3D does not work, FACT

Marvel at the Wonder of 3D

Its everywhere at the moment. Most films are being released at the cinema in 3D now. And with the announcement that George Lucas is re mastering Star Wars in 3D it shows that is is not going away!!!

I subscribe to Home Cinema Choice every month and in there it is on every second page, 3D this and 3D that. Gets on my wick.

Why am I so anti? I CANT SEE IT!!

I have a very weak eye and therefore they do not converge properly and I miss out on all the depth and things shooting out of the screen. All I get is a headache and watery eyes.

It bugs me that I am missing out. As any who know me I have always been an early adopter. I had both HDDVD and Bluray at a time as I hated the thought of losing the next optical battle and backing the wrong horse. So I backed both! Had to have 1080p not 1080i when it came out. And so on and so forth. I have even been thinking about getting a 3D TV just to show off even though I am in capable of seeing it. I know NUTTER.

Luckily today, when doing my daily browse of Technorati i stumbled on a post by Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sunday times.

It is a really interesting read containing a letter to Mr Ebert from Walter Murch.

Mr Murch is an extremely famous editor in Hollywood some of his work includes Apocalypse now, The English patient and Cold Mountain. He is very well respected by his peers and is widely seen as the first to use the term Sound Designer and was the first along with his colleagues to develop 5.1 sound.

So you can see he is a big deal.

Anyway the post then goes on to show the letter from Murch -

Hello Roger,

I read your review of “Green Hornet” and though I haven’t seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980′s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost — almost — parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch

You can read the whole post here. It makes for a very good read and also the comments are interesting too!

I am sold now. I will not invest in 3D. Not until a glasses – less version is developed that does not discriminate use lesser mortals with poor eye sight

/end of rant