Sony Professional has put together a 'behind the scenes' video demonstrating how live 3d sports broadcasts work. The video (watch it below) was recorded during the run up to a live 3d broadcast of a Premier League match on Sky a few months ago.
A very similar setup is currently being used to broadcast 25 World Cup games in 3d. Unfortunately, none of these games is being broadcast on TV in the UK as neither the BBC nor ITV has a 3d channel.
The good news, though, is it's recently been confirmed that 40 cinemas (including branches of Odeon, Cineworld, Vue and Empire) will be showing eight of the matches in 3d, from the quarter finals onwards.
There's been a strong reaction to the comment from Framestore's vfx exec producer of commercials Tim Keene (who was also exec producer of 3d effects on Avatar) in Televisual this month about how much he dislikes 2d-to-3d conversions.
One of the responses we received about Tim's piece was from Prime Focus' Martin Hobbs, who heads up View-D, the facility's proprietary process for converting 2d to 3d stereoscopic images. Martin has equally strong feelings about the subject – so in order to provide some balance, here's the full, unedited version of Tim's comment piece, followed by Martin's response.
Is Sky right to ban 2d to 3d conversions?
Tim Keene, vfx exec producer, Framestore "Sky’s recent – and slightly controversial – announcement that it’s banning 2d to 3d conversions on its new 3d channel is excellent news for our industry. For too long, 3d has been associated with the age-old red and blue anaglyph glasses that gave us all a headache. But with improvements in stereographic techniques, 3d is now a subtle and very watchable artform, as proven by the outstanding success of Avatar. But if 2d content is simply re-versioned into 3d via a post-process, the effect is more awkward and in danger of harking back to the bad old days of painful viewing experiences.
True clarity of depth can only be achieved if the work is originated stereographically, ie – where it’s shot 3d in the first place using two cameras in ‘stereo’; one for each eye. The subtleties of depth perception are surprisingly recognisable by the human eye. Converted footage is effectively a cheat and runs the risk of producing ‘bad’ 3d which can detract from the viewing experience.
The concern, given the already massive investment and excitement over the emerging world of 3d, is that poorly executed 3d runs the danger of making the experience 'gimmicky’ and 'B-movie' like. There is now little excuse for this given the UK expertise that is now at hand in both production and post production, something Sky is only too aware of. And, it should also be noted that if material is shot or generated in 3d in the first place, you get the 2d version for free.
If new 3d platforms, like Sky 3d, don’t boldly stand up for industry standards by discouraging 2d to 3d conversions, 3d will lose all the hard-earned credibility it’s recently gained. And the headaches will just start all over again."
Martin Hobbs, exec producer, Prime Focus "The question that was posed in June’s issue of Televisual to Framestore’s Tim Keene - ‘Is Sky right to ban 2d to 3d conversion’ - was somewhat flawed. Although Sky initially said they wouldn’t use any converted content, Chris Johns, chief engineer at BskyB, has gone on record to say that while they’ll be looking for native content where possible, they’re continuing to monitor 2d-3d conversion technology and they’ll look at conversions on a case-by-case basis.
Tim Keene’s response also contained some sweeping statements. I agree with Tim that converted footage can ‘run the risk of producing bad 3d’, but the technology’s evolving and when it’s done right - and it’s creatively led by people that know what they’re doing - it can produce great results on a timescale and at a cost that will be instrumental in providing content as fast as the technology itself is moving.
Conversion shouldn’t be ruled out – planning early is the key. Shooting in 2d with 3d conversion in mind is a time and cost effective alternative to shooting stereo 3d and if you work closely with your post house from the beginning they can advise you on shooting in a way that will look best in 3d – which is just as important when shooting in stereo.
Obviously when converting existing content you won’t always have this luxury. There are some shots which have the potential to give you a headache, for example when there’s rapid movement between shots or when a wide shot zooms in quickly to a close up, as these don’t translate well when converted into 3d. But there are ways of minimising these effects and if you choose the right conversion technique and the right team, they can make this happen.
