Toy Story in 3D...my take on it

[Gae43]

Went to see this yesterday and although it looked very nice, I wasn't particularly blown away by the 3D in it. Also, as per past 3d viewings, there was a lot of ghosting evident throughout the movie. The Cineworld that i visit uses the RealD setup which looks pretty top of the range but perhaps the ghosting is a problem with the type of screen that they use?
In "Toy Story" I believe that they used a similar device as they used in "Coraline" with regards the 3D. For the scenes in Andy's house, the 3D depth was kept to a minimum...we saw in-depth rounded characters, but the walls of the room themeselves seemed quite close around them. Once they went into the outside world, the 3D opened up and it looked excellent at times. The scenes in the Petrol Station and the garden attack near the end were highlights, with really nice depth of field....textures of plants standing out etc.
Some of the action scenes worked well in places but the problem I can see with these conversions is that because they weren't originally conceived in 3D, the editing speed and directional choice isn't always suited to promote the 3D element....for example, 3D works better with slower editing and an appreciation of moving into or across a scene. The action scenes in Toy Story were a little bit too quickly edited for us to totally absorb some of the 3D moments and at times you felt robbed when the scene quickly shifted from a scene where the 3D looked impressive. I think it will be an issue with all 2D to 3D conversions in the future. With new productions, no doubt because the film-makers will be watching the film in 3d as they edit it, they will be able to make different decisions based on how well the 3D element is working in conjunction with both narrative and dramatic elements.
Overall, Toy Story was a fine first effort at 2D to 3D conversion and although it looked excellent in places and it's nice to have this classic animation in the 3D format, there were times where the 3D did little to enhance the overall impact of the movie and perhaps didn't work as well as it would have for an originally conceived 3D movie .

Gae43

[cybereality]

Thanks for the review, I think I will check this out. However it is important to make a distinction here. Toy Story is not a "2D->3D conversion", as you say. The original creators went back an re-rendered the entire movie using 2 virtual cameras in the 3D package they used. It is a native stereoscopic production. When people say "2D->3D conversion" it is used to mean a movie which was shot in 2D with a single camera (live-action, for example, which can't be re-worked) and then later converted to 3D with post-processing. This is something different with Toy Story since the movie is 3D rendered to begin with it is fairly trivial to open the files and re-render just with another camera at an offset. However I do agree with you that since the movie was not originally produced in stereo that there may be some cuts that do not work particularly well with the medium.

[Gae43]

Ah yes, thanks for the correction Cybereality....it's not strictly a 2D->3D conversion, of course, as you mentioned.

I'm quite excited about the possibilities for the 3D re-rendering of animations, as it means that, technically, any classic cartoon of the past could be given the same treatment. 3D Tom and Jerry anyone?

Gae43

[GordoSan]

Ah yes, thanks for the correction Cybereality....it's not strictly a 2D->3D conversion, of course, as you mentioned.

I'm quite excited about the possibilities for the 3D re-rendering of animations, as it means that, technically, any classic cartoon of the past could be given the same treatment. 3D Tom and Jerry anyone?

Gae43

I'm going to be just as picky as Cybereality. A classic cartoon would indeed need to be a 2D->3D conversion. Cartoons are 2D in their very nature, as they are a moving hand-drawing with color. A re-rendering isn't possible unless you still had all of the painted cells, were OK with the chatacters looking like cut-outs, and OK with the backgrounds having no depth.

On the other hand, CG animation like PIXAR does is already 3D data. As long as the original data exists, you just need to render another viewpoint.

This is not to say that 2D->3D conversions of classic animation can't be done. They can, and supposedly they are way better than the early attempts at native 3D in cartoons in the past. A lot of people were impressed by what Disney showed of Beauty and the Beast recently. Of course, they did pick a scene that used some computer-created depth already. (ballroom scene)

Thanks for the Toy Story 3D review.

