Andrew Woods, who I mentioned a couple of posts ago, also sent me a link to a list he maintains. Worth checking out: ‘The Illustrated Blu-ray 3D and 3D DVD List‘. At the moment, this list’s population of proper Blu-ray 3D is pretty sparse, but there are lots of anaglyph and other formats of 3D discs.
Then click on the links on the top left of the page to see a whole lot more about 3D movies and 3D equipment.
Universal is releasing Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho on Blu-ray on Wednesday. Looks brilliant. Someone claims that there is some edge enhancement. Perhaps, but if so it is extremely subtle.
Anyway, here’s my Blu-ray vs DVD comparison. A sample (one that shows perhaps the most extreme difference):
Incidentally, the art of grabbing exactly matching comparison frames can be difficult sometimes. A car disappearing off to the left at high speed makes this much easier.
My brother emailed me a link to this PDF announcement from Channel Ten. From early next year it will add to its current regular SD channel and to its One HD sports channel something called ’11’ (my brother wonders if it will be ’55’ in Canberra). Here is its description:
- ‘Distinctly youthful’ Key 13-29 demographic focus.
- First-run targeted domestic and international programming
- Long term quality content supply from Network Ten and leading US studio, CBS – including access to CBS content library with more than 70,000 hours of programming
- The Simpsons – exclusive free-to-air home on ELEVEN
- Neighbours – prime-time home on ELEVEN
- Standard definition (SD) digital from early 2011
I wonder if this recent proliferation of content is having any impact on Pay TV.
… here are a whole bunch of glorious colour photographs of Russia from before the war. That is, before World War I!
Colour wasn’t easy, so they took three B&W photos in succession, using colour filters. The subjects were supposed to stay still.
But as you can see from the water surface in number 14, or three of the workers in number 19, things don’t always behave as they are supposed to.
[Update: Andrew Woods, a 3D expert from Curtin University in Western Australia, emails me with regard to this post:
Yes, an interesting and appealing thought.
It has been tried by many, but usually with mixed results.
Various methods have been developed and some work better than others but the better methods usually require lots of fine tuning so it’s not an automatic process, and certainly not a very simple process.
Oh well. Anyway, the post that prompted this remains here as a demonstration that I’m a pretty average prognosticator.]
Until recently, to the limited extent to which it has existed, 3D in the home has been based on ‘anaglyph stereoscopic‘ techniques. Which is to say, different coloured filters are placed before each eye (eg. cyan/magenta, blue/red) so that each eye sees a different image from the same frame. This works quite well in terms of producing a 3D effect, except that the resulting colours tend to be dull and washed out. Indeed, the reason that several different colour systems for 3D exist is because the 3D creators choose one that will best limit the damage done to colour.
Now what if a TV could take anaglyph 3D material and turn it into frame sequential 3D — the system now being rolled out in the form of Blu-ray 3D. Frame sequential 3D allows full colour because the left and right eye images are shown in sequence (LC shutter glasses are synchronised with the image display to ensure this).
One advantage of this would be to allow people to use the far more comfortable LC shutter glasses than the cardboard and cellophane ones packaged with the discs. Another would be to eliminate the visual distortion that the two colour schemes tend to induce in the viewer. With these glasses on, you get not just two different angles on the world, but two different colour schemes. This is tolerable in a darkened room where about the only thing you can see is the screen itself, but with the room lights on I find my eyes struggling to make sense of the same background things being two different colours at the same time through the glasses.
And here’s one more possibility: the system may be able to restore some of the colour that is normally lost in the anaglyph process.
Let’s look at a special extra on the regular (2D) Blu-ray release of Monsters vs Aliens. The extra is an animated short called ‘BOB’s Big Break’, and this provided in both 2D and anaglyph 3D versions. The 3D version uses the ‘Trioscopic’ (magenta/green) anaglyph scheme.
Here is a frame from the 2D version (reduced in size, of course):
And here is the matching frame from the 3D version:
Now consider what the TV might do. It accepts the incoming 3D frame, it applies digital filters, subtracting from the frame first one (green) then the other (magenta) of the anaglyph scheme, creating two separate frames.
At this point it could simply show them sequentially, in synch with the shutter glasses, and you should get a result just like with the magenta/green glasses, except without the visual distortion.
Now let’s look again at the 2D and 3D versions of the frames. As you can see (ignoring the green and magenta ‘fringes’ in the 3D version), for the most part the colour treatments are quite similar. The major difference is the loss of red saturation (eg. in the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ of the sign).
What if the extracted colours could be shifted horizontally and then reinserted into the frames from which they were extracted? The shifting would involve some clever shape recognition because the amount of shift varies according to the object’s fore/aft virtual position. As you can see, the fringes around the cockroach (which is closer to the viewer on this virtual stage) are much wider than those of BOB (the blue character, which seems to be at a neutral point).
But TVs use variations on technologies like this already, such as in motion smoothing algorithms.
Will the next generation of 3D TVs include such processing? There are probably dozens of movies on DVD and Blu-ray with anaglyph 3D content, so this could be an attractive feature.
I’m not one to get all upset about product placement in movies. I do sometimes find it quite amusing, though. Here is part of a scene from The Final Destination (on Blu-ray, naturally):
And here is part of a scene just a few seconds later:
Well, the same scene, different angle. Miraculously the Pepsi cups have rotated so that the name is face-on to the camera in both cases.
Well, I’ve just been reviewing a digital radio thanks to the recent provision of a digital radio trial in Canberra. I rang ACMA for information about the power output of the trial in Canberra (1kW) and also asked when we’d be going full bore.
Turns out we won’t be. Necessarily. The current trial ends on 30 June 2011. There is no provision in the legislation for licences to be granted in regional areas (of which Canberra is one). In other words, unless an Act of Parliament is passed, we probably won’t have digital radio at all after than date, and at the moment we don’t even have a working Parliament.
A review of the trial has to take place under the legislation commencing at the end of this year, but the fellow I spoke to can’t — properly — presuppose or suggest what its outcome will be.
Anyway, if you live in Canberra, it is probably not such a good idea at this stage to spend big on a digital radio.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Roadshow sent me the Blu-ray of the recent adventure movie, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. That’s what it’s called on the box, ie: ‘Centre’ or Australian/UK spelling. When I was typing that post, I put in ‘Center’ on the assumption that the localised version had the spelling changed. The discs have ‘Centre’ printed on them as well. The label of the disc is, after all, ‘JOURNEYTOTHECENTER’, and the title as displayed during the credits of the movie, is ‘Center’.
But IMDB also has it listed as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with the rider ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth (original title)’. Which makes me wonder: does IMDB now show a localised version of the title as the main one, depending on where you are?
Any US readers out there? Would you like to click on the link and let me know in comments how Centre is spelt for you?
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).
… for Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same, and the previously mentioned Pride & Prejudice (2005).
The former extracts about all the detail available from the film, most of which is grain. Still, get it for the TrueHD sound.
