Stereoscopic errors of five 3D movies revealed

A free downloadable 246 page report from the MSU Graphics & Media Lab evaluates five stereoscopic movies and highlights various disparity problems thought to cause headaches.

The first report from the VQMT3D project looks at horizontal/vertical disparity and colour/sharpness mismatch in the films 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' (2011), 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' (2010), 'Step Up 3D' (2010), 'Galapagos: The Enchanted Voyage' (1999) and 'Into the Deep' (1994).

In the foreward, Project Head Dmitriy Vatolin of Lomonosov Moscow State University states:

“We were surprised when even very simple yet reliable metrics that should be calculated on the fly even during shooting (vertical parallax and colour mismatch) revealed numerous problems affecting stereo quality. Clearly, the widespread adoption of stereo 3D will occur when the flood of low-quality content is minimized and quality standards are introduced.  One of our goals is to dramatically increase the number of people who leave modern 3D theaters without headaches, but instead just good impressions of the image quality and storytelling. We hope that our work will help give stereo 3D more-consistent quality and increase its popularity among the general audience!

The report has been contributed to by stereographers Ross Copeland, Alfredo Gonzalez, Srboljub Hetlerovic, Jon Karafin and Julian Napier.

It has been written for other stereographers (it is not exactly ‘light reading’) but has the same quality of information as many ‘paid-for’ reports.

It comprises of three main parts.

1. Thorough description of visual-discomfort potential causes while viewing stereo 3D films.

2. Detailed analysis of five films. Each film description consists of two parts:
- Full per-frame analysis with charts showing metric values for each frame.
- Visualizations demonstrating artefacts in frames that earned a poor rating according to their metrics.

3. Overall film comparison. Charts depict the average metric values and distribution of these values in each film.

The VQMT3D (Video Quality Measurement Tool 3D) project was created to improve stereoscopic films, aiming is to help filmmakers produce high-quality 3D video by finding inexpensive ways of automatically enhancing film quality.

For more information and to download the report click here. 

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