NEWSDAY

AUG. 17, 2010

To convert or not convert?

In Hollywood, that’s not a religious question but a technical one. Now that 3D is all the rage, studios have been converting some regular 2D movies into the new format. There’s just one problem: Converted movies often look noticeably inferior to movies that were shot in 3D from the start.

“3D photography entails that you shoot with two cameras,” says David Stump, a member of the American Society of Cinematographers’ Technology Committee. “Conversions take one camera view and splice and dice objects in the scene so that they are physically manipulated to be in multiple planes.”

That means digitally cutting and pasting images to move them into the foreground or background. Computers can do some of that automatically, but more detailed images may require tracing by hand. In the 3D conversion “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” it often seems that the computer was in charge: Whiskers will pop out toward you, but so will the carpet visible between each whisker.

“You have to very finely define the area you’re bringing up to the foreground,” Stump says.

“Clash of the Titans,” another conversion, revealed a different glitch: Actors’ faces seemed to float forward, away from their heads. According to Stump, that might be a problem with the interaxial — that is, the distance between the two cameras the computer is trying to create. Set the interaxial too wide, and the viewer’s perception can be skewed.

Can a conversion ever look convincing? We’ll see when James Cameron, who kicked off the 3D craze with “Avatar,” releases his 3D version of “Titanic” in April 2012.

link to original post on www.techradar.com