With all the talk on here about 3D and especially how people feel the lack of material will mean it will take a while to take off, if indeed ever, I thought I'd share an interesting afternoon I spent with £30k's worth of JVC 2D to 3D converter and a new JVC 3DTV.
This box takes an ordinary 2D HD 1080 SDI signal and using some incredibly clever algorithms and electronic jiggery pockery, converts it into a 3D image, all in real time. I have to say I was very sceptical, but what I saw was most interesting and on the whole quite believable. The 3D image generated has negative parallax so what you see appears to be projected inside the screen, and unlike positive parallax, nothing can actually appear in front of the plane of the screen (so no axes flying out into your lounge). The LCD screen used a polarising filter, so you have to wear the polarising glasses and not the shutter ones. The screen itself was very good, (although it was being fed an uncompressed 1080 HD feed from an HDCAM SR vtr), with very good solid blacks, nice sharp clean whites and no perceptible motion artifacts.
The couple of drawbacks I found were that after about 30 minutes it had become very tiring to watch as your brain is constantly being 'conned' into believing what you are seeing is a real 3D image - I found some shots in a scene would work better than others, so you are constantly having to alter and re-assess your 3D perception. Also, one of the processes uses colours to evaluate depth (a bit of a generalisation of what the process does but gives you a jist of the idea), using the assumption that red objects e.g. skin tones, are more important to our perception of depth than say blue or green (backgrounds like sky or grass for instance) meaning that faces will appear to be in the foreground. However, what that also means is that other red objects in a scene also move to the foreground. For example a red fire extinguisher on a blue wall appeared at first to be floating in space before your subconscious moved it back to the wall. I also found that if you let your line of vision stray from the central position and you focussed on the edge of the frame for instance, the whole effect momentarily stops working and you have to re focus on the centre to get the depth back.
Also, apparently a percentage of the 3D coverage of the football and rugby was sourced on 2D HD cameras and sent through a converter box - I didn't see the coverage but, for example, as far as I am aware, nobody has yet devised a small enough 3D camera head for use with a Steadicam, so if they were using tracking shots from the touchline, then they may have possibly gone this route. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who saw the 3D coverage if there were any steadicam shots and how they looked in comparison to the rest of the coverage.
On the whole though it was a very interesting piece of kit and JVC have done some amazing work in analysing what it is that allows our eyes and brains to see in 3D and then applied that to making this technology work. I can see that, just like in the early days of HD when there was a certain amount of upsampled SD material used, then devices like this will be used to provide 3D material from 2D masters - but don't worry too much, because it only really works on true HD sourced material, so you probably won't have to suffer re-runs of 'Only Fools and Horses' in glorious pillar-boxed 4:3 3D HD.
This box takes an ordinary 2D HD 1080 SDI signal and using some incredibly clever algorithms and electronic jiggery pockery, converts it into a 3D image, all in real time. I have to say I was very sceptical, but what I saw was most interesting and on the whole quite believable. The 3D image generated has negative parallax so what you see appears to be projected inside the screen, and unlike positive parallax, nothing can actually appear in front of the plane of the screen (so no axes flying out into your lounge). The LCD screen used a polarising filter, so you have to wear the polarising glasses and not the shutter ones. The screen itself was very good, (although it was being fed an uncompressed 1080 HD feed from an HDCAM SR vtr), with very good solid blacks, nice sharp clean whites and no perceptible motion artifacts.
The couple of drawbacks I found were that after about 30 minutes it had become very tiring to watch as your brain is constantly being 'conned' into believing what you are seeing is a real 3D image - I found some shots in a scene would work better than others, so you are constantly having to alter and re-assess your 3D perception. Also, one of the processes uses colours to evaluate depth (a bit of a generalisation of what the process does but gives you a jist of the idea), using the assumption that red objects e.g. skin tones, are more important to our perception of depth than say blue or green (backgrounds like sky or grass for instance) meaning that faces will appear to be in the foreground. However, what that also means is that other red objects in a scene also move to the foreground. For example a red fire extinguisher on a blue wall appeared at first to be floating in space before your subconscious moved it back to the wall. I also found that if you let your line of vision stray from the central position and you focussed on the edge of the frame for instance, the whole effect momentarily stops working and you have to re focus on the centre to get the depth back.
Also, apparently a percentage of the 3D coverage of the football and rugby was sourced on 2D HD cameras and sent through a converter box - I didn't see the coverage but, for example, as far as I am aware, nobody has yet devised a small enough 3D camera head for use with a Steadicam, so if they were using tracking shots from the touchline, then they may have possibly gone this route. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who saw the 3D coverage if there were any steadicam shots and how they looked in comparison to the rest of the coverage.
On the whole though it was a very interesting piece of kit and JVC have done some amazing work in analysing what it is that allows our eyes and brains to see in 3D and then applied that to making this technology work. I can see that, just like in the early days of HD when there was a certain amount of upsampled SD material used, then devices like this will be used to provide 3D material from 2D masters - but don't worry too much, because it only really works on true HD sourced material, so you probably won't have to suffer re-runs of 'Only Fools and Horses' in glorious pillar-boxed 4:3 3D HD.
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