3d Technical

In June there were two major events for those interested in 3D TV technologies. There has been the one day “3D Masters” at BAFTA on the 22nd in London’s Piccadilly . Earlier in the month we had the Dimension 3 Expo in Paris over 3 days from 1st to the 3rd.
The 3D Masters in London was packed in a single very busy day. This comprised of well managed programme of talks, lectures and forums in BAFTA’s very comfortable auditorium coupled with a small, but pertinent table-top exhibition in an upstairs room. Here you could dip in and out in between the lectures see live demos of all sorts of kit, talk to vendors or simply network with the 300 odd other delegates and 3D professionals. Being rather busy myself, showing off the Hamlet Vidscope-3D, I was not able to attend all the lectures, but those I did attend were all excellent and tightly managed to the exacting time-scale of the event. The hospitality on offer throughout the day and the lunch were simply first class. If TVB do it again next year, it is to be recommended for either the technical content or the manifold business issues surrounding the future deployment of 3D TV.
Dimension 3 was staged in the heart of Paris’s ‘TV land’ to the North of Paris very near the Stade de France. This was in a compact exhibition venue at Seine Saint-Denis within what is essentially a studio village. This had plenty of parking and was easy to get to for visitors coming by train from over Europe and UK. Here we had about 60 other exhibitors both large and small covering a wide range of equipment provision and services for 3D. The around 3500 visitors and being a 3 day event, there was far more ‘meat’ in this festival. On each day you could choose between the 3 different auditoriums which the organisers called ‘rooms’. The smallest of these seated over 100 and catered for live products workshops of various 3D product and systems.
The main auditorium was huge and looked like in might easily hold 1000. This was used for both 3D screening on a massive scale using the active shuttered XpanD system as well as talks, lectures and forums. These could go on until quite late some evenings making for very long days. However, generally the quality and relevance of the presentations was excellent. The third medium sized lecture space was used sometimes in parallel for a wide range of different discussions. Any worry about being at a French event and not being fluent were quickly dispelled as most presentation were most in English and those that weren’t had simultaneous translation via loop fed headsets.
With the Eurostar taking only just over 2 hours to get there, Paris becomes almost local to London so a visit to very friendly Dimension 3 has to be recommended for next year. In this short piece I can’t give a full review of all the topics from both of these events. However one influential speaker who presented both at London and Paris was Steve Schklair, Chief Executive Officer, 3Ality Digital Systems, the well known 3D equipment manufacture and services provider. In a talk covering many aspects of 3D work and technologies he went on to highlight the all too common mistakes and pitfalls in 3D productions. Making bad 3D is only too easy to do, so getting a 3D rig set up, aligned and depth budget right at the start is essential. At the end he made a heartfelt plea to all those working in all aspects of 3D TV, which I paraphrase here:
Since most of the audiences are going to be new to 3D, if there are presented with programmes that are hard to watch or give them headaches, they could easily put off viewing forever. So it very important for everyone in programme making or in equipment provision, indeed whatever you do – to take care to make ‘it’ a good as is possible for you to do so. We may only have one shot at this opportunity…