CarlieGotfingered Posted:

Strawman: Arguing against a point your opponent does not hold.

Pardon me if i’m not fully understanding your intentions here. You’re arguing that not everyone who likes movies likes thought provoking ones and might enjoy just watching pretty pictures.

That’s it more or less right?

Whether or not it’s true that’s what he meant, that’s true. There are definitely some people who enjoy seeing intense CGI and would gladly watch that for an hour plus.

Most people, including myself, enjoy fire and seeing fire consume things (don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I wish for fire; just if there’s one around, it’s pretty cool). Whenever they burn sugar cane about two miles from my house, me and my friends always go to watch the mbumive field on fire being contained, because it’s just amazing to look at. I don’t need the fire to have a story; it’s just cool to watch.

This whole thread has just become ‘avatar is a gimmick!!1!’ or ‘all 3-d used today is a gimmick!11!!’. Better question, why do you care? I loved avatar; it had a decent story, and the CGI, even without the 3-d, was absolutely incredible and more powerful than any other movie I’ve seen, and a majority of the people saw it just for that reason.

3-d, when done well, is cool. You guys can argue semantics all day, but if a movie offers 3-d and I know it’s going to be done well, I’ll see it over the regular version, as would the majority of people. It makes the movie a little more captivating.

While it is true that it’s mostly being used as a gimmick today (but a gimmick that obviously works), it won’t be for long. Every major sports fan with cash will be being a brand new 3D-TV in 2011, because when ESPN starts to broadcast in 3D they are going to flip their ****. The whole point of 3-d is to make something more life-like and interesting, and it will eventually (in 5+ years) be very useful for The History Channel, Discovery Channel, and all sports channels.

Actually talk about how 3D technology has evolved/will evolve/your thoughts on it and stop making this thread into an AVATAR SUKZ BALLZ!!!! thread; it was a good movie and looked absolutely amazing, and if you don’t think so, you’re just thinking way too hard about how it’s ‘all a gimmick’. Seeing as it’s the number one box office movie OF ALL TIME, it’s a gimmick that not only sells, but that most people in the world appreciate.

The trouble is is that Avatar has become the posterchild for 3D, and in my opinion what’s wrong with it.

But since apparently talking about the Model T when talking about the Automobile is no longer a valid thing to do, i’ll refrain from talking about “it”.

there isn’t much more to be said, 3D needs to get cheaper for the end user for it to evolve, and it will, it’s just a matter of time. For this to happen it needs stop being a gimmick and start being supportive. We should not see a movie just because it’s in 3D.

megazeroexe Posted:

You can make a full 1080p 3D camera with less then a thousand dollars and a little intuition.

As far as price goes, that’s pretty damn cheap. It’s obviously not a camera such as one used to broadcast and record television/movies (that are 10k+ to begin with, not even considering 3D technology), but you could record high quality 3D video with it easily. So it basically just boils down to the ‘it’s a gimmick’ point.

It’s not going to stop being a gimmick soon, so no use worrying about it. When 3D television starts being broadcasted, it won’t be in HD; modern satellite or digital cable lines cannot handle that mbumive amount of data that holds both HDTV and 3D, it’s one or the other at this point. So you’ll be watching TV in 3D, but it’ll be sub-480p, which is disgusting quality. It’s a lose/lose situation. The technology to record almost everything in 3D is around, it’s just that we’re not going to be able to show it to people.

Major problems ahead.

Right but major production movies don’t use cheap cameras.

Lets bumume this is a small house. Lets bumume that it would cheap out and use something like a Canon 5DmkII. You’d be looking at something like $5000 just for the bodies, and lets say you used a few prime lenses you’re looking at adding another $1500. Now you need to make some sort of rig to hold the two in place (not too hard, might even be a commercial product for this). bumuming 1080p you’ll need about 40GB of storage per hour. And since you’re doing that in stereo you’ll need twice that. High Speed High capacity Compact flash cards are roughly $175 for 16gb., you’d need four cards to hold about one hour of video. so for the sake of argument $700/hour for storage. Let’s bumume you edit nightly, you’d need at least 4 hours of storage for each day you film, i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ll reuse cards daily. Thats $2800 for storage. That works out to be roughly $9300.

And thats just a single angle.

Storing the data is another thing, you’ll looking at about 160gb of data generated per day (bumuming you only shoot 4 hours of video per day). Lets say you shoot over 45 days, thats 7200gb of Data (or 7.2tb if you’re so inclined). You’ll want to ensure that you don’t lose the data, so a mirrored RAID array is a must, making the total amount of hard drive space you’ll need is 14.4tb. This isn’t unheard of, it can be done with a single SAN unit, that’ll run you around $6,000 ($6,200 for a 16tb SAN to be exact). You’ll also need some pretty beefy workstations to do the editing. Now an editing workstation would cost you another $5,000 (2.6ghz Quad Core Xeon, 12gb DDR3 1333mhz, nVideo Quadro w/ 1.5gb Dedicated RAM). Adding another $11,000 to the cost.

I have no idea how much labor would be involved in editing the video into 3D, so i can’t estimate that, but it can’t be free.

Thats $20,000 there, and those are pretty low quality cameras for a movie too.

That cost, while not a whole lot (i own still cameras that, when new, cost more than that), it’s not nothing, and it requires you to hire more expensive techs since this equipment is “new” and “digital” and “computery”.

Even if you can cover the costs, and even if it doesn’t impact the ticket sales, you need to convince a studio or producer that a 3D movie will sell. There are few producers willing to take this risk, since 3D is new and unexplored territory.

Movies like Avatar (i lied, so sue me) will give producers a reason to take the risk, but there will be failures, and these will hurt the industry.

Time is the only solution.