Don’t Kill Moviegoers’ Experience With ‘So-So 3D’ Quality, Supplier Warns Theater Owners

When word first circulated that Avatar’s running time would exceed 2-1/2 hours, many in the movie industry began worrying whether audiences “could last through that,” Panabaker said. “But I've heard of very few people complaining about any kind of fatigue” after seeing Avatar in 3D, he said. The movie’s popularity has dispelled the worries in connection with any theater where the 3D system “is set up properly,” Panabaker said. A “bigger issue” than the length of 3D movies when it comes to eye fatigue and other problems is 3D gaming, he said. Citing “personal experience,” 3D gamers tend to play on “for hours and hours with very little break,” Panabaker said. That’s got to be “tougher on the eyes than any 3D movie experience,” he said.

Great 3D “is clear and comfortable,” Panabaker said. “One of the beauties of 3D cinema is that you don’t have to go ay further than looking at your theater screen. Everything you need to know about how well you're delivering a great 3D presentation is right there in front of you. If it isn’t clear and it isn’t comfortable, then you need to find out why.” On-screen 3D “really needs to look great to work,” Panabaker said. “There really isn’t a lot of middle ground for so-so 3D. If you're in the so-so area, you're quickly slipping into the bad 3D."

A “bad picture” in 2D can be “annoying and unpleasant,” Panabaker said. “But on the 3D side, if you get a bad picture, it really can destroy and take away from the narrative and in the worst case even hurt.” Movie audiences “may not understand what was wrong and why” if they view bad 3D in a theater, he said. “They certainly know when something doesn’t look good on a screen, and even worse, when it hurts. They'll vote with their feet the next time they go see a 3D film and remember that they didn’t like what they saw in your cinema. Having anything less than great 3D on your screen makes no sense for your business."

"One important element of our growth, digital 3D, will explode this year,” John Fithian, the National Association of Theatre Owners’ president, said at ShoWest’s opening ceremonies Tuesday. Last year, 3D box office receipts accounted for 11 percent of the total North American gross, Fithian said. “But 3D screen penetration has only reached about 7 percent on a global basis, and about 10 percent here in North America. We ain’t seen nothing yet.” He predicted that North America “could more than double our current 3D screen count by the end of the year,” and that “similar, and perhaps greater 3D screen growth is likely overseas as well."

It’s feared that a shortage of 3D screens has crimped growth in the number of 3D movies expected for release this year to 20 films from 17 in 2009 (CED Feb 18 p1) because studios don’t want to invest in 3D movies without the assurance they'll have screens to show them on. That’s why much of the emphasis at ShoWest was on finding ways to encourage smaller theater owners to make the investments to convert to 3D. Technicolor 3D, a system for theaters that uses old-fashioned film instead of digital servers, is to debut March 26 on How to Train Your Dragon, a computer-animated adventure comedy from DreamWorks Animation. Technicolor 3D allows theater owners to convert their auditoriums for 3D at a small fraction of the cost of buying digital cinema equipment, though Technicolor thinks movie exhibition one day will go all digital, Jed Harmsen, the company’s director of product and project development, said at ShoWest’s 3D seminar.

Technicolor is “fully supportive” of the conversion to digital cinema, Harmsen said. “But there’s a lot of exhibitors throughout North America and certainly internationally who are not going to have access to $660 million in Wall Street money,” the amount that the theater conglomerate Digital Cinema Implementation Partners reported last week as having secured for rolling out more digital and 3D screens, Harmsen said. “The current economic climate really highlighted to us that there was an opportunity” to give theater owners to “tap into high-quality 3D” today, he said. “The questions we put to ourselves were, how do we create this solution, and how do we bridge the gap from today to when digital becomes widely adopted and widely supported on a worldwide basis."

Seven studios have committed to releasing movies in Technicolor 3D, which has been in demonstration mode for eight months, Harmsen said. Besides DreamWorks Animation, studios backing Technicolor 3D are Lionsgate, Overture, Paramount, Universal, Warner and the Weinstein Co., but not Sony Pictures, whose sister subsidiary, Sony Electronics, markets the Sony Digital Cinema 4K system. Technicolor has sold 150 Technicolor 3D systems and installed 100, Harmsen said.

Technicolor 3D uses a lens specially developed for the system by the German company Schneider Kreuznach, whose executives said at the seminar they're barred for intellectual-property reasons from discussing how the lens is built and how it works. The system is much more light-efficient than most of the digital 3D systems available, Harmsen said. In tests that Warner ran for 2-1/2 weeks in Burbank, Calif., with the AMC theater chain, audiences couldn’t tell the difference between Final Destination 4 in Technicolor 3D and through a digital cinema system shown in adjacent auditoriums, he said. To make Technicolor 3D as “risk-free” as possible for theater owners, Technicolor collects $2,000 for each Technicolor 3D film that a theater books on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, he said. That means owners don’t pay if they don’t book the films, he said. Technicolor also imposes a $12,000 “cap,” so owners pay for the first six films, but there’s no charge for movies booked after that, he said. -- Paul Gluckman

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Clarification: CBS said it chose Las Vegas for its CBS Television City research center (CED March 17 p7) because it attracts a social, economic and geographic cross-section of the U.S. population, and the MGM Grand because it’s a big destination in Las Vegas even among visitors who don’t stay at the hotel. -— PG