NEWS
Digital Editing and Coloring
in Three Dimensions
by Debra Kaufman
A publicity shot for 1991’s Muppet*vision 3-D, which
was shown only in Disney theme parks. |
For years, three-dimensional, or stereoscopic, movies have cycled in and out of fashion. Though none other than Alfred Hitchcock designed a crucial moment of Dial M for Murder to play in 3-D, the genre has mainly been associated with less lofty fare like the Bwana Devil, It Came From Outer Space or Creature from the Black Lagoon.
A more recent trend in 3-D films was sparked by computer-generated animation. In addition to director Robert Rodriguez’s foray into three dimensions with Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, the 3-D CGI Polar Express started another trend, followed by Meet the Robinsons, Monster House and Chicken Little, among others.
But 3-D filmmaking’s identity as a niche market is about to change. First, theatre owners are eager to create experiences that filmgoers can’t get at home; no easy feat in the days of HD home theatres. Second, movie theatres are now more easily transformed to 3-D, with new technologies, including high-resolution digital projection systems. And RealD, a soup-to-nuts 3-D system provider, has announced licensing deals with a handful of exhibitors from Regal to Carmike.
Screen Digest forecasts that by 2009, there will be over 5,000 enabled digital 3-D screens worldwide, three-quarters of which will be in the US. Adding to the fervor, directors—Robert Zemeckis (Beowulf) and James Cameron (Avatar) chief among them—are gravitating to 3-D as a new aesthetic language.
All this means that editors have to get ready for a 3-D future. Quantel, known for its comprehensive tools, including Pablo, iQ, eQ and others, was in Los Angeles recently, demonstrating an interesting software addition to its Pablo digital intermediate system. The company is beta-testing a solution for 3-D editing and coloring that should arrive just in the nick of time.
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Guild member Arden Rynew—whose experience in cutting three-dimensional movies includes Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Muppet*vision 3-D, both for Disney, as well as Jaws 3-D and numerous others projects—speaks about editing 3-D as a technique and an aesthetic. According to him, in 3-D, an editor has double the work—and then some—since he or she has to edit both the left and right eyes and then sync them perfectly, constantly tweaking the convergence, which determines what will be seen in the foreground, mid-ground and background. The complexity of these tasks has long meant that the results were often far from perfect.
Once the reels reach the motion picture theatres, the use of dual projectors and the need to assemble all the reels has pretty much guaranteed a less-than-optimum viewing experience. “The problem was not only synchronizing the two projectors, but assembling the reels correctly,” says Rynew. “Across the country in the early 1950s, there were so many problems that people asked for their money back.”
Fast forward to the present. Quantel senior product specialist Milton Adamou was showing the capabilities of Pablo for digital intermediates. After discussions with Marty Sadoff, a 3-D movie specialist, Adamou said he was convinced that Pablo could be tweaked for a 3-D digital intermediate. That’s because the Pablo was designed and built from the ground up with dual output. The dual output was originally conceived of as ideal for customers who wanted to push out an HD and SD version of the same DI. But why not utilize that same dual output for 3-D color correction and editing? Quantel developer Simon Rogers, who designed the Quantel iQ, wrote the software plug-in to do just that.
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The system, which is as of yet unnamed, was recently demonstrated
in the Burbank studio of director of photography Vince Pace, who is
renown for his 3-D cinematography and his innovations in 3-D camera
systems. “What we wanted to do is get something out there to
gauge enthusiasm and feedback from the people attending, so that going
forward in the next few weeks, we would have a clear indication of
the things we need to tidy up,” says Adamou.
Rynew was among the 100-plus studio heads, post-production supervisors,
directors, cinematographers and editors who watched the demonstration.
“I thought it was great,” he says. “No question
that I wish I’d had them [when working on past 3-D projects].
In the past, until we put the eyes together, we didn’t see what
it looked like and often it was too late.”
