Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Complaints at 3-D "Jason Bourne" shows in China

This is topic Complaints at 3-D "Jason Bourne" shows in China in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=16;t=002790

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-27-2016, 10:37 AM:

quote: Breitbart (my emphasis)
Moviegoers in China have taken to social media to complain of dizziness and nausea after viewing a special 3D presentation of action film Jason Bourne, released in the country this week.

Chinese newspaper the Global Times reported Friday that dozens of fans who bought tickets to the Matt Damon-starring action flick have requested refunds, as they say the film’s conversion into 3D was an ill-advised move given director Paul Greengrass’s penchant for shaky camera movement and fast-paced editing.

Bourne distributor Universal Pictures had rolled out a “special” 3D presentation of the film in most theaters in the country, leaving many fans who wanted to see the film with no other option; just eight of Beijing’s 149 movie theaters and nine of Shanghai’s 174 theaters were reportedly showing the film in its original 2D presentation.

One fan, Zhou Yuchen, reportedly organized a protest along with other 30 moviegoers at a Beijing theater to demand a refund of their tickets.

“The 3D version is a rip-off,” Zhou told the Global Times. “It’s been happening many times in China and must be stopped.”

Universal issued a statement saying they were working to provide more 2D copies of the film to Chinese cinemas, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Jason Bourne had grossed $25.1 million after three days of release in China, according to THR. The film’s worldwide gross sits at $281.3 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Annoyingly, it doesn't say what 3-D system was involved. Is this a movie that was never shot with dual cameras, but processed through some software that does some sort of a digital Pulfrich effect to produce a pseudo 3-D version? If so, no wonder it didn't go down well, especially among audiences that are used to genuine 3-D.

Posted by Daniel Schulz (Member # 1881) on 08-27-2016, 11:05 AM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
Annoyingly, it doesn't say what 3-D system was involved. Is this a movie that was never shot with dual cameras, but processed through some software that does some sort of a digital Pulfrich effect to produce a pseudo 3-D version? If so, no wonder it didn't go down well, especially among audiences that are used to genuine 3-D.

Bourne was a post conversion 3D, it was not shot in stereo.

However, that is no longer a super useful guide to good 3D. Robert Zemeckis' "The Walk," for example, was shot with a single camera, and converted to 3D in post. But that was a film that was intended to be in 3D from the beginning. Everything from the storyboards to the shot composition to the editing was executed with the final 3D version in mind - but doing the conversion in post gives the director and DP a level of control that you lack when simply shooting a stereo image.

I should think that it's blindingly obvious that Jason Bourne was never mean to be shown in 3D, and even a high quality conversion would probably not work.

Posted by Marco Giustini (Member # 4544) on 08-27-2016, 11:41 AM:

Daniel,

I haven't got post-production experience and I do understand that some degree of conversion is always needed for the best final result. But I struggle to believe that a converted movie (with 3D in mind while shooting) can possibly be better than a proper 3D-shot movie.

Anyway: why on earth would you want to see Jason Bourne in 3D?

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-27-2016, 01:44 PM:

Better question: Why on earth would anyone want to see a movie directed by Paul Greengrass. I had enough of his pathetic attempt to cover up bad directing skills with the shaky cam a long time ago. WHY is this talent-less twat still making movies?

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 08-27-2016, 07:03 PM:

Paul Greengrass is perhaps the single best argument for high frame rate movies. I imagine the action sequences in his movies would be much more watchable at 60fps.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-27-2016, 10:17 PM:

My math disagrees.

Shaky cam = [puke]

High Frame Rate = [puke]

End result = [bs]

Posted by Arthur Allen (Member # 969) on 08-27-2016, 10:27 PM:

quote:
Universal issued a statement saying they were working to provide more 2D copies of the film to Chinese cinemas, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Why can't you just run a 3D movie in 2D?

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-28-2016, 12:28 AM:

The 2-D and 3-D versions are different versions of the DCP, that need different KDMs. Though for most of the big studio releases, the 2-D and 3-D versions come on the same hard drive.

What I suspect they actually mean by this statement, therefore, is that the studio is issuing KDMs for the 2-D version to all the Chinese theaters that are asking for them.

As for Greengrass, he cut his teeth shooting TV documentaries on 16mm and ENG gear, composing and framing his shots for an audience watching a 28" tube. He never really understood that this technique doesn't scale up to 'scope on a 60 foot cinema screen very well (at least not, as Brad points out, without provoking some gastro-intestinal action from the audience).

