“2D – 3D Conversion Can Be Better Than Native 3D”



Dr Barry Sandrew, Founder of 2D 3D Conversion Company Legend3D, Talks Exclusively to 3DFocus.co.uk

Legend3D has converted some of the most high profile 3D movies ever released and at eight movies will be 2D to 3D converted by Legend3D over the next 7 months including all three Shrek films. Legend3D also recently won the 2010 Most Innovative New Product (MIP) Award at CONNECT'S 23rd Annual MIPAwards for its 2D – 3D conversion technology.

Will 2D – 3D conversion ever be as good as native 3D? What’s happening with Titanic 3D? How does 2D to 3D conversion work? Dr Barry Sandrew has all the answers.

3DF: How does 2D – 3D conversion get better? Is it getting better with every new project Legend3D is working on? Is 2D to 3D conversion a constantly evolving skill?

Dr Barry Sandrew: We know we are achieving our established goals when the Legend3D proprietary 2D 3D conversion process and technology becomes faster and more efficient. Our most important goal is realised when our clients let us know that we have achieved a significant level of quality, exceeding their expectations. The Legend3D creative team is continuously refining, experimenting and advancing their craft and, together with our full-time team of R&D engineers, they are steadily advancing the sophistication of our process and technology.

Each feature film we take on presents its own set of unique challenges. The Legend 3D creative team presents these challenges to our software engineers and the two collaborate on the creation of new tools that will provide a wide range of conversion solutions. Consequently, with every new feature film converted by Legend3D, we are building a serious suite of tools that will allow us to more efficiently create high quality 3D films in the future.

3DF: When I watched your 2D to 3D conversion presentation during the 3D Experience in New York (2010), I was blown away and it made a good argument for converting all content from 2D to 3D rather than shooting in native 3D. However, since then I have spoken to a couple of Directors who have told me that 2D – 3D conversion will never be as good or preferable to native 3D. What are your comments?

Dr Barry Sandrew: Well first of all, everyone has to acknowledge that humans do not view 3D cinema the same way they experience binocular vision in real life.  That's because 2D 3D conversion and stereo capture are both Hollywood illusions and when we are performing a conversion we are producing extremely complex, full feature film visual effects. Both conversion and stereo capture require the theatre going audience to experience an aberration in how their visual physiology works, so when I hear people calling capture “real” and conversion  “fake”, it drives me a little nuts as does the term "native" capture because there's very little "native" involved.   Such comments often reflect an inadequate understanding of the underlying technology of stereo cinema and the physiology employed in human binocular vision from our retinas to our higher brain areas. 

Because both synthetic stereo methods are treated the same by our visual system, they should look the same when placed next to each other.  We have demonstrated that the difference between captured stereo and 2D – 3D conversion can be imperceptible when done correctly.    In fact, we have just finished converting part of a trailer for a feature film that includes scenes that were shot in stereo 3D, as well as 2D scenes that our team then converted. In our recent screenings of the trailer neither the filmmaker nor the rest of the crew could tell the difference between the scenes that were shot in 3D versus the portion that we converted.

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It should be stressed that shooting in stereo is not without its challenges, for example, when shooting with an over/under 3D rig that uses a mirror beam splitter to accommodate the close interaxial normally required; the camera that shoots through the mirror is shooting polarized light, while the camera shooting the reflection is not.  This is just one instance that can lead to conflicting images.  In this case, one eye sees a reflection on a window and the other eye does not.  It's not a show stopper, but this is one point to display the myth that shooting in 3D is an automatic easy way to create 3D or that it's somehow more "natural" than 2D 3D conversion.

3DF: You mentioned that you would have refused the conversion of Clash of the Titans due to the short turnaround. Can you please tell me what sort of timescale is involved behind a successful 2D – 3D conversion?

Dr Barry Sandrew: We were not approached to convert Clash of the Titans, but had we been asked we would have refused the project because there was simply not enough time to provide a quality conversion. We recently converted three animated feature films for Dreamworks which took about eight weeks each but even that would be considered fast. Anything upwards of 12 weeks, with an average of around 16 weeks, is what we would usually aim for to complete a high quality conversion.  Currently we have four feature films in various stages of 2D – 3D conversion.

3DF: Is Legend3D converting Titanic into 3D?

Dr Barry Sandrew: No, we are not at the present time converting Titanic into 3D and neither is anyone else from what we understand. I've received word from pretty reliable sources that Cameron, et al., are still deciding what to do and when to do it. We did, however, produce a 3D Titanic demo that I consider one of the best examples of 3D conversion that’s ever been produced.

3DF:  Are there certain ways of filmmaking which facilitate a successful 2D – 3D conversion?