[cybereality]

Well I just went to see this tonight and I enjoyed the films. I had seen the first one many times before but I had only caught pieces of the second film so it was like seeing it for the first time start to finish. I think everyone has probably seen Toy Story so I won't bother with a plot synopsis. Its just like you remember, except in 3D. For its age, I think it held up pretty well. The story is classic and the rendering still looked decent (although I imagine they could have touched it up here and there while they were at it). The only parts that felt dated were the animation on the human characters. It looked really un-natural and jerky and not up to par with modern 3D animated films (Monsters vs Aliens, etc.). Otherwise I thought it was pretty decent. The 3D effects were pretty well done and I thought it worked well. I think there were definitely more tasteful stereo effects than the last 3D feature I saw, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I guess since the movie was already produced in 2D they didn't think to pull any paddle-ball to the camera 3D gimmicks. Plus the whole double-feature was almost 3 hours long and I did not feel any eyestrain or fatigue at all. A great testament to the quality of modern-day 3D digital projection. Its only going to be around for another week, so if you have a chance I'd recommend checking it out. I mean, 2 movies for the price of 1 and in 3D. You really can't go wrong.

In regards to the ghosting: I can tell you right now for a fact there is nearly no ghosting in the theater I went to. I don't want to say 'no ghosting' because, aside from HMDs, all 3D solutions have ghosting to some extent. However, for all intents a purposes, there is no discernible cross-talk. In fact, I was paying very close attention to this (just since you mentioned it) and throughout the film I tested the ghosting by taking the glasses off, closing one eye and then the other, holding the glasses so they were only over one eye, etc. I did this just about every 15-20 minutes and was checking for ghosting all the time. There really was practically none. Only in one scene did I see any ghosting at all. It was about 30 minutes into the first film, when they stop at the gas station. The gas station sign had a spinning logo and it was a bright white neon light. The scene was at night so the background was basically black. This bright white on pitch black scenario did produce some mild ghosting, but even in this "worst case scenario" it was barely 5-10% opacity of ghosting. Hardly even noticeable had I not been actively searching for it. And mind you, this was one 25 second shot in a total of 3 hours of footage that displayed any ghosting at all. For the other 2 hours and 59 minutes there was no ghosting whatsoever. Again, I have been to close to a dozen 3D films in 4 different theaters (3 RealD, 1 IMAX3D) and this was the first time I ever noticed any ghosting. So clearly not all theaters are created equal.

On that note, I think this particular theater I went to had the best setup I have ever seen for a 3D movie. At first I was skeptical because the screen seemed rather small. And something about the image looked more "digital". It was like I could see the individual pixels. But as soon as the previews started I knew I was in for an experience. The one 3D preview they had was for A Christmas Carol. I have seen this preview 3 times previously in 3D and I wasn't particularly impressed. However this time the 3D effects simply blew me away. Even just the Disney logo intro looked amazing and had immense depth with convincing popout effects. Once the trailer started I was practically speechless. Jim Carrey's face was popping out the screen, I could see the snow flakes flying around, everything looked really good. And like I said, I'd seen this many times before and not had the same experience. So clearly this theater had something going for it that was different. Maybe it was because I was sitting really close to a smaller screen (I was about 4 meters away and at that distance it almost filled my full FOV). I don't know, but something was different.

I would certainly like to see more 3D re-masters of older animations, but keep in mind they can only do this for 3D animated features or very recent 2D productions that used computer animation. Old cartoons like Tom and Jerry would not work because they were hand-drawn and, at most, would only have like 4 or 5 cels (flat layers) for them to composite. In that case they would need to do a 2D->3D conversion post-process and I am not sure how good that will look. That said, Disney is converting Beauty and the Beast to 3D and, from what I heard, its supposed to look really good. Now if someone went back and did that for Akira or Ghost in the Shell and released it in theaters I would be happy.

[Gae43]

I would certainly like to see more 3D re-masters of older animations, but keep in mind they can only do this for 3D animated features or very recent 2D productions that used computer animation. Old cartoons like Tom and Jerry would not work because they were hand-drawn and, at most, would only have like 4 or 5 cels (flat layers) for them to composite. In that case they would need to do a 2D->3D conversion post-process and I am not sure how good that will look. That said, Disney is converting Beauty and the Beast to 3D and, from what I heard, its supposed to look really good. Now if someone went back and did that for Akira or Ghost in the Shell and released it in theaters I would be happy.

