet to see either True 
Lies or Piranha 2, so I can't judge those).

...Chambers

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> IMO, if there was an award for getting DOF right in a CG film, Avatar 
> would win it.

There were many points during the movie where objects in the foreground were 
blurry because of DoF, and if you tried to focus your eyes on them they 
would look like a blurry object.

I don't consider this to be a serious flaw; it's more of an artistic 
decision. Non-3D movies have exactly the same problem (focusing your eyes on 
an object do not bring it into focus), and I don't think it matters much 
more when viewed stereoscopically.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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4b51939e$1@news.povray.org...
>> IMO, if there was an award for getting DOF right in a CG film, Avatar 
>> would win it.
>
> There were many points during the movie where objects in the foreground 
> were blurry because of DoF, and if you tried to focus your eyes on them 
> they would look like a blurry object.
>
> I don't consider this to be a serious flaw; it's more of an artistic 
> decision. Non-3D movies have exactly the same problem (focusing your eyes 
> on an object do not bring it into focus), and I don't think it matters 
> much more when viewed stereoscopically.
>
I mostly agree... though when you get cross eyed to look at a close object, 
your eyes are used to get focus closer.
Here they are not able to...I got some trouble with that before accepting 
it.
At other moments I enjoyed having (as IRL) small things as 'mosquitoes' or 
seeds flying at the edge of  my awareness between me and captivating action. 
I thing it is a gimmick though, when got used to, it loses most of it 
interest.

Marc

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Slime wrote:
> and I don't think it matters much more when viewed stereoscopically.

I disagree.  Maybe it's just because we're more used to flat film (the same 
way that video games put in stuff like lens flairs even when the character 
isn't using lenses).

I think the brain knows it's looking at a projection on a flat screen and is 
more fooled by the stereo, so the inability to focus is more obvious.

YMMV of course.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:4b51f88d@news.povray.org...
> I disagree.  Maybe it's just because we're more used to flat film (the 
> same way that video games put in stuff like lens flairs even when the 
> character isn't using lenses).
>
> I think the brain knows it's looking at a projection on a flat screen and 
> is more fooled by the stereo, so the inability to focus is more obvious.

That's how a lot of tilt-shift images are able to give the impression that 
the viewer is looking at animated toys, instead of a film or image sequence 
of "real" objects. We have become accustomed to the subtle cue that a narrow 
depth of field (a feature of macro type lenses) means we're looking at 
something small. An artist can play with depth of field (as well as color 
saturation and other goodies) and create an illusion based on our 
acclimation to cinema and still photography. I once saw a guy do a pretty 
good tilt-shift simulation artificially (layer after layer of abstraction 
now...) in Poser of all things.

--
Jack

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