"Why 3D doesn't work" - Walter Murch (via Roger Ebert)

Paul F said:
It sounds like an old people discussion here. Is anybody in this discussion under 25? While I don't like 3D, I'm old. Old people are irrelevant with regards to whether or not 3D works. Walter Murch is old. It only matters what 3-25 year want to watch at the movies. If they want 3D, then it is here to stay.
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It's not what they "want", it's what they're given. Quite a difference.
 
@ Paul F.
Walter Murch was describing the technical reasons why 3D works or not. Not whether he likes it or wants it or not. That's what we were discussing also. And regardless of whether 3-25 year olds want it or not, technically, it doesn't work.
 
Walt didn't say why it doesn't work. He said why he doesn't like it "So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?"

Yes, it does provide a darker, smaller, strobier? experience. Dark and small doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works. You may not like it, but it provides a 3D experience. I'd find the opinions of the 18-25 year olds as more valid. Old people (that's me) resent change, resent a perceived lower quality experience, and are old and grumpy. I find their opinions about new technology to be not meaningful. 3D, Twitter, Facebook. Iphone apps; these are things that youth drive and determine future relevance. I'd really like to hear what young adults have to say about 3D. Do they care if it is dark, small, and strobey? Do they demand a movie be 3D or they won't watch it or do they dislike 3D. What percentage? This interests me. Old people's views.... not so interesting.
 
Paul F said:
You may not like it, but it provides a 3D experience.
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No, it provides a stereoscopic experience.

400px-Early_bird_stereograph2.jpg



It's just two 2D images that look almost the same.

This is 3D:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/animation/Kirupa_3D_02_TallBox.swf
 
Paul, your right. Walt didn't say it didn't work. That was the opinion of Roger Ebert. In fact Walt suggests it does work albeit problematically. My mistake.

As for who likes it or not, I'm not concerned about that. The market place will sort that out.
And like you say, the primary demographic, probably being 3-25 years olds, will ultimately decide it's success.
I can't argue with you there and I'm not.

Do I like it? I honestly don't care. I can take it or leave it. It's more of a novelty to me really.

When I say it technically doesn't work, technically, it doesn't. At least not at the level it should.
It's still very problematic. Imo.

I was more focused on the technical aspsects of his opinion. No pun intended.
At the risk of quoting the entire article, this is the area of the article I found interesting.


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.
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Indeed, the things Walt points out are the shortcomings that make it a bad experience for me. But I'm very impressed with this round of 3D (call it what you like) technology. it is quite good. Well beyond what we had before. I like to think that if 3D were as good as our actual vision, I would want movies to be 3D. But maybe not.
 
Paul F said:
It sounds like an old people discussion here. Is anybody in this discussion under 25? While I don't like 3D, I'm old. Old people are irrelevant with regards to whether or not 3D works. Walter Murch is old. It only matters what 3-25 year want to watch at the movies. If they want 3D, then it is here to stay.
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I'm 21 and 3D drives me insane. But that's probably because I've been a filmmaker and played with VFX for quite a while, so in Avatar I was constantly looking around trying to appreciate subtle details all over the frame. But my eyes were fighting the intended depth changes because I didn't want to look where the editor wanted me to look. That's what gave me headaches, especially with motion. I also am really frustrated with the darker image and the way it looks smaller (I'd never heard anyone mention that until this article), which maybe only drive me as crazy because I spend a lot of time analyzing image quality. Maybe my peers don't care. In fact, lots of my friends quite enjoyed Avatar in 3D. So who knows?

But I for one don't expect huge 3D penetration like we saw with color TV and HDTV, at least not until they can develop good screens that don't need glasses. More and more of my target mediums are in places nobody would bother putting on glasses anyway, like digital signage, website videos, motion graphics for events, etc. There is a lot of video content to be made where the audience isn't committed to a couch and glasses, and in many cases don't realize they are about to watch a video.

As far as home video recording... correct me if I'm wrong but don't you need a convergence adjuster on-set much like a traditional focus-puller? We all complain about auto-focus on consumer cameras... can you imagine your Uncle's shaky vacation videos with a poor auto-convergence adjuster too?
 
For me, the biggest shortcoming of 3D movies is the cost. I'm within the "demographic range" (albeit the top), but I'm also a broke college student/filmmaker, so spending almost $20/ticket is usually simply out of the question. And frankly, seeing a movie in 3D is not worth the price.
 
Here's another thing too that irks me. When you have a traditional 2D image confined to the screen, and a surround sound, you can play around with negative space. That's really where the audience's imagination comes into play. What they DON'T see.

Even if you DID have a "real" 3D movie, that took place in a 3D environment like a sandbox GTA game or something, and everything was in focus and you could choose where too look, that would totally take away a lot of necessary limitations. I'm talking about things like creating tension by not showing things.

Remember in the 90's there was all this talk about "interactive movies"? Like, how in the future you could decide where the story would go and that was the way stories were going to be told?
Well, that never happened because that's not how storytelling works.
Even if we DID have a "true" 3D movie experience, that would be like a visual version of the interactive movie idea. Instead of choosing where the story goes, you choose where to look. That's not going to work either.
 
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