Dr Barry Sandrew: Not necessarily, and that's the beauty of what we at Legend3D do. If a film is being produced with the intention of it being converted to 3D, it should inherently have ideal framing and blocking for 3D because the director will likely be working off of a depth score, similar to a music score but designating how depth will be used to tell the story.  However, it’s not absolutely essential to pre-produce a film with 3D in mind in order to have a stunning 3D feature film or 3D Blu-ray release. We have done 2D – 3D conversion work on catalogue titles and the stereo looks natural and absolutely stunning. They look as though they were originally produced in 3D or at least planned for 3D. 

To date, Legend3D has produced two films that were scheduled to be 3D from the start of pre-production and 5 films that are either catalog titles or titles that went through conversion in post-production. Not one of our conversions has been panned for bad stereo.  Quite the contrary, without exception, every film Legend3D has converted over the past year has been lauded as the highest quality stereo feature film product anyone has seen.

3DF: Has Legend3D attempted to convert footage from the 90s, 80s maybe even 50s? In theory, is it possible to convert anything from 2D – 3D?

Dr Barry Sandrew: I can go further back than that!  The International 3D Society is presenting the first Harold Lloyd award for excellence in 3D filmmaking on February 10th, 2011. Of course everyone knows Harold Lloyd was a very famous silent comedy actor but what many people don't know is that he was also a huge 3D enthusiast. He took about 200,000 stereoscopic pictures in his lifetime of famous Hollywood actors and actresses, world landscapes, etc. — you name it; he did it all in stereo.  He started the first 3D Society in Los Angeles in the 1950s and was quoted as saying “3D is the future of entertainment.”

Harold Lloyd was most certainly a visionary and the International 3D Society will honour him and his accomplishments in the medium with this special recognition that will be awarded each year to contemporary 3D film makers. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, recently approached me with some of her grandfather’s iconic footage.  She wanted Legend3D to convert the footage so that it could be screened before she comes out to present the Harold Lloyd award. She provided us with about 10 minutes of some of Harold Lloyd's best known footage and said, “just do something special with it,” and we did.

The converted footage that we provided The International 3D Society simply blew away the audience when it was previewed last fall at the society's black tie event honoring 3D technology award recipients. There’s something about that particular 2D 3D conversion that never fails to impress.  In fact, people have commented that what we did with the Harold Lloyd footage is more spectacular than a lot of the new 3D feature films that have come out recently, even though the converted footage we produced was originally released in 2D in 1923.

3DF: Have you been approached to convert premium television programs for 3D channels like Sky here in the UK?

Dr Barry Sandrew: We are getting requests from television people for projects such as movie specials and documentaries but unfortunately television programming typically doesn't have sufficient budgets for quality 2D to 3D conversions.  Also, there is not yet enough of a user base in the home so advertisers are cautious about spending money on 3D ads. You can certainly find people who will offer 2D – 3D conversion very cheaply but in this arena, but as has been too frequently demonstrated, you get precisely what you pay for.  Those conversions will never come close to the conversion quality produced by Legend3D.

3DF: The 2D – 3D conversion industry is new and your background has been very successful in colorisation. How have you become so successful in 2D – 3Dconversion? After all, it is not like there was ever a “How To Do 2D – 3D Conversion” manual when you first started! Was your expertise in colorisation helpful and if so how? How have you learned the process so successfully from scratch?

Dr Barry Sandrew: Well there wasn’t a “how to do colorisation” when I started producing colorised feature films in 1987 either.  But five years ago when I began R&D on our stereo process, the beginning part of the 2D to 3D conversion process was pretty intuitive to me because I saw it to be essentially the same as what I have been doing with colorisation over the past two decades. That is, we take a movie and break it apart into scenes and shots.  Then we design each shot by masking, which some people call roto, every object and parts of objects in each frame of the film. 

We have a proprietary process we developed for colorisation which we simply call masking.  Those masks were originally used to identify where and what certain colours are designed to be. In 2D to 3D conversion, rather than applying colour using these masks, we apply depth. We developed a whole new process for converting these masked frames into 3D in a unique way.  No other vendor of stereo conversion in the industry is doing stereo in the same manner as Legend3D.  I have been working on this technology and process with my colleague and collaborator Greg Passmore since the fall of 2005 and the comprehensive suite of stereo conversion tools Legend3D has developed is pretty remarkable.

3DF:  Could you describe a scene that is less timely to convert and a scene that is very difficult to convert from 2D – 3D.

Dr Barry Sandrew: This is going to surprise you but a shot that has heavy visual effects and lots of activity and action is easier to convert than a scene with two people sitting in a stylish restaurant eating dinner with a camera moving around them. It is harder to convert the simpler scene because the audience has more time to examine it, so every pixel has to be more precise.  In an action scene there is more creative interpretation, requiring a different type of precision that is more subjective and somewhat more forgiving.

