– we won’t miss you
Background
Dave Lee, the BBC’s North America technology reporter, has written (28 January 2017)
“…This week we learned that both LG and Sony have now stopped making 3D-enabled televisions. The firms follow Samsung – the world’s biggest TV maker – who confirmed the move last year. It means there are currently no major manufacturers making 3DTVs…”
Mike Jordan
It bites the dust for about the third time!
Dave Plowman
No surprise there. It’s a bit like true stereo sound. For it to work at best, it’s not fully compatible with 2D (or mono).
So basically production techniques would be determined by 3D (or stereo) for the best results. Fine if you could guarantee everyone was using it properly at all times.
Mike Jordan
Isn’t that why when Sky were trying it out (to sell for more money) on Sport, they apparently had 2 scanners – a 3D one and a proper 2D one – since a 2D downconverted version of the 3D was unwatchable?
When Sky did the Pro-celeb in Porthcawl, I went to see the results in Sky MCR (via a mate of mine who originally worked in BH) and it was dreadful!
The watching crowds were all "flattened" so it looked as if they were a load of TeleTubbies and they could never show the classic "ball and hole" golf shots as panning down as the ball moved did one’s head in!
What’s next to go? Curved screens that only someone watching dead centre sees the proper aspect ratio and anyone watching a bit from one side (the wife or kids?) gets a very tall thin picture. Try it next time you see one of these dreadful things.
Graeme Wall
You couldn’t have the close-up cameras in 3D as it is physically impossible to mount the two lenses close enough together.
Mike Jordan
I went to the Open Day at AP a year or more ago (from Jan 2017).
Ravensbourne had their 3D rig there and showed off exactly how they get over the close together lens problem since the lenses have to be eye distance separated.
They have a horizontal conventional camera/lens and a vertical one mounted above it and a mirror – presumably with some sort of scanning modifications.
Then the two lenses can move as required to simulate facial eye separation (apparently!).
Graeme Wall
With two 86:1 box lenses as used on close-up cameras for Sky sports coverage?
That’s where the problem is.
Chris Woolf
But the concept of "close-up" is entirely alien to true 3D. In normal 3D life we maintain the same vision angle the whole time and merely crab or track to change "shot".
Cutting between cameras, varying the shot angle and all similar transitions are part of the grammar of mono vision story telling, and don’t translate to 3D at all.
For surround sound to work you need a system that puts the audio sources at both the angle and the distance that they ought to be from you – and maintains those conditions no matter how you move around. So the rear instruments of an orchestra should appear to be positioned beyond the walls of a normal living room, and the balance of 1st and 2nd violins should change as you walk across the room. Moreover the ambience of the recorded room needs to stay in the same place irrespective of where you walk in the room.
Such a system is feasible, and would allow ordinary mortals to enjoy sound without having to sit in one magic spot looking forwards for an hour or so. But it is very, very difficult and expensive to do it.
3D video should do the same thing – produce an image that you can walk round and view from different angles – not provide a rather pathetic illusion of limited depth from one position. People watch TV hanging over the back of the sofa, stoking the fire and nipping out into the kitchen. You need a vision system that makes mental sense when you move in relation to it.
Such a system is NOT feasible currently, and would probably be very disturbing if it was. You wouldn’t want to step off that precipice to fetch the chocolates from the coffee table…
VR glasses do allow you to sense a 3D world, but the generation of data to supply that world is impossibly large unless you limit it severely. You can’t "live" in that world, and if you try to come out of a convincing version of it, then real life is heavily compromised for a while.
So the weak-kneed illusion stuff is probably all that will be available for a very long time, and it is probably best to work with simple mono audio, mono video and top notch human imagination.
Dave Plowman
…ambience of the recorded room needs to stay in the same place irrespective of where you walk in the room …
There is that – but I was also thinking of things like camera shots.
Having played around with stereo mics for drama dialogue coverage: on a wide shot it may match well – but cut into close-up and do you leave the positioning the same or move it central?
Basically why pretty well all dialogue (apart from OOV) is normally bang central mono these days.
And it’s the same with 3D. The best shots for 3D effect may well not be the best shots for ‘normal’. From what little I’ve seen of it, it’s fine for the cinema (possibly) but impractical for TV. Can you imagine watching say a police interview room scene – where the drama unfolds – shot in one – just because of 3D? It would be boring in the extreme.
Graeme Wall
Not 3D but a long time ago “The Bill” did virtually a whole programme on one shot, inside a Transit van. For the record, the cameraman on the episode of “The Bill” was Alison Chapman.
Dave Plowman
I don’t remember that one – but it can be very effective. The point I was making was a production restricted on how it was shot due to wanting the best 3D effect might look a bit limited, and therefore boring for those watching in 2D.
