ChainsawAsh said:
zombie84 said:
ChainsawAsh said:
zombie84 said:
ChainsawAsh said:
Bingowings said:
it had a nice editorial comparing the 3Dising of classic 2D films to Ted Turner scribbling pastel shades over monochrome classics
That's good. That's pretty much exactly how I feel about it.
That's not the same. Ted Turner bought the films and changed them against the wishes of their owners. This is totally different--the owners are changing them on their own will.
Yeah, but I don't really care. It wasn't shot that way, so I refuse to see it that way. Even if a director chooses to colorize his own movie, as in your example, I'll never watch the colorized version, and I'll continue to wish it didn't exist, despite what the director says.
The same thing applies to 3D.
This seems to me to be a rather rigid mode of thinking.
For example, editing. Often the craftiness of editing is to make things that weren't shot one way seem like they were in fact shot a certain way. You can manipulate a performance, create a camera move, or disrupt a camera move, you can even move around scenes and create a whole new story line.
You misunderstand me. By your logic, I shouldn't like any film, since they're all edited, and thus not presented the way they were shot.
I equate the conversion of 2D films into fake-3D to the cropping of widescreen movies, or the colorization of black-and-white films.
Look, I don't hate 3D. 3D is fine when it was shot with stereoscopic lenses, like Avatar, or Tron Legacy.
In fact, I just thought of a much better comparison: turning mono into fake stereo. It never sounds right, and it destroys the original intent of the mix, regardless of whether the artist chose to make it that way or not. I'm not talking about going back to the stems and making a new, true stereo mix - I'm talking about taking the mono mix, and running it through EQ and such to make it sound like it's in stereo.
Turning a 2D image into a 3D image is the same thing. You're right about Toy Story and Toy Story 2 - Pixar was, in effect, able to go back to the "stems" and make a true "stereo mix," in that, since they had all the original files, they could just add a second camera to make a true 3D image.
You simply can't do this for something that was shot with a single lens. It's trying to add something to the image that was never there to begin with. Kind of like those 120/240Hz displays that add in fake frames to try to make things look "smoother," when really it just gives everything a very artificial, speed-up-then-slow-down effect.
And I will have no direct issue with modern films being converted from 2D to 3D in post, so long as the 2D version is released alongside the 3D version (like the next Harry Potter films). I wish they wouldn't make the fake-3D versions, but that's their prerogative. I have the option of not seeing them, and I take that option.
You will never get me to watch a 2D-to-3D conversion, just as you'll never get me to watch a colorized film or listen to a fake-stereo audio recording.
The thing about this is:
Natively 3D filming (i.e. Avatar) in theory can be exactly the same as 2D-3D conversions. It's all an illusion anyway, it's all two-dimensional images projected in such a way as to trick the optics of your eye. The imaging technology is exactly the same as conversions however, 3D cameras film in two dimensions and project in two dimensions. With conversions, the only difference is if the makers take the time to put the layering details into the 2D conversion, and make it sophisticated enough. That's the clincher--3D lenses put all this dimensionalizing data into the image as it's captured, so it's free work. With 2D conversions you have to sit there and do the same thing manually that the 3D camera does automatically, and it takes a lot of work to do it convincingly "by hand", as it were.
That is essentially the only difference. In effect, there basically is no difference between a "native 3D" (which is a misnomer: its 2D, converted) and "converted 3D" (which is also a misnomer: in "native", the camera converts, in "conversions", VFX artists do it with computer software).
Which is why when you have 2D films that are decided to be converted to 3D at the last minute, like Clash of the Titans, it looks bad--they never had close to the amount of time that was necessary to convert the 2D image manually. A couple months. But to do it in a way that rivals the automated processes involved with a 3D camera and lens set takes years. Which is why James Cameron and George Lucas have been prepping their conversions for so long.
Which, again, is why I don't understand the hostility. 3D films are just 2D conversions captured with a camera and lens system rather than manually composited by VFX people. But in theory, a manually converted film could basically rival a native 3D capture, provided there is enough time and resources.