By John Merli, July 29, 2010
Even people who have spent much of their lives in the picturesque Smoky Mountains will tell you they've never seen their surroundings quite like this before. While 2D HD probably would have done justice to the many natural and manmade attractions of the Tennessee towns of Gatlinburg, Sevierville and Pigeon Forge, capturing them in stereoscopic 3D brings an added dimension to the subject matter.
Now in postproduction after a spring shoot, the documentary 3 Cities in 3D was shot by veteran HD cinematographer Randall Dark with Panasonic's new AG-3DA1 twin-lens stereoscopic camera. Dark worked on this innovative marketing piece with locally based Cinemarr Entertainment of Sevierville, and CineForm, a software integrator and post house based in Solana Beach, Calif.
The 3D tourism production is earmarked for an initial broadcast on WealthTV, a six-year-old network based in San Diego that's been struggling to grow its cable carriage. Although Dark set up one of the nation's first HD production houses and continues to run his own shop—Randall Dark Productions in Austin, Texas—this was his first major 3D project. He said his biggest challenge was simply defining what the look and feel of the documentary should be.
"A knee-jerk reaction would have been to punch through that 'fourth wall' and do the familiar one-trick-pony effect, but 3D needs to be more than objects floating in front of your television," Dark says. "The animation studios have proven for years—and recently [Avatar] director James Cameron did, too—that a willing suspension of disbelief can happen in 3D and your audience can have a cathartic response to the storytelling. I want the effect to be a payoff, not just a trick."
Dark says he's always been driven to create video content using cutting-edge technology, which explains his early passion for the then-emerging medium of HD a couple of decades ago. But 3D technology, for its part, is hardly new. "Since 3D has been around for many years, I thought there was nothing new I could bring to the party. The latest pioneers of 3D were already creating very cool content and had established successful workflows. But then I saw [the 3DA1,] Panasonic's version of [the Pixar character] 'Wall-E.' The idea that a 3D camera could be really portable and truly user-friendly greatly appealed to me."
Dark had worked with Shane Marr, the head of Cinemarr Entertainment, on a PSA featuring Dolly Parton, whose Dollywood theme park is located in Pigeon Forge. Dark successfully pitched the 3D documentary to WealthTV and began researching cameras that would hold up under occasionally arduous field work. He and Marr found a suitably sturdy and functional camera in Panasonic's AG-3DA1.
"This camera made post much easier because there's no need to sync anything up," Marr says. "Image files aligned perfectly when the footage was loaded into the computer." Marr is using CineForm's Neo3D to mux left- and right-eye views in order to make any convergence tweaks necessary. The CineForm software also is being used for color correction. "Once that's complete, we import the files into [the editing platform] to start the cut."
Yet neither Marr nor Dark is exactly tossing HD aside for the challenges and artistic allure of 3D. "The AG-3DA1 is like shooting two projects at once," Marr adds. "You're shooting both 3D and two 2D HD views simultaneously—that is to say, the left- and right-eye views. It reminds me of something an old instructor of mine used to say: 'Shoot as much as you can. You can always take away, but you can't add.' So I say, shoot in 3D, and even if you only use the 2D version, you'll have the option of going back to the 3D version later." (Using just the left-eye channel of a stereoscopic 3D project usually produces acceptable HD 2D content.)
Introduced in April at the NAB Show, the AG-3DA1 will be available by late August. Panasonic's Jan Crittenden Livingston, the camera's product manager, envisions the compact unit as "broader-basing" the world of 3D to far more users. "We have reduced the cost of entry with the price point, along with making the [technology] easier to work with in comparison to what is normally required for 3D stereography. For 3D, this camera will impact and expand accessibility to a good number of television and production projects," Crittenden says.
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Still, Crittenden cautions, there are some 3D-specific idiosyncrasies that must be considered when shooting. "This little [6.5 lb.] camera requires the stereographer pay attention to two things, one being the parallax aberrations or anomalies caused by objects being too close to the camera and creating visual distractions. Operators have to take steps to avoid that. The second issue to pay close attention to are possible framing violations or edge violations, where, for example, some object enters the frame and at first can be seen by only one eye, left or right. This can cause a very disturbing effect on the part of the audience. Depending on how large that object is, it can feel like a linebacker just hit you or like a nervous twitch in your brain—either way, the effect is pretty uncomfortable,” Crittenden explains.
Although not all 3D projects are shot and postproduced in the same way—Crittenden says she recalls from watching a panel discussion that approximately 23 different cinema projector configurations were required for screening Avatar in 3D in the U.S.—3D content typically is edited in 2D (HD) as independent left eye, then a final conform for the right eye in 3D takes place at the end of post. But since the 3 Cities in 3D project used CineForm's Neo3D software in post, editors were able to view footage in 3D during the editing process.
According to CineForm CEO David Taylor, "This edit technique allows the elimination of 3D conform entirely and gives the ability to handle prints directly from the editing timeline to electronic 3D distribution or projection files." 3 Cities in 3D is now in the midst of being edited in real time with full-frame-rate playback to external 3D monitors. Taylor says that First Light, the workhorse app for making 3D adjustments in CineForm Neo3D, can work in tandem with Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer.
"We're within a day's drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population, and we're very much a tourist destination," says Lori McMahan Moore, executive director of the Smoky Mountain Tourist Development Council. "From our perspective, it's completely marketing. So far I've seen maybe a minute of the 3D footage, and I was absolutely blown away. So much of 3D is simply depth perception—not objects coming out at you off the screen. It was truly amazing," Moore says.
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