Steve Crook

Has everybody got their 3D glasses for The Queen in 3D on Channel 4 tomorrow evening?

I just picked up mine from our local Sainsbury's

Steve

earlb

I've been looking at the Channel 4 website and a lot of their images are red/green but the glasses being supplied are red/blue. Since I have a wide array of 3D glasses I find the red/green are miles better than the other. It remains to be seen what I think 'On the night'.

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

Carl V

It sounds like a very interesting documentary, however I can't honestly say I'm very enthusiastic about 3-D on television, bearing in mind previous attempts by broadcasters in the past. Maybe this might be better.

darrenburnfan

I picked up my free 3D spectacles from Sainsbury's a few days ago and was half expecting to be stopped on the way out by a store detective, as I quite obviously put them in my bag without paying for them...but whoever the store detectives are in Sainsbury's, they're obviously not that stupid!

The sellophane "lenses" in mine are amber for the left eye and blue for the right. I'm looking forward to seeing this 3D documentary from 1953 about the Coronation and other royal highlights of the year, on Monday and Tuesday nights from 9 pm till 10 pm, as the films have never been publicly shown before.

Nobody ends like they started out.

Film Man

Good on Ch 4...a brave and costly thing to do...I wish them well! I'll record the prog's on DVD and see what they are like on a big screen projected.
Film Man.

Mark O

Got my glasses and i'll be watching it, though as i'm working tuesday evening i'll record the second programme on video, which i assume on playback will still have the 3-D effect!

Mark

Johnallan

Shouldn't these posts be on the recent 'Channel 4 3D TV' thread? Just a thought.

winsfordtown

Limiting free 3D glasses to just one supermarker chain is rank amateur.

Steve Crook

Very impressive

As they said in the programme, some shots show the effect better than others and some people might have difficulty in seeing the effect as well as others (but not as much as with the Magic Eye pictures)

But when it worked well it worked very well

They used orange and blue filters in the glasses, not the usual cyan & red and the images on screen seem to use a blue and yellow separation. That gave a very good depth effect while still leaving most of the picture quite watchable without the glasses.

Of course it is still just a flat anaglyph image which isn't really 3D, it just gives the illusion of depth by varying the colour separation. You can see this if you have an image on screen which gives an impression of depth and then you move your head to the left and right. You can't see around the images in the foreground.

But if you just sit back and enjoy it, it is a most enjoyable effect.

However, it was spoiled somewhat by the heavy handed reminders of when to put on and when to remove the glasses. If they'd cut those out they could have made the programme 5 or 10 minutes longer. And if they hadn't felt the need to remind us what we were watching every time we came back from one of the many ad breaks then we could have had another 5 minutes of the programme

But this film is an amazing find and I'm glad that it was preserved

Steve

darrenburnfan

Well, I just watched the Coronation and other royal events of 1953 in 3D on Channel 4. Some of it looked impressive and there was definitely an illusion of depth in many scenes, including the modern footage. But the system is nowhere near perfected yet and it tends to strain the eyes and, of course, the brightness of the picture is reduced when you look at it though the spectacles.

The problem with 3D both in 1953 and now is that you have to somehow make each eye look equally at a separate image and in the cinema and on television, this is a difficult thing to achieve. The 3D ViewMaster viewer reels of the Coronation I have look far better because with a viewer you really can make each eye look at a separate image and, of course, the brightness isn't affected.

I remember being taken to see a 3D film at the cinema as a six year old in 1953 and my impressions then were the same as now. The image through the 3D spectacles looked a lot dimmer than a usual film and made my eyes hurt after a few minutes and gave me a headache.

In tonight's presentation, objects nearer the camera looked okay, but those further away had a double image on them, even through the spectacles. Still impressive, though. The 1953 film may have looked even better projected in a cinema through polarising filters, but the present set up was okay for now.

Nobody ends like they started out.

orpheum

The programme makers made out as if this was a long lost discovery which it wasnt.the films have been shown at the NFT>They also made out that 3D virtually died the death in 1953 which it most certainly has not.It is true that it did appear in the cinemas and that the impact only lasted a short time.However it has been with us ever since.
It was clear to me that the programme makers did not have enough faith in their material to rely on it.Instead we got all that sycophantic gush about the Queen.I found it all very boring.I also found that it strained my eyes so eventually i took off the glasses and turned back to the Randolph Scott western that i was watching for probably the tenth time.Far more exciting!

