Not Keane on this Live 3-D webcast

Keane 3-D Live performance
The verdict

Let me start with a small warning here: this is a negative review of a live Stereoscopic 3-D event. If you are of a mind that all 3-D is good and must not be commented on in a negative way, then look away now. This review is not written for you. If, however, you are a producer or director looking to do a 3-D project and have come away from the live 3-D Keane webcast with a bitter aftertaste in your mouth and would like to know a) why and b) how to avoid this kind of bad 3-D for your stereoscopic project, keep on reading.


The results of BAD 3-D

Yes, live broadcasts are a lot of work and in 3-D they are even more tricky, but provided the hardware is in place (stereo rig, realtime stereo encoders, realtime webast encoders) there is no reason why material should be shot at poor interaxials, underlit, wrongly colour encoded and compressed with codecs that kill the 3-D altogether. Because that is my professional opinion of this production. All hail to digital 3-D and live 3-D broadcasts, but stereography actually does mean delivering pleasant and, where possible, impressive 3-D regardless of any shooting circumstances. And there's no hiding behind stereo lookup-tables when things turn out as flat as a pancake. It's not called 3-D for nothing, you know...


SI 2K Mini cameras in 3-D setup

On the Keane 3-D webcast firstly, and most crucially, the interaxial (interocular, camera distance) is WAY too small on all of the shots. Nice cranes and dollies, Spider Cams and SI Mini cams, but they don't change a thing about the interaxial. What were the Stereoscopic decision makers monitoring this material on; an IMAX screen? Apparently it was a 46'' 3-D Plasma screen - not exactly representative for what the webcast audience at home was looking at. Because, and correct me if I'm wrong here, this is a webcast with a screen size of 407x245. The interaxials of the shoot should have been selected with such a small screen size in mind because this is the way 99.9% of the viewers are going to be seeing the webcast. And that 99.9% of viewers are going to see an image that is practically flat. Unless a flat image is what the director was after here. The set may have been deep, but the back wall is too dark to see and the action happens within a space narrow enough to use an interaxial three times the amount that is used now. On the shots with closeby studio lights or microphone stands a dynamic interaxial should have been used. Yes, difficult to do, but that's what being a 3-D expert company is all about, right?


Actual webcast image size. Crane shot from behind a studio light

Compression on the clip is so high and so unrefined that most of the imagery ghosts. OK, so live webcasting does come with the big issue of compression versus bitrates and server load, versus available codecs and delivery systems. Flash video is of of course most versitile and accessible by the widest possible audience, but its ON2 compression is murder on anaglyph colours and thus very bad for 3-D. Windows Media is a lot nicer, RealVideo does an equally good job and Quicktime streaming does a decent enough compression streaming job as well. So in the case of this live anaglyph 3-D webcast the biggest question is: should we try and ensure a quality delivery of the 3-D imagery and choose anything other than Flash Video or do we prefer the benefit of a custom video controller in Flash, quality be d@mned? I know what the audience will choose given the option.


Killing compression for anaglyph 3-D with Flash Video

The biggest and most obvious problem with the video follows next. There is only one instuction that should be given to actors and band members about to appear in an anaglyph 3-D video: do not show up at the studio wearing blue or red clothing. So of course the main singer of Keane is wearing a blue t-shirt in this video - what elese can he do. Rock & Roll, baby! Or perhaps he just wasn't told this little detail by the producers.


You can wear whatever you like for the 3-D shoot - we'll fix it all in post!

An experienced 3-D expert will bring a fine selection of yellow, brown, purple and green shirts with him for this eventuality, but clearly not the people in charge of the Keane 3-D shoot. Sigh. It was my biggest bugbear with the Missy Elliot 3-D hiphop video of last year: 'Ching-a-ling', where dancers were wearing red, blue, and cyan shirts and no post colour correction had been performed on the material by Disney. No wonder most people in the world now seriously dislike analgpyh 3-D: uncorrected blue and red shirts hurt the eyes - and nobody appears to be correcting the blues or telling the artists!


The Ching-a-ling music video in 3-D: all colours of the rainbow used

In this Keane 3-D video some anaglyph colour correction was done, but it was done very poorly and indiscriminately, where none of the colours are tuned at all but just rammed down a blunt squeeze algorithm. It was probably a menu setting on the Sensio encoder used to colour combine the 3-D image into anaglyph 3-D. But black&white anaglyphs would have looked 10x better than this half-hearted mess!


Anaglyph 3-D colour correction

It is good to try and appease everybody and show colours in anaglyph 3-D, but if you are going to do this, do it right. Because right now it is a very dark, murky image with more black and gray than any other shade of colour.


Can you see what is going on in this shot? Is it in 3-D?

And then there are the deadly high contrasts, with lights and lit areas much too bright and dark spots much too dark. Who was lighting this? Were there stereographers on the set at all when the lights were set up? It is not only ghosting that results from this kind of high contrast lighting, but also loss of 3-D, with better lit objects taking a wrong Z-depth position in relation to the underlit or overlit objects. The end result is just plain bad 3-D.


