3D TV and 3D Cinema

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Bernard Mendiburu with Yves Pupulin and Steve Schklair

3D TV and 3D Cinema Tools and Processes for Creative Stereoscopy

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO

Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier

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Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451, USA The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, UK

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v

To frank verpillat*

“Bernard, within a few years, we’ll see the fi rst 3D TV channels. For they won’t be able to produce enough content for 24/7 operation, they’ll rely on content converted into 3D. I want you to design a 2D/3D conversion workfl ow and pipeline.”

frank verpillat* (October 1999)

Dedication

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vii

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................. ix FOREWORD .............................................................................................xi INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... xiii

CHAPTER 1 Professional 3D Production in the 2010s ..............................1 CHAPTER 2 The Stereoscopic Camera Unit ...........................................27 CHAPTER 3 3D Image Processing and Monitoring .................................59 CHAPTER 4 Shooting 3D for Broadcast or Editing ..................................91 CHAPTER 5 Stereoscopic Experience from the Front Lines ...................129 CHAPTER 6 Opinions on Creative Stereoscopy .....................................141

3D A TO Z ............................................................................................195 INDEX ..................................................................................................233

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ix

Thousands of thanks, Fabienne, for your incredible performance as the best supporting wife over the 15 months writing this book, and the 15 years before.

I want to acknowledge help and support from:

Steve and Yves, for agreeing to contribute to this book together, and for fi nding some time slots in your insane schedules to write and read; Richard Kroon for your tremendous work on audiovisual lingo, and the glossary you provided for this book.

The 3ality and Binocle teams, and all the industry members who answered my questions or provided images;

The CML-3D members, for your expertise and sense of humor;

The most beautiful Caribbean pearl, the Commonwealth of Dominica, West Indies, also known as the “Nature Island.”

Acknowledgments

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This book is a continuation of my fi rst one, 3D Movie Making: Stereoscopic Digital Cinema from Script to Screen, which was published in 2009 by Focal Press. It is a continuation both in time and in subject matter. Back in 2008, 3D was not yet defi nitively installed in movie theaters, as no major live action 3D movie had proven it was feasible and viable to the extent that Avatar did. At the time of my fi rst book, my objective was to convince readers that 3D would be more than a fad. My message was that it was complex to produce but worth the effort; that it was a new art form and needed the involvement of new crew members; and that one of them, the stereographer, deserves a supervisor-level seat at the production roundtable. The year 2011 is another world, with fl ocks of 3D movies now in development, production, and postproduction.

Before 2010, 3D fi lmmakers were afraid bad content would hit the screens and drive audiences away; and, indeed, bad 3D conversions almost did. With a surprising and positive twist, bad conversions educated viewers about the dif-ference between 3D conversions and 3D fi lming. It even taught audiences the difference between the rushed afterthoughts that were market-driven conver-sions and delicately planned art-driven conversions. We are now witnessing the cinema taming the 3D beast, inventing a new grammar, creating new visual tools, and enjoying more adapted hardware. In 3D cinema, the technicians are polishing the tools, and the game is clearly in the hands of the creatives.

The deployment of the 3D medium has always been a chicken-and-egg prob-lem between display and content. In the movie business, that gridlock seems to be solved for good, thanks to digital projection, fi rst fed with CG anima-tion, and now associated with live action 3D movies. In the TV business, it's another story. There's no previous installment of a massively broadcast 3D media one can rely on, such as with the Fifties golden age of 3D. One can see a vintage 3D movie and learn from it. What 3D broadcast would you turn to in order to learn about the practice? Although 3D cinema has a whole family of ancestors that forged a path, 3D TV is a newborn orphan about whom we have much to learn. Around the world, crews are learning and producing 3D con-tent at the same time, mostly for sports events and concerts.

Until very recently, the 3D battle was about education; we had to both justify it and provide it. This battle will soon be won, judging by the number of 3D workshops hosted by the many cinematographic societies around the world; industry members obviously agree that 3D image-making needs special skills and experience. Now, the battle is about the quality of the equipment used in production. We have to debunk the idea that bolting two cameras together is

xi

Foreword

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Forewordxii

enough. Not all productions or camera positions require a high-end motion-controlled rig, but one needs to correctly animate the interocular distance and use the full extent of the zooms in order to offer some creative range to the director—all while staying within comfortable stereoscopy, of course. We have often seen the lowest bidder getting the deal, and it shows in the recorded material: low-end equipment may not cause discomfort, but it creates bland and uninteresting stereoscopy.