My turn to disagree here.
Any artist worth his salt would be able to do a copy of an existing cartoon as a 3D side. I did a degree in art and know that it is straightforward to replicate existing artwork with a lot of time and patience. I'm sure there is a way, as they have proved with "Beauty and the Beast". The original cartoons could be digitally re-mastered and then re-rendered in a similar way that they do with Toy Story. If the motivation is there (or more than likely the monetary gain) then anything can be achieved IMO.
Remember too that the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons are only about 5 minutes long and so require a lot less work individually.
Gae43

[cybereality]

My turn to disagree here.
Any artist worth his salt would be able to do a copy of an existing cartoon as a 3D side. I did a degree in art and know that it is straightforward to replicate existing artwork with a lot of time and patience.

I'm sorry, this was not a matter of opinion. This was a technical limitation of the source material. Just like you cannot take a silent movie and magically restore the original sounds or take a black and white film and restore it into perfectly accurate color. In this same manner, it is not possible to take 2D source material and *restore* the depth information. That is lost forever. With a 2D hand-drawn cartoon there was never any depth to begin with. That said, depth could be added in a post-process production (like was done on G-Force, for example). This process typically involves re-creating the scene and characters with a 3d modeling package and then projecting the source video onto the 3d models. This can then be converted into stereoscopic 3D. Another technique involves hand-painting depth maps for each frame and converting it that way. What you seem to be talking about is taking each frame of animation and re-drawing it completely at another angle. That could be done, yes, but that is a whole lot of work. And since they animate on the computer now it would look strange to have one eye in old-school hand-drawn and one eye in perfect digital computer art style. So they would need to re-draw both views of every single frame along with the backgrounds. At that point it is no longer a conversion and is basically what would amount to a re-make. None of the original assets could be used in the final product. So even though it may be technically possible, from an economic standpoint I am not sure there would be much gain. It would seem the effort would be better spent on an original story based on the same characters (but modernized) or simply investing in new IP. And yes, I have an art degree as well, thank you very much.

[GordoSan]

My turn to disagree here.
Any artist worth his salt would be able to do a copy of an existing cartoon as a 3D side. I did a degree in art and know that it is straightforward to replicate existing artwork with a lot of time and patience. I'm sure there is a way, as they have proved with "Beauty and the Beast". The original cartoons could be digitally re-mastered and then re-rendered in a similar way that they do with Toy Story. If the motivation is there (or more than likely the monetary gain) then anything can be achieved IMO.
Remember too that the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons are only about 5 minutes long and so require a lot less work individually.
Gae43

What you are describing is basically the same thing they do for conversion of live action movies. It is not a perfect science. It takes some tweeking and a generous artistic license. (that may or may not be what the creator intended) I think that the standard is to keep the left eye image as is, and create a right eye image perspective, which takes artistic manipulation. To some people, this is like colorizing B&W films, and they will reject it. The thing is, I believe that animation would be much harder to convert than 2D live action. The reason is that the drawing character distorts and exadurates, where a real person always has the same shape. I have no problem with Disney doing their own stuff, as long as it doesn't alter the 2D version in the process. I already mentioned that they used a seen from Beauty and the Beast that had some computer 3D modeling in it, so its not even like they went with something completely 2D for their first test. They had to convert the characters but not the backgrounds. Hand-drawn backgrounds are going to be the tough one to convert because the perspective is not always in perfect 3D, and the camera movement in classic 2D animation almost always gives away that the backgrounds are not 3D, but fixed. Its what they choose to do with the backgrounds that will be the most controversial decisions, I think.

... If they would only convert Fantasia.


Anyway, when Cyber said "re-render", he meant simply render for the other eye, the same scene from a CGI movie that already existed. This was intended to imply that the source was already basically 3D, because thats how it exists in the computer anyway.