Fired By Design: How much industry interest is there in View-D?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK: Major flatscreen manufacturers are coming out with 3D television sets, where you\u2019ll be able to wear 3D-capable glasses and watch a stereo image on your TV, and they\u2019re also stereo Blu-Ray DVDs. So the studios are very interested in this. Also, the DVD business has tapered off a lot. It\u2019s not clear whether it\u2019s BitTorrent or that people have become aware that they don\u2019t need bookshelves full of these movies. This is a way to offer something to people that\u2019s special. There\u2019s quite a bit of interest from the studios, for very specific titles.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: Isn\u2019t this just a case of colorization revisited?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:The colorization thing is that [studios] were going to colorize their entire black and white libraries. All of a sudden they\u2019d have all this new stuff. Well, nobody wanted to see these movies in colour. They really didn\u2019t. There was no audience for them, and they really didn\u2019t look very good. It was totally arbitrary: it had nothing to do with the lighting \u2013 the lighting was all in the grey tones, just as it is now, and videotape wasn\u2019t very good. So, it didn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p>\n Fired By Design: Will people really want see classics like Rear Window in 3D, though?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:Well, it\u2019s funny, because that\u2019s Hitchcock. Hitchcock did Dial M For Murder in 3D. And now it\u2019s possible to actually release it as it was originally shot. The potential there is to bring a lot of [stereoscopically filmed] material to video, which right now isn\u2019t really possible. So they\u2019re looking at it not just for existing library titles but also for future library titles.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Katzenberg has said every film Dreamworks does is going to be in 3D. Paramount is looking at that same possibility. Fox is looking into it. They\u2019re all looking at it. Jeffrey Katzenberg has wanted to make 3D movies since the 90s. Now he can.<\/p>\n The thing is, other than animated films, how do you shoot it? Do you shoot it with one eye and do the conversion, or shoot it with two eyes and go through the pain of post-production of making that work?<\/p>\n There are a couple of things about shooting in 3D. Shooting in 3D these days demands that you shoot digitally, so cinematographers and directors who want to shoot on film: they\u2019re out of luck. They\u2019re not going to make 3D movies. But with our process, they can.<\/p>\n People think that once they\u2019ve recorded the 3D movie, then post just goes like it would on any movie. It doesn\u2019t, because the two lenses are never absolutely perfectly aligned. There\u2019s always something. One eye can be a little soft, perhaps the focus didn\u2019t quite settle in the right spot. One picks up a lens flare but the other doesn\u2019t. A shot that would kill you on a 3D movie is if I wanted to dolly past [a cinema] chair [up close, revealing] the screen [in the distance]. You can\u2019t do that in stereo at this point because one lens is going to see the chair and the other is going to see the screen. It\u2019s a classic shot in movies. You see it in every Indiana Jones, every Bond movie, where you start looking at something that\u2019s really close and you dolly to reveal something: a reveal shot. They\u2019re one of the best storytelling tools. Doing reveal shots for stereo movies is hard. View-D doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: In that case, how does View-D work?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:Very well!<\/p>\n Fired By Design: How much can you say about how it works technically?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:Very little. We have applied for a patent because it is truly unique. The business is being looked at by lots of people trying to figure out how to do this. The current technique for making a 3D movie out of a 2D movie is extraordinarily labour-intensive and slow and fraught with artefacts. We have managed to avoid the pitfalls of normal conversion.<\/p>\n "Shooting in 3D these days demands that you shoot digitally, so cinematographers and directors who want to shoot on film: they\u2019re out of luck. They\u2019re not going to make 3D movies. But with our process, they can"- Michael Fink, CEO Prime Focus VFX <\/p><\/div>\n <\/em>Fired By Design: How would conversion normally be carried out?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/h6>\n MICHAEL FINK:People are rotoscoped out of a scene, and then new parts of the background are built to be seen by the other eye. The person is put back into the scene, but all their edges are rotoscoped edges, so that makes them look flatter. To fix that, they build a 3D model of the person, and then they match-move the 3D model to his motion. Then in the computer they project his photographed image onto the model. That gives a little shape in 3D and creates a proper 3D guy. That\u2019s really labour intensive and it\u2019s not always all that effective.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: But you\u2019re able to get around that\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:We have some alchemists in Winnipeg. It\u2019s amazing. It snows and it\u2019s very cold, so six months a year. They don\u2019t go anywhere. They just write code! Also, we have the great good fortune of being founded by Chris Bond who\u2019s brilliant and Chris came up with this idea, and the basic idea and he worked out the basics of it in about half an hour.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: When did the idea first occur?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:It was last spring [2008] almost. We had a meeting with one of the studios and they said, we have two minutes of video and we want you to convert it to 3D. They were interested in library titles for the most part, initially. They told us we want it cost-effective, we want it fast, all that kind of stuff. We went away and we were completely dead. Our first estimate of what it was going to cost us to convert these two minutes of footage was about two million dollars, because we had to do a lot of research. I said, we\u2019re not spending two million dollars! They would never pay two million dollars!<\/p>\n It was just huge. People were throwing all kinds of ideas at it. Chris went away and said, I was thinking so I did a little of this and I got that. What do you think? I said let\u2019s test it. We did and in no time flat we had the scenes. But it wasn\u2019t a product yet. Now we\u2019re building a team to do this, to build it as a real service.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: So it will be a service, rather than a discrete package.<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:We\u2019re not going to sell the software, at least not initially.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: What sorts of markets are you looking at?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK:We\u2019re working on this software to make it so procedural that you feed a 2D movie in one end and you get a 3D movie out the other. For feature films that won\u2019t work, because there are going to be custom things you\u2019re going to want to do. But for TV where the price competition is huge, or the web where you really have to keep prices down, it could be proceduralised to the point that it\u2019s on a chip.<\/p>\n Fired By Design: What are the chances of a format war breaking out as 3D takes off in the home, for example with anaglyph (coloured) vs polarised glasses?<\/em><\/p>\n MICHAEL FINK: It\u2019s all going towards polarised glasses and passive systems. You can use active glasses where it either works with an infrared link or a wire, that essentially is an LCD shutter. It\u2019s not polarised. The glasses literally go black on alternate frames. It\u2019s so fast you don\u2019t see it. But it\u2019s turning on and off. Those are great. They\u2019re the brightest image and there are some good things about that. But you\u2019re either tethered, or they\u2019re clunky because you have to put batteries in, and if the batteries die in the middle of a movie, you\u2019re really unhappy. The only advantage is that you don\u2019t lose some of the light like you do with polarised glasses.\u00a0With TV, you don\u2019t have to worry about brightness. TVs are too bright anyway. You go into a store and they\u2019ve always got them cranked up, and they deliver them to you that way. The film guys are figuring it out pretty quick. You\u2019ve seen these movies. They look pretty good.<\/p>\n Visit Prime Focus for more on View-D<\/a> VFX veteran Michael Fink reveals Prime Focus View-D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[114,148,137,2939],"class_list":["post-1840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","tag-cinema","tag-rd","tag-stereoscopic-3d","tag-vfx-news"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/p>\n
![\""Shooting](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/firedbydesign.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Mike-Fink_Prime-Focus-VFX.jpg?resize=400%2C497&ssl=1\" "\\"Mike-Fink_Prime-Focus-VFX\\"")
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\nContact Graeme Aymer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"