The 3D Blame Game – Part 2

Published by Torsten Hoffmann, March 2014.

The first part of this opinionpiece received a lot of views, generated many retweets, was reposted on several other 3D sites and spurred a lively discussion on LinkedIn. I have also received numerous suggestions and direct feedback. Thank you all for that.

Here is the second part of my article in which I try to show that everyone in our industry has contributed to the current 3D crisis.

6. 3D Broadcasters

A. The 3D TV Channels can be accused of being short-sighted. In hindsight we can say that most of the 3D channels were too early. They started broadcasting and investing heavily in (mostly live) content at a time where there were virtually no 3DTVs in the market. Live content is extremely difficult, costly, and commercial suicide because no one ever watches replays of yesterday’s sports game. And two years later, sure enough, the same 3D broadcasters are closing down declaring that “3D is dead”. Both their entries and exits can now be seen as premature. But at least they tried, and spent considerable funds doing so.

3DTV forecasts

B. Even the larger 3D broadcasters backed by big media corporations did not acquire or commission third party content in meaningful volume. Only initially few projects were commissioned to big production companies. In 3D, the learning curve is steep and normally the third and fourth production from a filmmaker turns out really well. Unfortunately, very few producers ever got to this stage. Most independent producers never got a chance to learn and the larger production firms have already moved on (to 4k or ‘back’ to HD). Only a handful of dedicated firms get the majority of 3D production budgets. They produce on the highest level, but this is a small and exclusive club. Hence, the broadcasters missed the opportunity to create a wider production ecosystem.

7. Equipment makers.

Read Full Post »

Opinionpiece: The 3D Blame Game Part 1

 (Torsten Hoffmann, February 2014)

By now, it has become very clear that the 3D industry has not managed to reach mainstream consumers – at least not in the living room. And in its’ current form it never will: Broadcasters are stopping with their 3D transmissions, Producers and Distributors have gone bust, Content Buyers have dropped off the map, and 3D websites and Blogs are struggling or shutting down. In my meetings, I hear many reasons for this demise – and most of the time it includes blaming some of the parties in the ecosystem: The 3D glasses that consumers don’t like to wear, the content that is lacking, the bad quality of 2D to 3D conversions, the price premium for the 3D tickets at the box office, etc. While it is easy to point fingers, I think the time has come to take a deeper look at the situation to better understand exactly what went wrong. Let’s examine all the different parties in the industry and what mistakes were made.

My aim here is to show that everyone in the business has played some part and contributed to the current crisis. Moreover, I want to make sure that we learn from past mistakes as we leave 2013D behind and look towards 2014k. We shouldn’t make the same mistakes in 4k and when we eventually enter the world of auto-stereo 3D.

1. Content Distributors

A. I want to start with my own part of the industry. Distributors like 3D Content Hub (and a handful of specialized 3D distributors as well as larger 2D distributors) have a clearly defined role: Monetizing, to license content rights to content buyers. Unfortunately

Read Full Post »

Picture of the Week

From an upcoming 4k film

Kings of Baja 4k

Read Full Post »

FireAnts wins Best 3D Documentary

We are proud to announce that Micheal Watchulonis’ FireAnts 3D: The invincible Army has won the award for Best 3D Documentary at the Beyond Festival. The largest German 3D festival took place in Karlsruhe this month. We are distributing the film here (some pictures). It is on Amazon here, where you can also see a customer review falsely claiming that it is a 2D film. Here is the 3D Trailer on YouTube. And here is an in-depth interview about the film-making process.

Read Full Post »

Picture of the Week

From Pawel’s underwater shoot in Tonga. 

Read Full Post »

6th Annual 3D Film Festival 3DFF

3D Content Hub is proud to be a sponsor again at this years’ 3DFF. We are also participating with several shortfilms in the festival competition. More infos on the official website, the official 3DFF Final Program Guide v5 2013 (download pdf) or in the press announcement below:6^TH ANNUAL 3D FILM FESTIVAL OPENS WITH INTERNATIONAL 3D SHORT FILM COMPETITION AND CLOSES WITH LOS ANGELES PREMIERE OF DARIO ARGENTO’S DRACULA 3D

3D FILM FESTIVAL RUNS AS PART OF THE 3D WEEK IN AMERICA CAMPAIGN HELD IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WORLD 3-D FILM EXPO III AND THE INTERNATIONAL 3D & ADVANCED IMAGING SOCIETY

PRESENTED BY 3OPOLIS

SPONSORED BY REALD, DLP and NVIDIA

SEPTEMBER 19 -21, 2013

Read Full Post »

Exclusive Interview: War of the Worlds: Goliath 3D

Today we present an exclusive interview with Leon Tan, producer of War of the Worlds: Goliath,  an award winning stereoscopic 3D animation feature.

1. Tell us how you got the idea to make this movie?
It all started from an idea by Joe Pearson, a Los Angeles-based animation producer and director, who had a concept for an animated TV series entitled “War of the Worlds: ARES” in the 1990s.
I met Joe in a bus in Tokyo in late-2006, during the Tokyo International Film Festival, and after he returned to Los Angeles and I to Kuala Lumpur, we kept in touch and he shared his many animation project ideas with me and the one that stood out was “War of the Worlds: ARES”.
By July 2007, Joe and I had formed a Malaysian company called Tripod Entertainment Sdn Bhd, together with New Zealander Mike Bloemendal whom I had already partnered with at Imaginex Studios, an audio post-production house also based in Malaysia.