The one thing I admire him for is not a movie, but his part in bringing Spycatcher into print. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into the technology used by the real life James Bonds to, quoting from the book, "...bug and burgle their way across London at the state's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way." I stopped reading when I got to the chapters about how the head of MI5 was gay and being blackmailed by the Russians, but the first half, which goes into a lot of techie detail, is fascinating, and well worth a read.

Posted by Marco Giustini (Member # 4544) on 08-28-2016, 06:33 AM:

Arthur,
while it could be theoretically possible to run 3D into 2D by only showing the Left Eye, this is not a possibility anymore with IMB/IMS and also you would be running content graded for lower brightness at a much higher light level.
While it could be acceptable in an emergency (say your projector is not 3D and you cannot get the 2D version in time), it should not be seen as a viable solution to be adopted on a regular basis.

Posted by Frank Bolkovac (Member # 6201) on 08-28-2016, 10:07 AM:

Like Brad Millers' comments.

Posted by Daniel Schulz (Member # 1881) on 08-28-2016, 11:37 AM:

quote: Marco Giustini
But I struggle to believe that a converted movie (with 3D in mind while shooting) can possibly be better than a proper 3D-shot movie.

It can, because you can adjust things like depth of field and inter-ocular distance shot-by-shot, making a much more comfortable viewing experience for the audience. If you shoot in stereo then the stereo effect is baked into your original footage.

The trouble is that doing 3D conversions *well* is very expensive and very time consuming. At least if you shoot in 3D you know you've got a proper stereo image to begin with.

Posted by Marco Giustini (Member # 4544) on 08-28-2016, 01:02 PM:

sure but you'll have to cut every single object from the scene! What about small objects or objects with transparencies?

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-28-2016, 02:22 PM:

The basic way you do the conversions is to exploit the Pulfrich effect to make a guess, informed by fiendishly complicated math, at the distance in depth between two objects represented in a 2-D photograph, and then to use that to create a separate right eye image.

I'm not conscious of having seen any of these conversions (the last two 3-D movies I saw in their entirety were Cinderella and the Wim Wenders ballet documentary; AFAIK, both were actually shot stereo), but my guess would be that some software does a better job than others at exploiting this optical trick, and that how much depth of field and distance between foreground/subject/object in the source shot affects how convincing the resulting pseudo-3D looks, too.

It was a similar principle whereby there were many attempts from the '30s to the '60s to create a blue image from two strip or duplitized/bipack red and green original records by printing the yellow and cyan negatives successively through filters to create a pseudo-magenta strip; arguably the most successful was the one jerry-rigged by British Technicolor for the 1948 Olympics movie, but even then, the grass looks turquoise, even on original IB prints!

Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 08-30-2016, 03:03 PM:

I have had it with this shit too.

My comment on Leonard Maltin's Review where even he noted the sloppy camera work.

quote:
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for calling out the seizure cam nonsense. I’m sick of this crap. Someday in the distant future film historians will look back at movies made in this period of time and marvel at all of the missed opportunities destroyed by a chaotic shit show of horrible camera work and editing. No one should ever pay Greengrass to make another movie until he swears off this fetish forever. He’s not the only one in Hollywood that’s hooked on giving us images we can’t see, either. What happened Hollywood? In the 50s we had one-eyed directors making 3D movies that still look awesome today. And today our film makers have unlimited CGI power at their disposal to create life-like imagery of anything they want but instead some of them choose to give us blurry images we can’t make out at all. There was a time when scenes like that would have been considered a mistake and would have been re-shot. This idiocy is a cancer on film making and it needs to stop.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-30-2016, 06:34 PM:

quote: Arthur Allen
Why can't you just run a 3D movie in 2D?

Just get two pairs of regular 3-D glasses and swap lenses to make two pairs of 2-D glasses.

That's how I watch most 3-D movies. I've got a set of 2-D glasses, here, at home and I take them with me whenever I go to see movies in 3-D. The only time I watch a movie in 3-D is when it has a good reputation as a 3-D movie.

90% of the time, most 3-D movies are just gimmicky crap. [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-30-2016, 06:43 PM:

I wish that was possible with the Dolby 3-D glasses, but those lenses are too small to be able to do the swap without leaving gaps in one eye.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-30-2016, 09:48 PM:

Do Dolby glasses have cured/shaped lenses so that they can't be flipped for left and right?

With the polarized glasses, you can just take a small screwdriver or an Exacto knife and pry the plastic frames apart. If you're careful, you can snap them back together pretty easily. You can use a few dabs of plastic model cement if you need to.

I've never seen a pair of Dolby glasses, close-up.

They're dichroic. Right?