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Getting the 3D words right

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Captions and sub-titling in 3D is not so easy as in 2D. The words cannot simply be superimposed over 3D content. They need to be accurately positioned in the depth plane otherwise they can create visual confusion and break the whole 3D illusion. For instance, consider a street lamp-post on the right in the foreground and in front of the screen plan...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

DVB-3DTV: A Milestone

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In 1822, George Stephenson set his Standard Gauge for the world’s first steam railway at 4 foot 8 inches (1.44m), to match a nearby wagonway that worked well at Killingworth Colliery. Despite Isambard Kingdom Brunel building the London-to-Bristol line (1838) on what he considered to a better 2.2m ‘Board Gauge’ (he was right!), the Gauge Act of 1846...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

One Eyed 3D

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The illusion of a single 3D image is created within the brain based on the spacial displacement of our two eyes. So how can you make a 3D production with one camera?The 3D stop frame animation feature film 'Coralline' was largely made with just one camera for each scene. The same DSLR camera was used to take left and right images successively. For...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

Mobile Cameraman Extraordinaire

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I had wanted to work in television since my teens and, at 20, started as a trainee assistant cameraman at Mersey Television on 'Brookside' in Liverpool and then joining Thorn-EMI Facilities in London. Thorn-EMI put me in charge of a studio used to shoot links for companies like Children's Channel using very bulky early tubed Betacams. Five years la...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

3D in 2011

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Another year and it’s time for a fresh look at the S3D market. Each year the CES Show that occupies the Las Vegas Convention Center with, in 2011, an unexpectedly high number of attendees (140,000) keen to see what’s new. At CES 2010 S3D was THE thing, but a year later the excitement had moved on to the nebulous market of mobile devices OTT and, pr...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Eyeballing 3D errors

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Standard-issue human eyeballs are very adaptive and clever. Of course it’s the massively powerful image processing in the visual cortex of the brain that really allows us to resolve 3D images. Stereographers have been very practised over the years in achieving good camera set-up with only simple tools. The most common test uses a picture monitor sh...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Eye to eye: The changing face of video displays

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Video display technology is progressing so fast that the phrase 'More revolutions than a banana republic' inevitably comes to mind. No offence intended if you have just taken over as president. From the 1930s to the present century, television display was dominated almost entirely by cathode ray tubes. Competition then arrived in the form of plasma...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

3D camera mirror rigs

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3D camera mirror rigs will be around for a long time to come and contrary to popular belief, shooting in 3D is very easy with the right equipment. Entry level 3D mirror rigs made in the UK are now available, such as the manual Hurricane Rig developed by Alistair Chapman and the fully automated 'BINORIG' developed by us at Teletest Ltd. The key to a...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

The 3D titling tango

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The further you look into 3D, the more it diverges from 2D. Titling, including lower thirds, on-screen ‘burnt-in’ text and subtitles (aka closed captions) are common features of 2D TV and film presentations and so it’s not unreasonable to expect it to be used in 3D. Placing titles at a suitable position on a 2D display is rarely problematical. Usua...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Dont lose the 3D plot

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As was mentioned in the sixth article of this series, depth budget is the single most important parameter in stereoscopic 3D TV. As well as observing the practical and desirable limits to which the depth parameters can be pushed, making a good 3D production required careful management of depth dynamics. This is mostly done in post production to ens...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Bridging the divide between production and post productio...

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In the last couple of years we have seen a considerable increase in the adoption of digital film cameras. This is not only fuelled by improvements in the technology and image quality but also by the adoption of 3D filmmaking, which significantly lends itself to the digital arena. Digital cameras have brought some wonderful benefits to the filming c...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Seeing 3D or 2D

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The press coverage of all angles of 3D continues unabated but the subjects are changing away from the technology and more towards the commercial aspects and how 3D should be shot. With some people saying there’s no extra money above an HD budget to make 3D, there’s a money problem. For a start there’s twice as many cameras and more people, specific...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2011

Anaglyph, old hat but still useful

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There are now many technologies for viewing 3D on television or the cinema. The oldest, dating from the 1850’s, is the anaglyph glasses. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the ‘red’ and ‘green’ style of old, though those particular single colours are hardly used these days. The basis of an anaglyph is to separate left and right image components for...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2011

Does 2D to 3D really work?

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It is widely said that 3D has to be done well as, if it’s not, then it actually can hurt the viewer and give 3D a bad name. Certainly there have been big efforts to make good 3D, with Sky going to great lengths to ensure they set a high standard. Unlike the old 3D celluloid films, digital 3D can be a completely stable medium; it does not degrade wi...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2010

Not so Good Vibrations

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When shooting with ordinary 2D, you can almost do what you like with camera dynamics. If you pan wildly from side to side or up and down, what you see through the viewfinder is what you will actually get. If there is going to be some camera shake or vibration, you can opt to switch in a stabiliser in the camera or the lens system. In 3D these are d...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010