High contrast strangles any 3-D left in this shot

I am sorry guys, but I have to conclude this 3-D presentation is a very poor one and will serve to do plenty of damage to 3-D overall and anaglyph 3-D in particular. Should you be looking to do a similar presentation in 3-D I can only suggest you consider getting proper 3-D stereoscopic consulting beforehand, especially if you are intending to use the production companies involved in the live Keane 3-D webcast. Get your 3-D shots down the way they should be and learn how to get them, before stepping into the studio or even into a 3-D production meeting.

Contact Alexander Lentjes of 3-D Revolution Productions for more information
www.the3drevolution.com


Shot from 'Watch How We Blow', a 3-D HipHop music video
with consulting from 3-D Revolution Productions

Get your $2 worth of 3-D

With film producers and distributors boiling down the Stereoscopic film equation to the $2 mark-up for a 3-D film ticket, audiences are starting to air their demands for $2 worth of 3-D entertainment...


The following article I wrote can be found in the excellent 3-D publication Veritas et Visus (3rd Dimension edition). I can highly recommend this online magazine for anybody working in the Stereoscopic industry, so do check it out: http://www.veritasetvisus.com/3rd_dimension.htm


...As the average 2009 cinema ticket price in the US is $7.20, that amounts to a mark-up of 22%. So a bit less than a quarter or a bit more than a fifth of the film’s duration should be using engaging, entertaining 3-D to keep the patrons happy. If you charge $2 more for 90 minutes of cinematic entertainment, you are going to have to deliver the extra 20 minutes of 3-Dimensional cherry on top.

When it comes to 3-D, that cherry is more often than not the in-your-face stuff: good old negative parallax, theatre space, the out-of-screen area. One look at the trailer for ‘My Bloody Valentine 3-D’ (2009) and it becomes clear how people equate the term ‘3-D’ with pick-axes flying at the camera and flames engulfing the theatre (even when flames are, in fact, 2D forms). Funnily, the trailer goes straight against the director’s own promotional words of how the 3-D is not used in a cheap and cheesy way like previous 3-D movies! Pretty much all promotional artwork for 3-D feature films throughout cinema history have featured objects jumping out of a cinema screen. It is undeniable that the two or three 3-D shots people remember when they come out of the theatre are almost always negative parallax shots so their importance in the bigger picture of a successful 3-D film experience is immense. That is not to say that a 3-D feature film should consist of an endless bombardment of negative parallax action - ‘Treasure of the Four Crowns’ (1983) is a very good example of what that looks like: throwaway fairground fodder.


Film poster of 'Treasure of the Four Crowns' (1983)

So far, storyboarders, designers, directors and cameramen have mostly underestimated the importance and complexity of a good negative parallax shot and underinvested in developing new grammar for this part of the visual language of stereoscopic cinematography. It could be because out-of-screen shots pose an almost impossible challenge for narrative visual storytelling: how can these objects coming out of the screen be used to enhance the story, action and character interaction without engaging with the viewer in first person? So far, only very few 3-D films have managed to have a decent negative parallax shot or two that is not out of place or totally obtrusive. A shot that comes to mind is Jared-Syn’s deadly arm in 'Metalstorm' (1983). The negative parallax in this shot serves a narrative function, is spectacular in slow-motion 3-D and doesn’t take the audience out of the movie. Suspension of disbelief is sustained. But no, it wouldn’t work for longer than the duration of that particular shot and later shots in the movie show the usual stretched arms holding guns, coming out of the screen. Not very intelligent use of out-of-screen space. But then most scenes involving theatre space in 3-D film scripts appear to have been written on the backs of beer coasters, with very childish visuals result.


Still from 'Metalstorm' (1983)

How would it fly with the audience if an actor of a play started talking to them or even waving a stick at them? And what if the actor were to walk into the audience and talk to the other actors on stage from there? It could be called ‘modern’, perhaps ‘abstract’, but in any case quite odd and probably not helping the flow of the story. It is this dilemma that 3-D film is facing and has always faced: how to make that oddity work in a serious, undamaging way. This is especially relevant as the discussed 22% of the film needs to pay off in the way people remember and love 3-D. And so far nobody has ever said that the deep scenery of a 3-D film has stuck with them for a long time.

3-D eye poking is very much like camera access, camera shakes, on-screen text and other camera-affirming techniques in cinema. It must be approached with the rules to these techniques in mind. The reason for using camera access, interaction with a camera, bumping into the camera, splatter on the camera lens and even showing a camera crew can be for comedic effect, to indicate the camera as a person, to talk directly to the audience in a medieval theatre style or to touch upon a documentary situation for heightened reality and closeness to the action. But with it comes the breaking down of the fourth wall and the illusion – disbelieve is unsuspended.