Prior to Quantel’s offering, 3-D post was a daredevil combination of gerry-rigged tools, experienced eyes and luck. “We edited electronically, and in a lot of cases, we’d look at scenes by putting two monitors side-by-side,” Rynew recalled. “We weren’t integrating the two eyes during the editing process until it became critical that we integrate the material and look at it. It was trial and error. Most particularly, continuity of convergence was a big issue. I’m also thinking of the 3-D Muppets movie, where the right and left eye were switching back and forth, and that created problems.”
Quantel’s new software solution radically changes the less-than-ideal 3-D editing paradigm by enabling real-time color correction and editing for both eyes simultaneously and real-time convergence. The key to the power of the software is the ability to play out two streams of video at the same time, a capability that fuels flexibility in editing.
“In terms of editorial, you have the ability to work on both eyes at the same time,” explains Adamou. “You can splice them at the same time, cut out edits at the same time, trim at the same time and slip-and-slide them at the same time. But you can also do all of that for each individual eye.”
The Quantel software also offers the ability to see each eye independently. “If you want to go between left and right eye on the display, you can,” he continues. “That’s very important because one camera may have a filter on it and the other not, so you can easily correct that.”
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Real-time masks, pan-and-scan and 3-D look-up tables (LUTs), replicated for film, are other features. According to Adamou, the editor can wear 3-D glasses or not. “If you’re doing editorial in terms of lining things up, you can see the results by wearing the 3-D glasses,” he explains. “The strength of the system is that you can easily go between the 2-D and 3-D worlds. So there will be times you want the glasses on and times you want them off. When you’re doing cutting and trimming, it may be preferable to have the glasses off.
“But at the point when you’re setting convergence—which is determining what’s in the foreground, background—you certainly want to have the glasses on because that’s the only way you know how the image is going to talk to you,” he continues. “And just by tweaking convergence of an image, you can give it a very different feeling.”
There are currently no set standards related to 3-D filmmaking or post, but Adamou believes that will evolve over time. “I think it will develop similarly to the way that DI is almost developing into a standard after three or four years of people doing it,” he says. “There’s a lot more standardization now about the way things are formed and delivered, and I think this will happen in 3-D stereoscopic post.”
After a week of demos, Adamou said he’s come away with a list of features that post-production professionals would like to see. “People were asking for lots of tidying-up work, like being able to take a shot where left eye and right eye have been brought in incorrectly, and flip them around,” he explains. “They’d also like to be able to take one eye and use it to paint the other eye––to correct lens flare, for example. And there was a little bit of talk about being able to color correct with 3-D glasses on.”
Adamou also stresses that this is a software, not hardware, upgrade to the Pablo. After beta-testing through September, the software will be released with Pablo’s next major code release.
Will the ability to edit in 3-D create a new career path for editors? “I think it’ll become an extension of the editor’s skills,” predicts Adamou. “It won’t be the extension of everyone’s skills, but I still think it will be specialized in that some people have a better perception of 3-D space than others––and some people are less tolerant of a bad 3-D image than others. Editors will have to train their eyes, but there’ll be a demand for editors who do this.” Color correction will also be a bit of a learning curve. One characteristic of 3-D is a loss of luminance, which means a color grade will look differently with the glasses off or on.
Though he worked with the old 3-D editing tools, Rynew believes the reason stereoscopic movies haven’t had a sustained life is based more on the difficulties of getting them successfully into theatres and on the screen. “With electronic projection, we have the final key,” he says. “With this new technology, I suspect that we will finally see the fruition of 3-D.”
“Editors will have to start thinking in 3-D,” he continues. “Of course, the aesthetic is different than in 2-D, and editors are going to have to learn that and become sensitive to it. The possibilities are endless, and the complexity of creating 3-D will make the person putting it all together more important. And with the proper aesthetic, I think, what will emerge will be dramatically effective 3-D shows.”
Debra Kaufman is a freelance writer who is also West Coast Editor of Film & Video Magazine, and editor of DI Studio, an online newsletter on digital intermediates. She can be reached at dkla@ca.rr.com.
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