The ‘all in one’ “Bill” I remember well was it starting with the camera inside the car as they drove up to a children’s home. Then went throughout the home looking for a kid. Cameraman was Adrian Fearnlay. (Adas). Great fun in those early days.
Bernie Newnham
“Russian Ark” was that film that toured the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in one incredibly long shot – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark . An amazing piece of camerawork, but story-wise a little tedious. Note that the man who did the really difficult work doesn’t get a mention on the Wiki page until about half way down.
Geoff Fletcher
NEP Visions had the main 2D Sky footy contracts and Telegenic covered the 3D matches. To my eye the 3D pictures resembled a child’s pop-up book – various layers of 2D on top of each other. The only way you could have true 3D would via some holographic process. Telegenic worked very hard on their 3D contract and did their level best to make it work.
Graeme Wall
I did the Sony 3D course through the Guild a couple of years ago. There was a timeline for 3D going back to the early days of film in the 1890s. Basically it turns up once in a generation when people have forgotten how crap it was.
Pat Heigham
I recently had a discussion with a production mixer – ex-BBC – who advised against the current manufacturers ‘bent’ on curved screens.
His point was that they picked up unwanted reflections of your room lights.
Also, his TV (Samsung) was 3D capable, and I was quite impressed but I now gather that it’s a dead duck.
Seeing a 3D movie at the Waterloo Imax was impressive. That had the characters hovering ‘in yer face’ It was a computer generated cartoon – which worked in 3D – but a trailer of live action stuff did not. A huge C/U of an actor’s face was over the top, but a wide shot from helicopter over the Grand Canyon was superb, as was an underwater shot of a shark swimming over your head!
Horses for courses you could say.
When I played with stereoscopic stills, one mounted the slides with variable interocular separation for projection, dependant on the shot size – wide, mid or close-up. This would put the projected image either in front of the screen, (or behind – like looking through a window, with the perspective receding beyond, into the distance).
The Samsung 3D TV was effective as the perspective appeared both in front of, and behind the screen. Again, what I viewed at the time was a CGI cartoon, I did not see any live action material.
Dave Mundy
I can’t understand how the Buck. House officials allowed HMQ to be the front person for Rupert Murdoch’s promotion of 3D TV in her Christmas broadcast a few years ago, shame on them! At an Imax film showing, 3D really works, but in the living room it’s a no-no.
Terry Meadowcroft
In my opinion, 3D will never die as long as we have two eyes.
I know that a whole family sitting in the front room wearing weird specs to watch TV is not a comfortable experience.
Hopefully some genius will come up with a way of seeing a 3D image on telly without losing a good percentage of picture brightness and having to wear those glasses, and paying an extra £100 ish for a pair of badly designed specs will never be a good experience – especially when you have a large family!
But I believe the struggle to eliminate the glasses for 3D telly is still on, and who knows, it may be cracked. If and when that happens, I would predict yet another renaissance of TV 3D. Perception of depth in any image in my opinion is always a plus. I would hate to have to struggle to live a life with one eye shut.
Dave Plowman
3D can look very good. Big snag is it has to be shot in a particular way to look its best, a way which isn’t necessarily compatible with 2D, or even the best way of telling a story.
Which to me says it might well carry on in features and therefore DVDs, etc, but not for broadcast TV.
Bernie Newnham
I think in the cinema, 3D is brilliant.
If I’m paying lots of money I want the full works – huge screen, Dolby Megasound ™, and 3D, even if it is done in post production these days. The strange thing is that after a while you don’t notice the 3D, it’s just there being natural, unless you’re watching some 1950s Western.
At home, half the time I’m doing something else at the same time so have never thought of buying 3D. Too late now. Now I have to have some of those sweaty face Oculus Rift things –
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I tried a BBC Research system out at IBC, and stood in the Queen Vic, but someone was next to me so I didn’t fall over.
Alasdair Lawrance
I’m not certain that 3D on a screen is worth pursuing. I have a feeling that it will end up as some sort of holographic projection idea, and will appear on a kind of rostrum in the middle of your lounge, a smaller version of ’theatre in the round’. I think I’ll just patent that…
Peter Neill
Like this?
Check about 5’30” in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3n6fRLEY8U
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“The Flipside Of Dominick Hide” 9 December 1980
(The play features several Beatles songs, including "Yesterday" (as played in the section from which this still was taken), "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Here Comes the Sun". The first broadcast was on 9th December 1980, the day after John Lennon was murdered by Mark Chapman.)
Bernie Newnham
Ah – Chris Cherry’s finest hour (producer). And thin Peter Firth.