At Prime Focus, our artists have spent many years calculating 3d space for the post production and visual effects projects they’ve completed for 2d films, TV programmes and commercials. We’ve used these skills, along with our stereo 3d VFX experience on films such as Avatar and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3d, to develop our 2d-3d conversion process that sits as part of our stereoscopic 3d pipeline, and which was recently used to convert Clash of the Titans to stereo 3d for Warner Bros.
I’m certainly not saying that conversion is the only way – at Prime Focus we’re working on content that’s been shot in stereo, content shot in 2d that we’re converting, and a mixture of the two. But Tim Keene’s view that converted footage can only lead to a painful viewing experience is flawed and misleading."
Yesterday’s Westminster eForum, held at a very near capacity Congress Hall, London brought together the great and good from the world’s of stereo 3d and TV technology to talk about what the future holds for 3d broadcasts.
With a delegate list including all the main UK broadcasters, representatives from many Government departments, management consultancies and plenty of city types, it was a fairly corporate, suited affair.
But it was far from dry, with speakers such as BSkyB’s director of product design and TV product development Brian Lenz (pictured), providing further detail on the broadcaster’s forthcoming 3d channel, which launches in the autumn.
Lenz revealed the channel will mix arts, docs, films, general entertainment, music and kids programming alongside (naturally) sports content, with the emphasis being on quality, not quantity: “It’s in our own hands to control quality – that’s the key,” he says.
He pointed to Sky’s recent 3d commission, the David Attenborough-fronted Flying Monsters and an English National Ballet production, both acquired in 3d, as good examples. He admitted there’s currently a “scarcity of content” in stereo 3d, but added that Sky “isn’t prepared to fund everybody’s first 3d project, as it isn’t likely to be their best.”
As regards the technical side of Sky's stereo 3d broadcasts, Lenz says Sky subscribers won't require new Sky set-top-boxes. He added that the transmission structure to deliver 3d is the same as HD, so there’s no need for Sky to make any costly infrastructure changes either.
Lenz says the same stereo 3d broadcast works with all 3d TVs, so “you shouldn’t be alarmed by any talk of format wars”. He compared the option between active and passive screens (the two different types of 3d TVs available to consumers) as similar to choosing between plasma and LCD.
Whichever you go for, the screen will be able to display all 3d broadcasts so, says Lenz, “The format war is really just hype.”
Paul Gray, director of European TV research at consultancy company DisplaySearch, who was up next, talked about the price of 3d TVs, which, at around £1,700, he says, will remain a niche interest until prices fall to the £800 mark. This will happen, Gray believes, “very, very rapidly”, at which point 3d sets will then grab around a 10% slice of the TV market.
A few speakers later came Tony Mattera, director, Digital Switch Over Network Design at Arqiva. He explained the pros and cons of the different means of getting stereo 3d content through terrestrial TV. It’s technically possible already, using the existing transmission infrastructure, by transmitting the left and right image side-by-side, he explained.
But the limited bandwidth available for terrestrial broadcasts makes this option (which would mean having a dedicated channel only viewable on 3d TV sets) an extremely inefficient way to do things.
Instead, Mattera says, the focus is on looking to transmit 3d and 2d at the same time, using a system called ‘2d plus Delta’. This makes it possible to transmit a 3d version without using additional bandwidth. Essentially, it works by transmitting the 2d version complete with additional data so conventional TVs display the 2d picture and 3d sets utilise the extra information to create a stereo 3d image.
The system just requires a new encoder at the transmission end before it can be transmitted through existing infrastructure, so again, this wouldn’t be a massive upheaval for those companies providing transmission services.
Mattera acknowledged there are potential issues as to whether ‘2d plus Delta’ impairs the quality of the stereo 3d image, but says it depends on the content and that Avatar, for example, would work “quite effectively” transmitted this way.
William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon and “arch criminal” John Dillinger are amongst the key historical figures brought back from the dead using what Cardiff-based indie Wild Dream Films describes as “revolutionary technology” for its forthcoming History Channel doc Death Masks.
The doc takes the ‘death mask’ face casts made of famous figures from the past at their time of death, and recreates them in vivid detail using "advanced facial-reconstruction techniques and 3d imprint detailing".
