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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Complaints at 3-D "Jason Bourne" shows in China
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 08-27-2016 10:37 AM
quote: Breitbart (my emphasis) Moviegoers in China have taken to social media to complain of dizziness and nausea after viewing a special 3D presentation of action film Jason Bourne, released in the country this week.
Chinese newspaper the Global Times reported Friday that dozens of fans who bought tickets to the Matt Damon-starring action flick have requested refunds, as they say the film’s conversion into 3D was an ill-advised move given director Paul Greengrass’s penchant for shaky camera movement and fast-paced editing.
Bourne distributor Universal Pictures had rolled out a “special” 3D presentation of the film in most theaters in the country, leaving many fans who wanted to see the film with no other option; just eight of Beijing’s 149 movie theaters and nine of Shanghai’s 174 theaters were reportedly showing the film in its original 2D presentation.
One fan, Zhou Yuchen, reportedly organized a protest along with other 30 moviegoers at a Beijing theater to demand a refund of their tickets.
“The 3D version is a rip-off,” Zhou told the Global Times. “It’s been happening many times in China and must be stopped.”
Universal issued a statement saying they were working to provide more 2D copies of the film to Chinese cinemas, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Jason Bourne had grossed $25.1 million after three days of release in China, according to THR. The film’s worldwide gross sits at $281.3 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
Annoyingly, it doesn't say what 3-D system was involved. Is this a movie that was never shot with dual cameras, but processed through some software that does some sort of a digital Pulfrich effect to produce a pseudo 3-D version? If so, no wonder it didn't go down well, especially among audiences that are used to genuine 3-D.
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Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler
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From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Registered: Sep 2003
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posted 08-27-2016 11:05 AM
quote: Leo Enticknap Annoyingly, it doesn't say what 3-D system was involved. Is this a movie that was never shot with dual cameras, but processed through some software that does some sort of a digital Pulfrich effect to produce a pseudo 3-D version? If so, no wonder it didn't go down well, especially among audiences that are used to genuine 3-D.
Bourne was a post conversion 3D, it was not shot in stereo.
However, that is no longer a super useful guide to good 3D. Robert Zemeckis' "The Walk," for example, was shot with a single camera, and converted to 3D in post. But that was a film that was intended to be in 3D from the beginning. Everything from the storyboards to the shot composition to the editing was executed with the final 3D version in mind - but doing the conversion in post gives the director and DP a level of control that you lack when simply shooting a stereo image.
I should think that it's blindingly obvious that Jason Bourne was never mean to be shown in 3D, and even a high quality conversion would probably not work.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 08-28-2016 12:28 AM
The 2-D and 3-D versions are different versions of the DCP, that need different KDMs. Though for most of the big studio releases, the 2-D and 3-D versions come on the same hard drive.
What I suspect they actually mean by this statement, therefore, is that the studio is issuing KDMs for the 2-D version to all the Chinese theaters that are asking for them.
As for Greengrass, he cut his teeth shooting TV documentaries on 16mm and ENG gear, composing and framing his shots for an audience watching a 28" tube. He never really understood that this technique doesn't scale up to 'scope on a 60 foot cinema screen very well (at least not, as Brad points out, without provoking some gastro-intestinal action from the audience).
The one thing I admire him for is not a movie, but his part in bringing Spycatcher into print. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into the technology used by the real life James Bonds to, quoting from the book, "...bug and burgle their way across London at the state's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way." I stopped reading when I got to the chapters about how the head of MI5 was gay and being blackmailed by the Russians, but the first half, which goes into a lot of techie detail, is fascinating, and well worth a read.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 08-28-2016 02:22 PM
The basic way you do the conversions is to exploit the Pulfrich effect to make a guess, informed by fiendishly complicated math, at the distance in depth between two objects represented in a 2-D photograph, and then to use that to create a separate right eye image.
I'm not conscious of having seen any of these conversions (the last two 3-D movies I saw in their entirety were Cinderella and the Wim Wenders ballet documentary; AFAIK, both were actually shot stereo), but my guess would be that some software does a better job than others at exploiting this optical trick, and that how much depth of field and distance between foreground/subject/object in the source shot affects how convincing the resulting pseudo-3D looks, too.
It was a similar principle whereby there were many attempts from the '30s to the '60s to create a blue image from two strip or duplitized/bipack red and green original records by printing the yellow and cyan negatives successively through filters to create a pseudo-magenta strip; arguably the most successful was the one jerry-rigged by British Technicolor for the 1948 Olympics movie, but even then, the grass looks turquoise, even on original IB prints!
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