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football

Moor Larkin

I didn't make the Queen but tried to watch the Derren Brown nonsense that came on afterwards and spent most of my time putting the glasses on, squinting and having to take them off again.......

Film Man

Have to agree with Orpheum...making out that it was a 'lost' film...when it has been knocking around the NFT for years...they even had the two Kallee projectors set up in a room for ages, just waiting to be kicked back into life.

I was hoping that the quality would be as good as 'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth' Blue Ray...but it wasn't! Just hope the 'History of 3-D on Saturday makes up for it all!
Film Man.

darrenburnfan

1953 was the year that cinemas decided whether to go for 3D, or to opt for the then incoming medium of CinemaScope, both weapons the industry employed to lure patrons back into the cinemas as television started to become popular, especially after the Coronation.

The problems with 3D at that time were two-fold. It was technically difficult to present properly in the average cinema and audiences found that having to wear the cardboard spectacles was a bit of a nuisance. For this reason, 3D feature films like Inferno and Dial M For Murder were shown in 2D at most cinemas.

On the other hand, CinemaScope was expensive to install (an average of £3,000 for each cinema at 1953 prices), but only required a wider screen and a special anamorphic lens fitted to the projector (to each projector, of course, as, long before the days of a whole programme being mounted on a "cakestand feeder", the reels would alternate between two projectors every twenty minutes or so). 4-track, magnetic stereophonic sound was also part of the CinemaScope package and added to the expense, but helped to create a "you are there" type of experience as a substitute for 3D.

Publicised in 1953 as "The Modern Miracle You See Without Special Glasses", so as to distance the process from 3D, CinemaScope won out, with most cinemas in the UK being equipped to show it by 1957. Although no one could say that CinemaScope films, even at their best, had any 3D effect whatsoever, the large, wide, curved panoramic picture looked far more real than your standard shaped picture and the wide screen is still with us, fifty-six years later, while they still seem to be struggling to get 3D off the ground.

Another problem with 3D was limited product available to cinemas. Very few films were made in 3D compared to the hundreds that were eventually made in CinemaScope and other 35mm anamorphic systems and 70mm wide screen systems such as Todd-AO and Technirama 70.

In the early 1970's, when cinemas were closing in droves, I remember my old cinema boss telling me: "If the industry had stuck with 3D and perfected it, instead of going for the quick option of CinemaScope, the cinema would by now (1972) be out on its own over television. The industry spent millions on CinemaScope and where did it get us? Nowhere! They should have stuck with 3D."

Nobody ends like they started out.

earlb

As stated in my earlier posting I have now had the opportunity to check with my array of blue/green and blue/red 3D glasses.
My conclusion? I was able to see the 3D effect much better with my red/green glasses which made the picture appear much brighter(something Darrenburnfan commented on). Years ago the rage was red/green but somewhere along the way someone had the bright idea of changing to red/blue, I suppose because they were opposite ends of the spectrum thereby assuming better seperation. I hope first timer 3D fans didn't assume this was what 3D was all about and pooh pooh it as a non runner. 3D IS MUCH MORE AND BETTER THAN THAT.A lot of the Coronation footage was shot at a distance and with objects far away you cant see round them where close ups give better effect (look at distance objects in a panorama with no glasses and it looks very flat). Next: The definition of the film left a lot to be desired but this unfortunately was down to the film stock they used which was available at the time. Last: It is down to the individual what their eyes pick up and how the brain assembles that information and how the TV is lined up colourwise.
THE CASE FOR: My friend and I have been making 3D films since the early 60's, on 35m/m slides and 8m/m movies using a 4 'surface coated' mirror system using red/green and polaroid. The seperation is still excellent today but in this digital camera age I have to go back to film for 3D as I haven't yet worked out how to transfer to TV. We got so advanced at one stage that we applied an anamorphic lens to shoot in 3D and scope on 8m/m and the effect was astounding. Since those early days I built a 4 mirror system with the eye seperation at 5 inches instead of the customary 2.5 inches and you could almost put your hand behind the subject which seemed to stand out so much. My parents weren't too pleased to see a silver pearlux screen across their lounge while they allowed me my fantasies.
To me 3D definitely works but ONLY with ideal conditions.

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.