There aren’t many topics that divide opinion more than the use of 3D in movies (except for the Star Wars prequels and sequels). Those who enjoy it do so. Those who despise it despise it. There are many lies and suppositions to be found.
But how are things going, how can you utilize it, and what is it all about now, 17 years after the present incarnation of 3D made its comeback? The state of 3D is discussed in these four areas.
Who Invented 3D Movies?
You may definitely credit Valerie Thomas for your enjoyment of 2009’s Avatar or your childhood enjoyment of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. She was the NASA scientist who made 3D movies feasible, and she was a black woman. She worked on a number of ground-breaking projects while she was a student at the aeronautics institute, where she also won various honors, such as the NASA Equal Opportunity Medal and the Goddard Space Flight Center Award of Merit.
By mentoring young people through various NASA initiatives, she also gave back to her community. She was interested in science herself as a young girl, and that was the beginning of everything.
1. 3D Myths
One way that 3D is frequently summarized in the popular mind is that it is characterized as things coming at you or leaping off the screen. Although it may be accurate, this is a blatant oversimplification.
All that 3D is is depth perception. As long as you have two healthy, functional eyes, that is what you see every single day. Stereo vision is usually subconsciously employed to improve clarity and our impression of shape and distance, even when objects are rarely close up and frequently far away.
Therefore, it cannot be arbitrarily claimed that 3D is just appropriate for certain genres like animation or action films because it is both commonplace and beautiful at the same time. Actually, slower sequences make it possible to appreciate the subtleties of 3D even more.
Another misconception that has persisted and is still widely believed by some is that 3D content must be shot using a twin-lens camera in order to be worthwhile, and that 3D conversions are of poorer quality.
It’s important to note, though, that no significant 3D movie conversion has ever been totally automated; instead, manual input from artists is required. One factor that contributed to the conversion’s poor reputation was the fact that several movies that weren’t originally intended to be released in 3D underwent a last-minute conversion in the early days of digital 3D, when 3D movies started to become more popular following the success of Avatar. They were typically on the subtler side because they had less time to create them and had fewer resources.
Even while some of the early conversions were, most of them weren’t, so it doesn’t mean they were awful. Even though they weren’t nearly as effective as the conversions used today, most of them were correct and an improvement.
But in modern times, the whole controversy is pointless. The majority of 3D movies were intended to be converted from the start, and as a result, most of them look just as good, or often even better, than ones that were really shot in that manner. This gives the directors more creative freedom.
The Amazing Spider-Man, which was shot in native 3D but had very little depth, is a startling example of this.
2. 3D Technology
Anaglyph 3D, the type of 3D that requires red and blue spectacles, has always been a compromise that reduced the potential impact and decreased the visual quality. Many people may not understand that the two main high-quality 3D viewing techniques in use today have existed for practically the whole time.
Shutter and Polarized Glasses
When LCDs were developed in the 1980s, shutter glasses—which flicker the left and right views in time with electronic eyewear—gained popularity once again for usage in homes. They were first used about a century earlier. Since then, they’ve been available for purchase.
The most often used format in movie theaters across the world now is polarized glasses, which are easier to use and enable a brighter, full-color image. Polarized glasses have been around since the 1950s, when the 3D craze began.
Streaming 3D
The left and right eye views of stereoscopic video are typically provided online and on some 3D cameras and camcorders as a single HD video, with side-by-side or SBS, being the most popular and over-and-under coming in second. This means that the resolution of these two formats is halved. One issue to watch out for is the so-called 3D conversion of some YouTube videos by some content producers who just duplicated the same video side by side for viewing on a VR device. Please be aware, however, that the final video will still be flat because 3D images differ significantly from one another as if seen from various angles.
3. 3D Isn’t Dead
Since its most recent resurgence, one popular headline that appears every year is “3D is dead.” While it’s true that 3D broadcast television never really took off, most theatrical tentpole films are now released in 3D, so most directors don’t even give it a second thought. Actually, since the invention of home video, 3D movies have been continuously released on DVD for use with shutter glasses as well as field sequential VHS, Laserdisc, and other formats. It has continued to be a consistent but small market ever since for many years.
The HD era saw more of the same. A Blu-ray 3D version was released a few months after practically every new 3D film that was released in theaters. Even though it wasn’t being advertised to the general public like it had been a decade earlier, 3D was at its pinnacle and easily accessible to its fans globally up until 2020.
Sadly, even though the 3D version was already finished, most movies were switched to 2D-only streaming releases that year because of the frequent shutdowns and the fact that 3D generates the majority of their revenue in theaters. In general, 3D ceased entirely during that year.
The second half of 2021 marked the return of 3D to cinemas in the majority of locations, and the simultaneous release of several postponed 3D movies—which culminated in December 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home—showed that 3D was here to stay—leading to the billion-dollar box office comeback.
4. 3D Lives On
New movies, though, aren’t the only reason for recent 3D releases. Companies like Warner Brothers and the 3D Film Archive have restored old 3D films that were shot with primitive 3D film camera rigs, conserving these technological and historical gems and sometimes making them appear better than before.
While minor Australian distributor Random Space Media occasionally releases unexpected recent films that were previously inaccessible, such as Jumanji: The Next Level and Spider-Man: No Way Home, Variety Films continues to release original 3D movies on Blu-ray. Unfortunately, such availability has been genuinely sporadic, and they are dependent on the larger studios’ decisions about whether to collaborate with them on a particular release.
