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.