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MillimeterStereo Hype
Feb 18, 2009 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
Stereoscopic 3D is enjoying a renaissance in theaters, but what are its prospects for the rest of the video production market?
Pace's main crosstown competitors also use Sony cameras. 3ality is perhaps best known for its production of U2 3D, a concert film that's considered a triumph of stereoscopic technology. That project required months of painstaking postproduction in order to correct minute deviations in camera sync and to adjust the depth of frames across cuts.
Shooting live, of course, there are no such second chances for adjustments. And recently, 3ality has dived headlong into live stereoscopic sports production. Luckily, the company, founded in 2000, has been perfecting on-the-fly camera calibration all along. 3ality founder and CEO Steve Schklair says that on the production end, the most expensive aspect of shooting live stereo 3D is the years of R&D that have gone into the software that enables live cuts from camera to camera. “It's really easy when you're shooting 3D to change depths,” Schklair says. “You've got a director in an [outside broadcast] truck cutting from camera to camera, and you're not sure which camera they're going to go to. If the depth is different on each of those cameras, it'll tear people's eyes out making those changes.”
That's the depth problem, and its solution required eight stereographers when 3ality shot the Dec. 4, 2008, NFL game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders for a live broadcast to movie theaters in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. 3ality used eight dual-Sony HDC-1500 beam-splitter rigs in a split-block configuration, which means the optical block is extracted from the body and wired back to it in order to make the rigs smaller. Those eight stereographers were each assigned a single stereo camera rig, and the directive was to pull convergence match the camera's depth to that of the program camera, so as to minimize viewer headaches.
Such a labor cost is probably not sustainable for a broadcast industry that's ruled by quarterly profits. Love, who worked this game as a stereographer, sat in the truck with seven other convergence operators and manipulated sliders to control the convergence angle of the camera to which he was assigned. 3ality has made quick progress in its foray into live sports. Even at the December NFL game, 3ality was plotting behind the scenes how to cut down on the unwieldy manpower costs. As a proof of concept, a rackmounted SIP2900 unit in the truck was doing the job of the eight convergence pullers. “It's now handling automated depth balancing so that we're using image processing to read the depth of every shot, and all the cameras are slave to the program camera depth,” Schklair says. “So no matter what the director cuts to, there won't be a jump in depth.”
The next live football event in 3D was the BCS game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Florida Gators on Jan. 8 in Miami. 3ality was ready to roll with only one convergence puller with an assistant. The SIP2900 was ready for primetime. For live 3D sports to have a viable future, these budget-cutting measures will have to continue. “The more we do it, the less expensive it becomes,” says Jerry Steinberg of Fox Sports, which broadcast the BCS game. “And the less expensive it becomes, the more we can do.”
On the evening of Jan. 8, I sat in a mostly full theater in Brooklyn with about 100 college football fans and other technologically curious viewers wearing RealD's bulky, polarizing glasses. (The polarization effectively blocks the right eye's view from the left eye and vice versa — if you close your right eye and look at yourself in a mirror, the left lens will appear transparent and the right will be almost opaque. In the theater, the projector alternates left and right eye frames at a very high rate; the liquid-crystal screen in front of the single projector's lens polarizes the image circularly: clockwise for the right eye, and counterclockwise for the left.) Like most of the folks in Sooners caps and Gators jerseys, I'd paid my $24 and was eager for a head trip to enhance some superior football.
For the most part, 3ality succeeded on this count; the audience did audibly protest at several brain-bending moments. But watching the game in 3D opened up much more than just a visual dimension — it helped a non-football fan understand the nuances of the game a lot better. Viewing players in 3D on a theater screen, I started to appreciate better the various body types of football players and their roles on the field. (Seeing the massive yet agile left tackles in three dimensions, for instance, brought home the reason these rare specimens make almost as much money as quarterbacks.) The lower-to-the-ground coverage by the Sony rigs enhanced the stereo effects as running backs leapt out of the screen. Hits were more brutal.
As with HD, many expect live sports to be a killer app for the home adoption of S3D. If the unparalleled popularity of pro football doesn't trigger a surge in adoption of stereo 3D in the home, there are still videogames and the DVD releases of the upcoming theatrical S3D releases. At this point, the technology is still developing, but quite viable today. The content is piling up slowly but surely. The demand is slowly emerging — in January, My Bloody Valentine 3D did more business in 3D than in 2D. Outside of the 800-or-so 3D-equipped theaters, however, the distribution channels are unclear. But that's not stopping independent content producers such as Love from suiting up with heavy yet sensitive gear and dropping into foreign locales, pulling stereo, and troubleshooting as they try to frame their shots.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.