"Why Are All Movies Getting A 3D Remake?" or "How Many Times Can We Watch Titanic?"

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Wait, there's a problem with depth perception on screens now? Wierd, cos I can look at anything, on screen or off, and it looks perfectly fine to me. Trying to make movie images more like human vision is a pointless affair anyway as human eyes work totally differently to cameras.

A camera, you point it somewhere, and you capture the whole image with equal clarity across a square surface.

Human eyes, you have peripheral vision around the edges of your vision that blurs out the parts you're not paying attention to. Human eyes also turn themselves on and off again every time you move to focus on those other things, so you don't get queasy trying to refocus on new stuff.

Should we therefore add some sort of bizzare bluring effect around the edges of cameras now, and stutter the image every time it moves? Of course not, because that's fucking stupid.

[stefan]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

thats like saying sound or color doesn't solve any of the issues. Yes there are ways around the problem. Though its still an issue.

no, it isn't. Look, I'm a student of photography and videography, 3D is utterly superfluous. Anything it does can be done less intrusively with control of aperture and depth of field. Your mind already SEES a movie screen as 3D, adding a 3D effect causes confusion for the visual centers of your brain.

No matter what you do objects moving straight to or away from the camera looks unnatural.

no there isn't. contextual clues are already everything you need to determine if something is growing larger or moving towards the camera.

Forcing you to always need visual ques to tip off the viewer as to the size and distance of an object.

you are supposed to have visual cues. Your subject should not exist in a vacuum.

[Amake]

I have no idea why we should be looking at film cameras - if not movie visuals themselves - and go "this needs to emulate the mechanics of the human eye". It's like saying games need to have photorealistic graphics, but on a whole new level. I don't need or even want to look at a movie screen that looks like I'm looking through the eyes of another person with my eyes. Actually that sounds more like the plot of Being John Malkovich than a movie watching experience.

I'd have no problem with a movie depicting the world of the second dimension in a way that would be impossible to show in 3D. It's not that movies easily can fool us into thinking we're looking at a 3D world, though they can. It's that we absolutely don't need any cutting edge technology to be fooled. We don't even need pictures. Of course it's not going to stop anyone from passing off technological innovation as creative work if it's all they can do. Heck, it's worked for the videogame industry for decades.

[Magus]

As soon as they perfect holograms I think we'll all forget about this 3D shenanigans.

[Archbio]

Mang, I'm still over here, waiting for sculpture to fully replace painting, which is in limiting 2D.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Yeah and why haven't audio books completely replaced written words yet? You can't get the full experiance from a book surely? There's like, a whole dimension that written books are missing by not having audio to them!

[Osterbaum]

3D gives me a headache. I don't go to movies to get headaches.

[CelesJessa]

Also if I recall correctly CJ does not have stereoscopic sight which gives her an interesting... perspective on perspective. Ha! I'm good.

Hohohohohoho. Perhaps I am the next step in evolution, where stereoscopic sight has been rendered useless.

Originally Posted by Aerozord

look if you do not get why there would be advantageous to adding an entire axis to a visual medium I'm not going to argue it. I mean if there were no perks to stereoscopic sight why the heck do you think we evolved it in the first place.

No, I honestly don't really get why it would be advantageous (or at least i'm not understanding the kind of use that you would think would be advantageous). The only way I could see is maybe a holodeck sort of deal and I think that in of itself is a little too far away from "movies" to be considered here. I mean, I regularly animate using three-dimensions and I think it would be a nightmare, compositionally, if the picture wasn't restricted to the frame that the camera makes for you.

You're free to not explain it to me, but I asked because I don't get it and honestly wanted clarification. As someone who doesn't have stereoscopic vision, I have always been fascinated by what it might look like to have it, so I never considered before that movies might normally look funny to people who do have it.

Originally Posted by Fifthfiend

Yeah but I think zord is it creates a challenge for filmmakers because they have to remember to arrange each shot of their movie to have have stuff in it to provide those cues. Which I will say is probably fair to call the sort of thing you end up considering a hassle to remember every single iteration of a routine process after twenty or thirty years of doing it.

Eh, honestly I wouldn't really think so. At least from personal experience, in animation there's the mindset that every frame, if you take it alone, should be compositionally appealing, so it's all part of setting up the composition, which filmmakers have to consider anyway because that's what makes them filmmakers and not just dudes holding cameras (if that makes sense?)

[RickZarber]

Originally Posted by pocheros

I'm also trying to dig up an article on how 3D forces your eyes to move in unnatural ways which causes the headaches so many people get, but can't seem to find it.

Is this the article you meant?

Originally Posted by Walter Murch

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. [...] [T]he audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the "CPU" of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.