Saturday, April 6, 2013

Sandrew Discusses the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of 3D Conversion


Conversion is maturing, stated Legend3D Founder Barry Sandrew, Saturday at the Technology Summit on Cinema. “It offers filmmakers a dynamic creative canvas for creating 3D when placed in the right hands.”
Sandrew spent time elaborating on some of the “common errors” in conversion when what he considered to be substandard skills or corner cutting were applied.
“We all know bad when we see it, but it's difficult to pinpoint what's wrong. Choosing a conversion house is a very critical thing and finding one that will do the work properly will make your production go a lot smoother. There are some basic rules to conversion and it's relatively easy to see if a house is violating them or doesn't understand them.”
To emphasize his point, Sandrew showed DCP examples of deliberately exaggerated badly converted material to highlight problems such as incorrect eye-line, occulsion artifacts and incorrect grouping.
By comparison, he showed some of Legend3D's recent work. The 'ugly' in Sandrew's session was realtime conversion where the main problem he argued is that no algorithm has yet managed to cater for the changing dynamics of depth within in a live shot.
He also suggested that some people's lack of appreciation for 3D - or inability to judge conversion correctly - was simply to do with the frailties of human eyesight. Failure to correct near sightedness so that both eyes were in balance, for example, would render any stereo experience inaccurate.
“You need to have two perfectly balanced eyes to accurately assess disparity,” he said. “The most important aspect to watching 3D is our own visual system yet oddly it's the last thing we think about calibrating.”  

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