The resulting facemasks, as showcased in the doc, represent an exact replica of every feature of the faces and “help solve age-old mysteries about the way these people lived their lives and how they ultimately died.” Death Masks features two scanned masks (based on an official and an unofficial mask) of Abraham Lincoln, which apparently provide fresh insights into his health and reveal how the civil war aged him.
“In the process of creating these lifelike faces, amazing new details emerged about these historic figures – what they really looked like, what illnesses they suffered from and how they lived their lives,” explains director, Wild Dream’s Stuart Clarke.
“We reveal the real face of Shakespeare [above], make Abraham Lincoln open his eyes and blink and have solved the mystery surrounding the death of arch criminal John Dillinger."
Death Masks is being broadcast on the History Channel in August, and has been nominated in the Best History Programme category at the Banff World Television Festival awards. The winners of the Banffs are revealed on Monday 13 June.
Every other month Adam Buxton (of Adam and Joe fame) hosts BUG at BFI on the South Bank. BUG showcases the best creative work in music videos and sells out very quickly to an audience of promo directors, designers, producers and a sprinkling of general public.
The format is simple – Adam sits on stage with his laptop and rambles on about great pop promos, screens a batch of them and then browses through a load of inane YouTube comments about the videos, rinsing them for full comedy value.
He does this twice a month (for the month it’s on), with one of the nights featuring an on-stage interview with a promo director and the other BUG night (the director’s cut) the same but without the director interview.
Anyway, it’s a great night (co-organised by Promo News's David Knight) and, for those who missed out on last night’s BUG 19 Director’s Cut, here are a few of what, for me, were the highlights...
Probably the most impressive of all the videos was Paris production company One More Production’s director Patrick Jean’s Pixels. It’s a spectacular piece of work, which is listed under the ‘inhouse’ section of One More Production’s website so was clearly made for love not money. Having said that, this morning a press release went out from US production company Mothership to say Jean has been added to its roster for commercials work in the US, following the viral success of Pixels.
Furthermore, Jean is joining up with Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions to create a “big-screen version” of Pixels, with the plan to make a "Ghostbusters-style action comedy” where characters come out of a video game to wreak havoc in the real world.
Next up is Factory’s promo for New York singer-songwriter Diane Birch’s Valentino, directed by Dennis Liu. This meticulously planned one-shot video is super impressive and one of those ones that begs the question, 'How did they do that?' Fortunately, that mystery is solved in the behind the scenes video Factory has also handily put on YouTube.
Here’s the finished video.....
And here’s the behind the scenes reveal...
Adam Buxton was particularly proud to present the next highlight, Radical Media’s ever-changing interactive experiment for Johnny Cash's Ain’t No Grave. The reason for his excitement is one of his digital drawings features in the promo. The concept is for visitors to the Johnny Cash Project website to choose a frame of the video and draw their own portrait of the scene.
All the submitted user artwork is then pieced together to form the finished video, and because new artwork is continually being submitted, the promo is never the same twice. Each piece of work has to be approved before it becomes part of the video, so while Buxton’s fairly convincing sketch of Cash made the cut, one of his other efforts from another frame of the video, which in all honesty was a bit rubbish, was rejected. He wasn’t at all bitter about the rejection either!
Click the image below to find out more and view the current Ain't No Grave video...
There were plenty of other inspiring videos shown last night, including Max Hattler’s art-inspired loops 1923 (aka Heaven) and 1925 (aka Hell) – see my earlier blogfor more on these.
But the final one I’m going to finish with is the one Buxton finished the night with last night. It's a blast from the past from the Adam and Joe archives and a cheeky little warmer for the World Cup. Originally made way back in 1998, here's (click the image below) Adam and Joe’s ridiculous football video, the Footy Song. Enjoy!
For more on BUG, head to www.bugmusicvideos.com - the next two BUG nights will be at the BFI on 15 and 23 July. Thanks to Locomotion for getting me in last night, and well done on your consistently high quality title sequences for the event.
At an Autodesk-organised talk at BAFTA last week, Weta Digital’s head of layout and animation technologies Shawn Dunn spoke in detail about how the facility created the widely admired cg/vfx on Avatar.
