More Thoughts on 3D Cinema and Stereoscopic Conversion

This morning at Special Agent, we had a nice visit from our old lighting director from Wildbrain. In animation terms, he is the person who puts the lights into a 3D scene, renders it out into many passes and composites together, giving you the final image you see. Lately he has been doing lot of work in stereoscopic conversion. Naturally, I had lots of geeky questions to ask him regarding the process and the state of this new industry.
The process can be broken up into two parts, both of which are dreadfully tedious. The first part is building geometry in a 3D application that approximates the scene on screen. The resolution of these models tends to be very low. For a human face for example, you can get away with a simple head shape with indents for the eyes, and a few points pushed forward for the nose. Sounds like not too much trouble for one frame, but they have to move this geometry around for each frame to track its movement. The movie image is essentially projected onto the scene through the camera to give you your stereoscopic image. But now you have a new problem with the stuff going on behind your character. Your left eye sees around the left side of his head. Your right eye sees a little around the right side. In short, you're seeing more visual information than there exists on that frame of film. This is where the second part comes in.
Artists have to go in and digitally paint in all that missing information by hand. Sometimes it can be grabbed from another frame where the character is standing elsewhere. Sometimes you can "rubber stamp" it from another part of the frame. Sometimes, you just have to make it up.
It would be an understatement to say that converting a film into stereoscopic 3D is a lot of work. There are tricks and tools being developed to speed up the process for an artist, but like any production process, only so much can be automated. To movie executives, it is not seen as an artistic endeavor, but as a magic button that converts a film several months and millions of dollars later. The new demand has sprouted new studios in countries where labor is cheap. Hungry for contracts, they are agreeing to do it for less and less. The quality of the work being produced is suffering and going largely unnoticed by the untrained eye.
It saddens me to think that this new industry that has such amazing potential is in a race to the bottom. I see the shrinking budget trend happening over the last few years in the animation industry. But when I look back to the early 90's when animation bounced back from the desert wasteland that was the 80's, I have some faith that more avatar-like movies will clearly spell out to viewers and investors what real money can buy.

On a side note, I also learned that about half of the live-action shots in Avatar were converted from 2d due to some shots looking too flat, or spoiled with light artifacts.