Shortage of 3D Screens Breeding ‘Caution’ On New Films, Sony’s Cookson Says

"Everybody that I know across all the studios is looking at every project they have to see what actually is helped by 3D,” Cookson said. “People have a greater appetite to do 3D than the number of screens makes them comfortable with.” Sony’s 3D film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was a “number one” hit in its first two weeks in theaters, he said. “Third week, you couldn’t find it, because Disney opened Toy Story,” pushing Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs literally “off the screen,” Cookson said. “In a world where it costs extra money to make a movie in 3D, you want to make sure you have a chance to play it out.” There’s also widespread doubt among the studios that enough homes will have 3D TV sets to justify the costs of packaged Blu-ray movies in 3D, he said.

It takes “a spectrum” of content, not just movies, “to appeal to a broad audience,” Cookson said, explaining why he thinks the slow increase in 3D theatrical films and their release as packaged Blu-rays shouldn’t be a problem for building a home 3D market. “There will not be enough movies by themselves to drive you to run out and buy a new 3D TV set just because I really liked Avatar or I wanted to see Cloudy or whatever,” Cookson said. “If you think about how many movies in the course of a year you really like, the question is, how many thousands of dollars each you would pay for one to watch? The answer is, there are many people who would like to see more than a movie to buy the 3D TV set for."

Games, for example, “are a really compelling 3D experience,” Cookson said. Games “will move a large number of people who want to spend a lot of hours watching 3D,” he said. “Movies, of course, are part of it, but sports to a great many people are really one of the most compelling uses of 3D. The real question there is learning the techniques of story-telling that really makes good use of 3D. You can’t stick cameras in the same spots you always stuck cameras in, because the 3D doesn’t tell the story the same way."

Converting into 3D content shot in 2D “can work very well,” but it “needs to be done with care,” Cookson said, adding, “It needs to be done with an awareness of what’s in the scene, so you create the proper range of depth that people can enjoy.” Unfortunately, there are “some automatic ways of creating depth,” and Sony Pictures hosts visits from “two to three people a week” pitching the “ultimate, deluxe” techniques for converting the studio’s library into 3D, Cookson said. Most of the ideas he has seen “have been somewhat painful, and some of them just downright hurtful,” he said. “So it’s an area I worry a good deal about: People going out and doing a lot of the work on the cheap, to be able to have a large volume of what they call 3D and having bad results from it."

The “instability” of 35mm film as a medium for storing 3D movies was what doomed the technology in the 1950s, Cookson said. It created “a workload on your brain, while your eyeballs had to adjust,” he said. By contrast, “the stability of the modern generation of digital cinema projection systems I think is one of the major things that fixed it,” Cookson said. The stability of modern equipment deserves “more credit than I think people give it,” he said.

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Sony has been “revising the whole product development process in Tokyo and working on that seriously for about a year and a half,” Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow said Tuesday. The effort seeks to deal with complaints that CEO Howard Stringer made last January that Sony urgently needed to “streamline” its product planning and development, because “too often we have been late to market with new products,” and that “this practice can’t be tolerated going forward” (CED Jan 23/09 p1). Product development has “changed a lot, and certainly the software part of it has changed dramatically,” Glasgow said. “We've built a software team across the whole company. There have been dramatic changes in the last year. Do we have it all solved as of today? No. Are we a lot better than we were a year ago? I would say yes.” Sony also recognized a need to stop basing all product development in Japan, Glasgow said. The U.S. serves as “the headquarters for the world” on the Sony Reader, he said. “We do that for speed reasons. We do it because we're a little closer to the actual user community that’s guiding that, and the heavy competition from Amazon, and now Apple, et cetera. So I think there are various things that the company has done very successfully. But we haven’t solved all of that problem.” Home 3D is an area “where we've got to be up front and quick with it,” Glasgow said. “And that’s why we have to take a leadership position. We did what I would consider the first Full HD OLED 3D set at CES, and we're going to take leadership in terms of doing high-quality 3D. That’s why we're coming out quickly this year with this.”