As of late I’ve all ways reviled in the knowledge that a movie at the cinema is presented on 35mm film. What with movies now days so heavily relying on digital production and or capture it’s kind of personal things known that I’m not only about to watch my first digitally projected movie, but one that’s presented in 3D.
I’m not going to talk much about Avatar other then worth watch but also worth watching in 3d. All this 3d talk to one said, digital projection isn’t all that bad for one the ads look a lot better. This is partly due to the fact the kind of projectors that your local cinema would be using would go far beyond the resolution of a commercial projector. If this is the level of clearly they provide I think I can give up iconic things like film grain and tell tail sings of ware and tare that come from an film based medium.
3D cinema has come a long way from the days of then silly glasses with the magenta -blue filters though you still have to put on a pair of silly black frame glasses. They now use polarized glasses. To quote Wikipedia:
RealD 3D cinema technology uses circularly polarized light to produce stereoscopic images. Circular polarization is preferable to linear polarization because viewers are able to tilt their head and look about the theater naturally with no loss of 3D perception. Linear polarization, on the other hand, requires viewers to keep their head within a certain degree of tilt for effective 3D perception, otherwise they can see double or darkened images.
The projector alternately projects the right-eye frame and left-eye frame 144 times per second, and circularly polarizes these frames, clockwise for the right eye and counter clockwise for the left eye. A push-pull electro-optical modulator called a ZScreen is placed immediately in front of the projector lens to switch polarization. The audience wears recyclable circularly polarized glasses to make sure each eye sees only “its own” picture, even if the head is tilted. In RealD Cinema, each frame is projected three times to reduce flicker, a system called triple flash. The source video is usually only (2x)24 frames per second (which can result in a subtle ghosting and stuttering on horizontal camera movements). A silver screen is used to keep the light polarized and to reflect back as much light as possible to counter polarization losses. The result is a 3D picture that seems to extend behind and in front of the screen itself.
Basically your bending light and playing with frame rates so each eye sees a slightly different picture giving your brain the illusion of depth…. and me one monster head hack by the time the movie is over. it’s all so good to see Sigourney Weaver still hocking it in a movie.