'Ferris Bueller's Day off' (1986) - constant camera access

A major issue is that the dimensionality easily distracts the viewer from the story and its characters and negative parallax pushes the viewer’s suspension of disbelieve to the limit. More often than not, these shots remind the viewer he is watching a movie and take the viewer out of it completely. The ability to lose one self in the story and character interaction gets dealt a heavy blow by objects sticking out into theatre space. By observing and analysing the negative parallax object, the brain switches sides from creative (left) to analytical observing (right): the worst possible thing that can happen when being told a story. It is especially wry when all a cinema theatre is trying to do is remove cues to the fact one is sitting in a chair watching a movie to enhance the cinema-going experience to its fullest potential. Paradoxically, by getting close to the viewer’s face, the 3-D movie reminds the viewer he is not actually part of the on-screen events. That which makes stereoscopic film great – the ability to get a film closer to the audience – can take away from the very factors that make for cinematic enjoyment.


'Dial M for Murder' (1954) - negative parallax fame

Basically, theatre space can be used a lot without a problem by movies that don’t take themselves too seriously, that are more of a realistic/documentary-style breed, films that are confident enough to use first-person and POV shots or those that are more or less glorified thrill rides. For movies that don’t want to sacrifice their serious nature, subtle negative parallax shots such as the scissors-grabbing shot in ‘Dial M for Murder’ (1954) may just about work, but they can’t fill a fifth of the available screen time with characters reaching into the audience. A solution to the problem may come from a recognition by producers, distributors, theatres and the audience that 3-D movies are a different medium altogether – neither film nor theatre, but volumetric narrative visual entertainment of its own. A new medium with new rules – where the fourth wall can be broken at will and where serious drama is followed by visual puns and an opportunity to examine objects and scenery in volumetric detail. Because an evolution of film won’t happen until old conventions and ideas are abandoned and new ones are fully embraced.


Pie-throwing in 'The Three Stooges - Pardon my Backfire' (1953)

The Reality of 3-D Television

One of the biggest financial elements for any film production is the promise of DVD and broadcasting sales. Some productions even go so far as to part or gap-finance productions with DVD pre-orders; a practise possible with well-established properties enjoying a big fan base. But what of Stereoscopic 3-D productions?




As written before, films playing in Real-D and Dolby 3-D theatres are simply not released in 3-D on any type of DVD or broadcast on television. There may be the odd distributor taking the step of active or passive 3-D plasma screen format versioning, but such a hardware market is not a real consumer fact yet and work on small screen reversioning is currently still close to working from a belief in the existence of a home theatre 3-D market rather than a basing these costs on a commercial reality. Anaglyph 3-D is still the most accessible and cost-effective 3-D release format for the small screen, yet it is quickly acquiring a bad name in the industry.


How not to watch analgpyh 3-D...

For some reason (most likely a financial one), Disney has distributed only 1 million anaglyph glasses and then asks of home viewers to construct their own anaglyph 3-D glasses using felt pens, clear film and cardboard for the Hannah Montana 3-D broadcast and DVD release. No surprise then that the girls doing this will walk away with a justified hate of very poor quality 3-D, but sadly also a distrust of anaglyph 3-D as a whole. Proper filtering using the red and blue of anaglyph is certainly possible and the results can be on par with a polarized projection solution, minus the hardware headaches and investments that polarized projection bring with it. But of course the think-tank at Real-D will advice Disney to distribute Hannah Montanna’s 3-D concert in this DIY way: it will be yet another nail in the coffin of consumer trust in anaglyph 3-D. Journalists are certainly doing a great job helping them with this, bashing anything other than polarized, digital projection on a daily basis – often without ever even having witnessed a proper anaglyph presentation themselves. But that’s the way these cookies crumble.



Practically speaking, what would a saturated, well functioning 3-D television market look like? The daily news in 3-D (rising interest rates – now in 3-D), the weather report in 3-D (tomorrow: more stereoscopic rain), sports broadcasts in 3-D (poor refereeing in and extra time in 3 Dimensions), cooking programs in 3-D (carrots flying left and right out of the screen), talkshows in 3-D (talking to the hand that’s comin’ at ya, coz the 3-D face ain’t listening), soaps in 3-D (pregnant with her husband’s best friend – in stereo, so probably with twins)…



In such a future, 3-D is the standard and 3-D cameras will be simple to operate, locked down to an EBU standard interocular, with SMPTE limited convergence control and, finally, an industry standard handbook on how to work it all. 57 3-D channels and still nothing on! Maybe 3-D TV should stay limited to a 3-D film and special event channel. Hannah Montana 3D, U23D, the NBA and World Cup rugby final in 3-D, followed by a late showing of Hondo (in all of its restored 3-D glory), House of Wax, Chicken Little, Beowulf and a 3-D converted Wizard of Oz. That will work and it will keep 3-D special. Because everyday 3-D will become as dull as 2-D in our present experience.


3-D Converted still from the 2-D version of Hondo -
just to complicate things even further