On Dunn’s laptop was a treasure trove of goodies to get any Avatar fan hot under the collar. As well as a dozen or so hi-res scans of the original concept paintings of both the Avatars and Pandora, we were treated to footage of Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana covered in markers, acting out scenes during the motion/performance capture shoot.
But much of the talk focused on a series of ‘template’ visualisation video clips created by James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment facility.
These were handed over to Weta as a meticulously detailed reference for each of the scenes and look surprisingly similar to what ended up in the movie, albeit in much lower res and without anything like the elaborate detail, lighting and finishing touches.
Weta’s task was to take the many different elements of these ‘template’ videos and recreate them in the photo-real detail seen in the finished movie.
Dunn, who spent three and a half years working on the film, revealed Weta had a team of 900 working on the vfx/cg of Avatar at any one time. The company ended up creating 170 minutes of mostly fully-cg shots, and worked on 53 different characters.
Weta built a 4,300-machine render farm to handle the work on Avatar, and created 10TB of data every day. There was a network of water pipes running around the render farm to try to keep it all cool, yet at one point Weta had to shut it down, concerned the place would catch fire after a big bit of metal somewhere in the render farm started smouldering under the pressure of the work.
Over the time it worked on the film, Weta built up a library of elements such as plants, trees, leaves, moss, insects, and so on, so the first step whenever it received a new ‘template’ from Lightstorm was to use proprietary-developed software to auto-scan through each scene and work out which elements it already had in its library and which needed to be created from scratch.
During the talk, Dunn confirmed Cameron was a real stickler for detail, to the point where he had very strict instructions as to the direction individual flies should move in scenes where there are hundreds of barely visible flies hovering around in the fog. Dunn said that most days Cameron would be on the phone for three to six hours to catch up on progress and talk through the next batch of work.
The humble TV remote’s days look to be numbered with manufacturers falling over themselves to come up with new, uncluttered pointing devices more able to cope with navigating the onslaught of new channels and video-on-demand content soon to be cluttering up programme guides once internet-delivered TV becomes the norm.
I was recently invited to have a go of a prototype of one such device; the Philips uWand. The first thing that strikes you is it has very few buttons and looks not unlike a Nintendo Wii controller. It works in a similar way too, being controlled by gestures, so when you tilt the uWand left or right the on-screen cursor whizzes off in that direction.
To select a programme, you point the uWand at the screen and rotate it to move the programme guide in that direction to locate the one you’re after, then click to select. You can add programmes to be recorded by just dragging and dropping them onto the on-screen ‘record’ box. It’s also possible to navigate around the Z axis of a 3d screen by moving the uWand forward and backwards.
Here's a slightly cheesy demo video of the uWand in action....
I initially found it quite fiddly and frustrating to make the uWand do what I wanted it to do. As with anything, though, after a bit of practice it gets easier to get a handle on. What makes things easier still is the ability to adapt the speed of the on-screen cursor to suit your needs.
Philips has user trialled the prototype uWand, and (naturally) reports back encouraging results. It gave 200 families in Amsterdam a Philips net TV along with a standard remote control. After a month, they were given the uWand instead of the standard remote and 75% preferred it. Their satisfaction ratings for the net TV also increasing from ‘fair’ to ‘good’.
The company is now looking to license the uWand technology to TV and set-top-box manufacturers.
Are these the best views from any of London's many TV studios? These are the really rather impressive backdrops to the five high definition studios making up the Associated Press's new complex at The Penthouse, New Zealand House, 80 Haymarket, London.
The five HD studios, two of which are multi-camera setups, were unveiled at a launch party at the end of April. They have been built by AP Global Media Services, the video newsgathering facilities wing of the Associated Press.
The views from the different studios take in many of London's best-known landmarks, including Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the West End, the City, London Eye and Buckingham Palace.
The studio complex includes editing facilities and high-speed fibre transmission links to the Associated Press's global satellite network.
The Associated Press hopes to attract production companies after recognisable London backdrops and believes the studios will become the "premier live shoot facility in London".
.png)
.png)
