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http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/3d-progress-lost-dark-19392
By Steve Pond
Published: July 21, 2010
By Steve Pond
Published: July 21, 2010
3D may be the bright shining future of the movie business, but at the moment it just isn't bright enough.
That's not a metaphor. It's the plain truth.
3D movies -- whether they're made using the process or converted in post-production -- are simply screened at significantly lower light levels than 2D films.
More and more often, it's enough to hamper audience enjoyment, make filmmakers wary, and perhaps even slow down the acceptance of a format that is one of the movie industry's great hopes for the future.
When Roger Ebert blasted 3D in an article in Newsweek, for instance, one of the reasons he listed for disliking the format was "its image is noticeably darker than standard 2D."
Even a movie like "Avatar," which was shot in 3D using techniques that boosted the amount of light and compensated for the darkening process to come, was screened at light levels about half of a run-of-the-mill 2D film.
And the problems are exacerbated when a movie -- like the disastrous "Clash of the Titans" -- is made with no thought of 3D and hastily converted after-the-fact. "Titans"appeared so muddy that it prompted walkouts and no doubt scared some theatergoers away from the 3D experience entirely.
(Fewer and fewer moviegoers are making the 3D choice when they plunk down their money at the box office; see sidebar: "The Rise and Fall of 3D.")
At the Hero Complex Film Festival in downtown Los Angeles in June, "Inception" director Christopher Nolan joined the 3D naysayers, saying that he refused to make his new film in the format largely because of the darkness problem.
"On a technical level, it's fascinating," Nolan said of 3D, "but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating."
The 3D process, Nolan said, makes "a massive difference" in the brightness of the image. "You're not aware of it because once you're in that world, your eye compensates - but having struggled for years to get theaters get up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything."
Nolan also got into the numbers, using "foot-lamberts" - the unit of luminance by which screen brightness is measured - to explain the difference between regular and 3D projection. But when he said that traditional 2D cinema is projected at 16 foot-lamberts, but 3D automatically loses three foot-lamberts, he was grievously underestimating the 3D effect.
In fact, a typical 3D system can lose as much as 80 percent or more of the light from a 2D system on the same screen, and result in an image projected at only two or three foot-lamberts.
"I think it's a major problem for the audience appreciation of 3D," says Lenny Lipton, a pioneer in the field since the early 1980s. "The principal complaint that audience members and industry people make is that it's too dark."
That's not a metaphor. It's the plain truth.
3D movies -- whether they're made using the process or converted in post-production -- are simply screened at significantly lower light levels than 2D films.
More and more often, it's enough to hamper audience enjoyment, make filmmakers wary, and perhaps even slow down the acceptance of a format that is one of the movie industry's great hopes for the future.
When Roger Ebert blasted 3D in an article in Newsweek, for instance, one of the reasons he listed for disliking the format was "its image is noticeably darker than standard 2D."
Even a movie like "Avatar," which was shot in 3D using techniques that boosted the amount of light and compensated for the darkening process to come, was screened at light levels about half of a run-of-the-mill 2D film.
And the problems are exacerbated when a movie -- like the disastrous "Clash of the Titans" -- is made with no thought of 3D and hastily converted after-the-fact. "Titans"appeared so muddy that it prompted walkouts and no doubt scared some theatergoers away from the 3D experience entirely.
(Fewer and fewer moviegoers are making the 3D choice when they plunk down their money at the box office; see sidebar: "The Rise and Fall of 3D.")
At the Hero Complex Film Festival in downtown Los Angeles in June, "Inception" director Christopher Nolan joined the 3D naysayers, saying that he refused to make his new film in the format largely because of the darkness problem.
"On a technical level, it's fascinating," Nolan said of 3D, "but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating."
The 3D process, Nolan said, makes "a massive difference" in the brightness of the image. "You're not aware of it because once you're in that world, your eye compensates - but having struggled for years to get theaters get up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything."
Nolan also got into the numbers, using "foot-lamberts" - the unit of luminance by which screen brightness is measured - to explain the difference between regular and 3D projection. But when he said that traditional 2D cinema is projected at 16 foot-lamberts, but 3D automatically loses three foot-lamberts, he was grievously underestimating the 3D effect.
In fact, a typical 3D system can lose as much as 80 percent or more of the light from a 2D system on the same screen, and result in an image projected at only two or three foot-lamberts.
"I think it's a major problem for the audience appreciation of 3D," says Lenny Lipton, a pioneer in the field since the early 1980s. "The principal complaint that audience members and industry people make is that it's too dark."
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