3DF: Does the 2D to 3D conversion industry face a competitive future? And how is Legend3D going to ensure its reputation going forward?

Dr Barry Sandrew: 2D to 3D conversion is not at all an easy thing to do. We take an entire feature film with maybe 150,000 to 160,000 frames and design every single pixel of those frames by adding depth and then rendering it out to improve upon the original visual effects. It is a very difficult process that requires an army of artists with a lot of talent so there are considerable barriers to entry. There are a few studios like Legend3D who can convert an entire feature film but it is less than a handful. There are some boutique visual effects houses that can do a minute or so of conversion; perhaps a commercial, but to convert an entire feature film is a different world entirely. The studios are still working to sort out the real vendors from snake-oil vendors as more fly-by-night studios make claims that they can convert whole feature films on a minimal budget.  There will be quite a few of these companies coming up from the floorboards that will want to do conversion and they will do it at a very cheap price, undercutting everybody. There are even some films out now that are prime examples of very poor quality conversion. Legend3D has won the label from our clients and from much of the industry as the pinnacle of conversion in terms of quality and we are doing everything necessary to maintain that quality.

3DF:  What is your view about 3D in general and why do you think it might be successful this time around? Sky in the UK is very aggressive in marketing their 3D channel.  Is there quite a bit of 3D activity in America?

Dr Barry Sandrew: ESPN, HBO, etc., are all going 3D. All the TV manufacturers are selling 3D TVs at normal HDTV prices with stereo functionality built in so there will be a large installed user base even among those buyers who never intended to own a 3D HDTV.  As more and more people purchase HDTVs with the 3D functionality built in, the interest in 3D will most certainly continue to grow.  Interest will come first in gaming and broadcast sports but there will also be concerts, historical events, plays, etc.  Blu-ray 3D titles are already making their way to the retail shelves. This trend is literally unstoppable because there's too much big money invested in its future.

3DF:  As the cost of filming in native 3D comes down and possibly matches the cost of 2D 3D conversion, will your core business be archive conversion or are there other benefits to conversion aside from cost?

Dr Barry Sandrew: Shooting in 3D is a whole different animal compared to 2D and a lot of filmmakers don’t feel comfortable filming in 3D; they would rather shoot in the format they feel most comfortable, and that is 2D. The filmmakers we are dealing with right now understand that with conversion, their film will look as good if not better than if it were shot in 3D. When I say “better” there are a lot of challenges in shooting in 3D.  3D takes a lot of talent and technology that people have not acquired yet and 3D rigs aren’t all that precise; you have to "fix" shots all the time. So you take into consideration all the extra time and hassle at every stage of pre-production, production and post-production as well as the added expense of the 3D rigs, which can cost up to $250,000 each, and conversion becomes a much easier, more attractive decision to make.

3DF: Can you the 3D Focus readers something about Legend3D or 2D to 3D conversion in general that you have not told any other journalist?

Dr Barry Sandrew: We are on the verge of completing development on a new suite of conversion tools that promises to dramatically enhance both the speed and quality of the Legend3D product. I wish I could go into more detail but all I can tell you is that the development will be the most significant differentiator to date among the field of conversion vendors.

3DF: How important is the media’s resolution? For example, is converting a 4K feature easier than converting a 525 line episode of a 90s episode of The X-Files?

Dr Barry Sandrew: I feel that stereo does not hold up well unless it's produced at HD resolution at a minimum. Generally, I feel that the higher resolution, the better and more successful the 3D effect will turn out.  However there are diminishing returns. Most film makers I think agree that 2K is sufficient for high quality stereo cinema. Certainly, visual effects are rarely produced at higher resolutions.

3DF:  Passmore Labs also do 2D – 3D conversion and I presume Greg Passmore is the person you referred to earlier. Do Passmore and Legend3D share similar technology?

Dr Barry Sandrew: Greg and I use the same technology. Only Greg's concentrations are documentaries, cult films and his own indie productions. He's a masterful craftsman when it comes to 3D capture and he uses conversion to supplement his work with the stereo camera rigs he's developed.  He's also a brilliant software engineer and a great collaborator, so i see our partnership continuing indefinitely as Legend3D continues to assume a commanding position as Hollywood's premier conversion vendor.

THANK YOU DR BARRY SANDREW FROM LEGEND3D FOR TAKING THE TIME TO SPEAK TO 3DFOCUS.CO.UK.

If you would like to discover more about Legend3D visit www.Legend3d.com

READ ABOUT LEGEND 3D CONVERTING SHREK TO 3D

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