We’ve gotten to the point where it’s unlikely that cheap 3D production will hurt the audience’s eyes, but we are now seeing that cheap gear impedes ste-reoscopic creativity. There's no trick here: If one wants to be able to invent a new imagery, one needs a new camera and monitoring system that refl ects the evolution of the produced media. Would you produce color without a cali-brated camera, color monitoring, and a color timing pass? Would you edit on an NLE (nonlinear editing) system that drops frames and drifts in frame rate? Some respected names in the industry discard as useless functions they can’t offer yet, but they will suddenly insist that these very same functions are neces-sary as soon as their engineers catch up with the industry requirements. In the meantime, poor 3D is produced and inaccurate knowledge is spread around. For instance, it’s not because one cannot calibrate a zoom lens that zooming is useless in 3D, yet we have heard this incorrect opinion voiced loudly all year.

As Yves Pupulin explains in Chapter 6, 3D is an industrial art; as such, it can-not be separated from its exhibiting support. We would add that in its current infancy, neither can 3D be separated from the tools of its creation. In the early years of sound and of color in the movies, reproduction technology was adver-tised on movie posters and billboards, sometimes just as much as the starring talent—“in Technicolor” or with “Movietone” or “Vitaphone.” Shall we soon see the “in 3D” demarcation replaced by “100% real 3D,” “Shot with 3ality Digital rigs,” or “3D Quality by Binocle Takker ,” just as we see the Intel brand “InTru3D” on the DreamWorks Studios animation promotional material?

Dear reader, this is the journey awaiting for you. It’s time to get to know your new production tools, and use them to extend the cinematographic language like sound and color did. How far stereoscopy will revolutionize audiovisual arts? I can’t wait to see your answers reaching TV and theater screens.

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xiii

Introduction

Until recently there was no such thing as stereoscopic television. It was a dream, a concept, but now it is a reality—a nascent medium that is being shaped by aesthetic, business, and technological forces.

The quest for 3D moving images is more than a century old, and the quest for 3D television has been evolving for most of that time. Early attempts at broadcast 3D TV were crude by today’s standards, but despite the inelegance of these solutions the dream didn’t falter. Part of what makes this story so inter-esting is the convergence of motion picture and television (or video) technol-ogy. Digital motion pictures are nothing more than technologically advanced video, and it’s this commonality that makes the transition from fi lm to TV so much easier than it might have been had the fi lm medium remained entirely based on the chemistry of silver halide.

The groundwork for stereoscopic television was laid in the 1980s and 1990s by three companies: StereoGraphics, Tektronix, and VRex. StereoGraphics intro-duced the fl icker-free, fi eld-sequential 3D display, and the fi rst wireless shut-tering eyewear, CrystalEyes. StereoGraphics also introduced what are now the most commonly used stereoscopic television multiplexing techniques and cre-ated the ZScreen electro-optical modulator, which is the basis for the RealD motion picture projection system. Tektronix was fi rst-to-market with a liquid crystal modulator for a display screen that alternated polarization characteris-tics at fi eld rates allowing for the viewing of a 3D image with passive eyewear. VRex developed manufacturing techniques for an interdigitated micropolar-izer for monitors, which allowed for line-sequential viewing of a stereoscopic image using passive eyewear. The techniques created by these three companies are now employed by the manufacturers of stereoscopic televisions and by the people who manufacture the connective infrastructure necessary for the record-ing and transmission of 3D TV images.

Why, then, did it take two or three decades for stereoscopic television to hap-pen when so much of the technology was in place? There are several reasons for this, some of which have a technological and some of which have a busi-ness basis. For one thing, the obsolete NTSC protocol in the United States, and PAL and SECAM in other countries, precluded viable transmission of stereo-scopic information because of their limited bandwidth. Stereoscopic television had to await the more open protocols and higher defi nition of digital televi-sion. Curiously, though, the prior dominant display technology, the cathode ray tube, or CRT, was a better vehicle for the viewing of fi eld-sequential stereo-scopic TV than the modern pervasive liquid crystal display screen.

