Archive for the ‘News’ Category
by Michael Grotticelli April 9th, 2010
XpanD, a European manufacturer that makes active-shutter glasses for movie theaters, as well as 3-D glasses for Panasonic and Vizio TV sets, is developing universal glasses that will work across manufacturer lines.
One of the negatives of 3-D TV is that viewers must always wear special glasses to view the three-dimensional effect. But one “gotcha” that most viewers don’t know yet is that virtually all of the glasses being packaged with early 3-D TV sets are proprietary to the manufacturer’s brand.
That means 3-D glasses sold by Samsung won’t work with Panasonic, Sony or other set brands. Forget bringing your 3-D glasses to a viewing party for a sporting event at the home of a friend using a different kind of 3-D display.
The cheap, polarized spectacles required to view 3-D in movie theaters won’t work at home, either. Most of the new 3-D receivers require “active-shutter” glasses that have to electronically synchronize with the TV set.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3DTV, glasses, Incompatibility
Related Topics: Broadcast, News, Products |
by Michael Grotticelli April 8th, 2010
ESPN will produce both 2-D and 3-D broadcasts of the 2010 World Cup events with a single mobile production vehicle on-site in South Africa.
ESPN has been making some big promises about bringing to home viewers a minimum of 85 sporting events in 3-D over the next year. Those programs will launch on the fledgling ESPN 3D network on June 11 with a World Cup soccer match between South Africa and Mexico. The network said it eventually will air 25 World Cup matches, Summer X Games, college basketball and football and the BCS National Championship game.
In the meantime, ESPN’s production staff is learning how to produce -3D programming in the most efficient and cost-effective way. It’s a lesson that many will be watching and ultimately benefiting from. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3DTV, ESPN, production
Related Topics: Broadcast, News |
by Michael Grotticelli April 5th, 2010
When viewing movies, most less than two hours in length, binocular dysphoria has not been a huge issue for audiences.
Most 3-D display technology, whether in the theater or at home, requires viewers to wear electronic glasses that are timed to open and close rapidly. A slightly different image is projected to each eye, and from that difference, the brain creates the illusion of depth.
However, our brains process visual information in many different ways, and human depth perception is a very complicated business. The brain uses 10 different cues to figure out the distance of an object. One if them is parallax, which is used by most 3-D TVs. For 3-D to work, the brain must reject several of the other cues in favor of parallax. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3DTV, binocular, dysphoria, medical, viewing
Related Topics: Application, Broadcast, Film, News |
by Michael Grotticelli March 19th, 2010
Aside from its new 3-D TV sets, Sunny Ocean Studios claims it can retrofit regular displays for 3-D and also assist in 2-D-to-3-D image conversion.
Following predictions at this year’s CES that it would take many years to create affordable 3-D video displays without glasses, Sunny Ocean Studios of Singapore has introduced a 27inch 3-D HDTV offering 64 viewing angles without glasses.
A serious upgrade from eight or nine viewing angles and lenticular displays shown at CES, Sunny Ocean Studios claims it can retrofit regular displays for 3-D and also assist in 2-D-to-3-D image conversion. Where most companies offer stereoscopic 3-D, which uses glasses, Sunny Ocean is pushing auto-stereoscopic, which is glasses-free 3-D.
“We are presenting a solution where the image appears to float spatially in front of the screen without the help of the usual aids like 3-D glasses,” said Armin Grasnick, founder and managing director of Sunny Ocean Studios. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3-D, displays, glasses, lenticular displays, Sunny Ocean Studios, TVs
Related Topics: Application, Broadcast, News, Products |
by Michael Grotticelli March 17th, 2010
On the set of “The Mortician,” cinematographer Michael McDonough uses an Element Technica Quasar 3-D camera rig. Photo by Cook Allender.
For more than a century, the term “low budget” was never applied to 3-D production. Making 3-D content was always tricky, complex and expensive. And like with any nascent technology, equipment costs usually take a while to become affordable, and production values improve over time.
However, highly skilled 3-D production is already being applied to a wide a variety of projects, some with limited budgets, as professionals find new cost-effective tools to get the job done. A good example is the new Panasonic AG-3DA1 handheld 3-D camcorder that costs $21,000. These tools are limited in their scope (they are not going to be used to shoot a major feature like “Avatar”), but they provide the effect audiences are coming to expect.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3-D, 3D systems, Element Technica, Keith Collea, Michael McDonough, OFFHollywood, production, The Mortician
Related Topics: Application, Film, News |
by Michael Grotticelli March 15th, 2010
Like many, Insight Media thinks the market will grow quickly, predicting sales of 3-D TVs to increase more than tenfold from about 3.4 million this year to 49.6 million by 2015.
I understand there’s a lot of hype and promising sales predictions surrounding 3-D technology, but we all need to take a closer look at the real world for a moment.
Three-dimensional images, or what we popularly call “3-D,” has actually existed as a tiny niche in film technology for more than 120 years. These gimmicky films were always expensive to produce and usually required viewers to wear special glasses to see the effect.
That technology has emerged in fits and starts. 3-D films were especially prominent in the 1950s in American cinema, and later underwent a worldwide resurgence in the 1980s and ’90s driven mainly by giant-screen IMAX theaters. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3-D, Insight Media, iSuppli, predictions, Samsung, Sony
Related Topics: Application, News |