Tripod was fully-funded by MAVCAP, the Malaysian government’s venture capital firm. MAVCAP’s endorsement and investment was key to greenlighting Tripod’s production of “War of the Worlds: Goliath” (of which “ARES” was now called), which had by now shifted focus from a TV series to an animated feature film. 

Soon, other Malaysian government agencies and funds supported “Goliath”, including the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) and Bank Simpanan Nasional. 

It’s not so much a sequel to the original HG Wells’ book as it is a “what if” scenario:  What if HG Wells’ book was really an eye witness’ journal of a historical global Martian invasion in 1899?  It’s just one man’s story, in an event that would have millions of stories to tell from perspectives all over the world experiencing the invasion.  By then, we got Kevin Eastman, the co-creator of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and owner/publisher of “Heavy Metal” magazine on board as Executive Producer, and David Abramowitz, the creative mind behind the acclaimed “Highlander” TV series, as a producer and writer of the script. Joe helmed the movie as director.  And so it began.

Read Full Post »

MSU Graphics Stereoscopic Research Report (Part 1)

The Graphics & Media Lab CMC of Lomonosov Moscow State University has about 10 years’ experience in comprehensive analyzing of compressed video. Recently the Graphics & Media Lab (further: the Lab) has published its first detailed report on Stereo-Film-Quality Analysis within VQMT3D (Video Quality Measurement Tool for 3D) Project. Meanwhile the Lab is working on the next four reports on stereoscopic video quality estimation. They are expected to be made public in the second half of 2013.

Stereo and multiview video entertainment has become a very popular trend. A rapidly growing demand for 3D films after Avatar release inspired the production houses to create a lot of new stereo content. But sometimes doing fast doesn’t mean doing it well enough. Insufficient stereo video quality provoked in the audience such ‘special effects’ as eyestrain and headache after visiting 3D cinemas. The Lab decided to analyze five stereo films, captured with stereoscopic camera systems and to investigate the reasons of the irritating annoyance. Finding just a set of bad frames is rather a simple task, but it is not a useful result for a comparative analysis. For achieving a valuable result it’s important to estimate a ratio of bad and well-done frames in a movie. Such results enable finding the worst frames in one movie or comparing different films.  For the purpose of revealing stereoscopic errors the Lab developed a unique tool for stereo video quality measurement (VQMT3D). Its algorithms are able to discover the key reasons of visual discomfort from 3D films viewing:

1. horizontal disparity

2. vertical disparity

3. color mismatch

4. sharpness mismatch

Read Full Post »

3D Entertainment Summit is cancelled

Press Release:

From before the release of AVATAR up until the release of MAN OF STEEL, the questions surrounding 3D have for the most part, been answered.

Will AVATAR be successful, in 3D. No question about it. Will 3D become a creative tool used by top flight directors? Ask Martin Scorcese, Baz Lurhman, M Knight Shyamalan and the many others. Will television display makers add 3D as a built in feature in new sets? That answer is in and 3D is a part of virtually every new set available.

There are still questions about the growth of 3D. Will sports continue to be broadcast in 3D, will prime time television be offered in 3D, will 3D glasses become a thing of the past? Time will answer these questions but the basic question of the viability and sustainability of 3D has been answered and is no longer challenged.

We have been an advocate and a supporter of 3D from its very formative stages and have attempted to answer all 3D related questions as the technology evolved. For now, we feel there is little more we can do in the context of a two or three day conference to advance the knowledge beyond what it is so we have decided to postpone the 3D Entertainment Summit past 2013.

As with all technologies when new ones enter a market they are disruptive yet opportunistic as well. There will be new ones, we will be on the lookout for them and when the next generation of story telling is affected by technology and creates more questions than answers we will return with our conference team to endeavor to activate discussion and seek answers.

For now we want to thank our sponsors, supporters, speakers and attendees. We wish you all the very best and hope 3D has become a new area of success for you and we look forward to working with you again, down the road.

Read Full Post »

Why ESPN 3D failed

Just a quick note on the ESPN 3D news today and my take on why the channel failed:
1) Marketsize: There aren’t enough 3DTV’s in the market yet. Broadcast, by definition, means that you have to reach a large audience in order to make economic sense. So, unfortunately ESPN was a few years too early. The action for 3D content is in Home Video and VOD as the dealflow of 3DContentHub shows.
2) Sports Rights: the nature of sports rights and sports franchises is such that it is almost impossible to own multi territory rights. Hence ESPN couldn’t sell their 3D assets overseas to the countries where 3D is performing better than in the USA. And they were also prevented to license their content to global customers such as VOD platforms or hardware makers.
3) Shelf Life: I wrote in January 2012 “most sport events lose their entire commercial value after the initial live broadcast.”  So, to have a channel with sports events is not necessarily the right “genre” as you have to re-run a lot of content during the day. And re-runs of live sports events isn’t so attractive to viewers.
4) High Costs:  Sports events require multiple cameras and in many cases two separate production crews (2D and 3D). This is (too) costly, especially if the addressable market of 3D TVs is still so small.
5) 3D Technology: we also have  to see the bigger picture and admit that the current 3D technology is not offering an enjoyable consumer experience and may not indeed be ready for the mainstream yet. 3D has not been as popular with the general public and the industry could potentially be making the same mistakes with 4k again. Here is me tackling the question “Is 3D Dead?”

As I wrote last week and have spoken about on many occasions, it is important to point out that it is not (the current) 3D or 4k what matters; In the future we will have ultra high definition screens and glasses-free 3D. Auto stereoscopic displays is where this is all going. So building 3D skills and 4k capabilities is a wise strategy for broadcasters and producers alike. Let me know your thoughts.

 

Read Full Post »