We discussed earlier in the week the debate that has been circling about the longevity of the 3D revolution. And a poignant discussion has been raised which might give a technical reason for the slight movement back towards 2D from 3D ticket sales in cinemas, pointing at the lack of brightness as a possible cause.
Hollywood execs are insisting confidence, saying the 3D ticket sales are finding their natural water level as the initial hype inevitably wanes, but others are pointing to the cyclical history of 3D popularity, saying that it is finishing another cycle.
Steve Pond at thewrap.com offered a more technical explanation behind the current trend, pointing to the lack of brightness that the current 3D technology offers theater audiences:
At the Hero Complex Film Festival in downtown Los Angeles in June, Inception director Christopher Nolan joined the 3D naysayers, saying that he refused to make his new film in the format largely because of the darkness problem.
“On a technical level, it’s fascinating,” Nolan said of 3D, “but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating.”
The 3D process, Nolan said, makes “a massive difference” in the brightness of the image. “You’re not aware of it because once you’re in that world, your eye compensates – but having struggled for years to get theaters get up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything."
Nolan also got into the numbers, using “foot-lamberts” – the unit of luminance by which screen brightness is measured – to explain the difference between regular and 3D projection. But when he said that traditional 2D cinema is projected at 16 foot-lamberts, but 3D automatically loses three foot-lamberts, he was grievously underestimating the 3D effect.
In fact, a typical 3D system can lose as much as 80 percent or more of the light from a 2D system on the same screen, and result in an image projected at only two or three foot-lamberts.
“I think it’s a major problem for the audience appreciation of 3D,” says Lenny Lipton, a pioneer in the field since the early 1980s. “The principal complaint that audience members and industry people make is that it’s too dark.”
source: thewrap.com
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