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Introduction xiv

It’s obvious that the current interest in stereoscopic television derives from the success of stereoscopic cinema, and this success can be laid at the doorstep of three companies: Texas Instruments, with the development of their DLP (digi-tal light processing) light modulator; the Walt Disney Company, with their lead in the charge for 3D movies; and RealD, with its successful deployment of the ZScreen added to the DLP projector. The basis for modern stereoscopic projection technology, and its reason for success, is that only a single projector needs to be employed for the successful display of both left and right images in a fi eld-sequential mode, as originally demonstrated by StereoGraphics for industrial applications. This makes for superior geometric and illumination coordination of the left and right channels, allowing for routinized operations in the projection booth. Similarly, a virtue of today’s 3D TV is that both left and right images can be displayed on the surface of a single monitor.

The success of current 3D TV technology, just like 3D motion picture tech-nology, depends on viewers wearing eyewear. The eyewear that are employed today are either passive, using polarizing lenses, or active, using electro-optical shutters, and are identical in function to the products offered in the past. There are advantages and disadvantages to both techniques, yet as this book is being published, no one can predict the level of acceptance on the part of the public for stereoscopic television that requires the use of glasses. Despite the fact that every major television set manufacturer, as well as the manufacturers of cam-eras, custom integrated circuits, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and the like, not to mention cable companies, satellite broadcasters, Internet protocol providers, and manufacturers of multiplexing and switching apparatus for the backbone of the television infrastructure, despite the fact that all these players are making a tremendous amount of effort and outlaying enormous expenditures, every-body in the fi eld is making a big bet on the public’s acceptance of 3D TV with individual selection devices—that is, glasses.

There are applications today that do not necessarily require the use of eye-wear. These applications, most probably involving laptops and handheld devices, use interdigitated stereo pairs in a vertical columnar format with an at-the-screen selection device, typically a lenticular screen or a raster bar-rier. In applications where the user can carefully position himself or herself, or by hand-holding the device to position it, and where there is only a single user, an interdigitated stereogram makes sense. Such selection devices have limited head-box area, so proper positioning or the relationship between the display and the viewer’s eyes is critical. But such a stereogram is not a general-purpose solution that must await a large number of views and a proper selec-tion technique.

It is safe to say that if an autostereoscopic (non-eyewear) television system could be developed and offered for sale at a reasonable price, and had image quality equal to that of images viewed with eyewear, it would be successful. The basic technology has been under development for about a century. One of the several problems that must be addressed no matter what selection

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Introduction xv

technique is used for an autostereoscopic display is that a tremendous amount of information needs to be displayed. A multiplicity of views is required—something like a hundred views rather than the two views needed for a plano-stereoscopic (two-view) display—which would require either a humongous bandwidth or the means to reconstruct the required information. The latter is more practical, and a great deal of work has gone into solving the reconstruc-tion problem. But what to do about a display panel that requires at least an order of magnitude more pixels than present devices? It is my belief that the autostereo problem will be solved, but is it 5 years or 15 years away?

There are more immediate problems to be solved for successful implemen-tation of a plano-stereoscopic TV system, not the least of which is the cam-era requirement. For every kind of TV content—news, sitcom, documentary, sports—a specifi c camera type is required. Today we have kludges of thrown-together adapted cameras. The industry needs integral cameras designed from the ground up. Numerous other issues need to be addressed, such as how to handle text boxes, how to reconcile the different formats that will be favored by particular content providers, and on and on. One interesting issue is the suitability of content created for the large theater screen when it is displayed on small screens at home or in the hand, and vice versa.

There are aesthetic issues to be addressed as well. Producing comfortable con-tent is the fi rst order of business, and there’s always the question of style: the photographic approach has to be related to content. Since the 3D medium is so new, at this time creative people have to wing it. Some people have strong opin-ions, but many of these opinions aren’t based on experience because the indus-try has very little history producing stereoscopic television content. That means that we’re in a period of discovery, which can be a good thing, as long as people are open-minded. But we don’t know whether or not some of what we suspect to be hard-and-fast rules are truly gospel, or whether these will change in time as the audience learns to look at stereoscopic images. This is an important sub-ject, and there is no room for its contemplation in an introduction—which is fortunate for me, because I don’t have the answers.

And the business issues I’ll leave to the business people.

The book that you hold in your hands, by Bernard Mendiburu, is an effort to offer the information that creative professionals in the fi eld of stereoscopic television require. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in order to get a stereoscopic image from the camera to somebody’s TV set or computer screen or handheld device. Bernard has tackled an enormous subject, and his book is an important part of what will be an ongoing exploration. It will prove to be an invaluable ref-erence for people in the fi eld or for those who wish to enter the fi eld.

Lenny Lipton Laurel Canyon, California

November 2010

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