Reader James emailed me a link to this video ‘review‘ of one of the stereoscopic rigs used by James Cameron in Avatar. I see that has been used in a number of other movies, including The Final Destination and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Cameron is in the video clip to discuss it.
The main trick of this ‘Fusion Camera System’ is that it uses a beam splitter to allow the effective position of the two different camera lenses to be much closer together than would normally be the case. Rather interesting if you like to know how they pull it off. Apparently Cameron did quite a bit of the camera work himself.
As it happens, Roadshow sent me those other two movies in their 2D and 3D versions. Unfortunately, they aren’t Blu-ray 3D but anaglyph stereoscopic. I had a quick look at The Final Destination last night on the computer monitor, and the 3D was surprisingly effective. It uses blue/red, and allowed quite a bit of colour to be apparent. If you have seen TFD in the shop and decided not to buy it because of the claim on the box that the 3D version is ‘in Standard Definition only’, feel free to change your mind. This is an incorrect statement. The 3D version is full 1080p24 HD, and actually has a much higher video bitrate than the 2D version (it gets 24Mbps, vs 15.7Mbps for the 2D).