James Cameron came to IBC armed with world premiere footage shot in the Mariana Trench including the moment where his one-man submersible touched the bottom of the deepest place on Earth
Digital explorer Adrian Pennington & Carolyn Giardina On ultra-HD...
Cinema has always been challenged by competition in the home with access on- demand and mobile and with the improved quality of home large flat panels. We’ve got to push for higher resolution and higher frame rate stan- dards. The only reason I have been hesi- tant in the past is that there was a bandwidth bottleneck for a while and I wanted stereo first. Now we are talking about improved resolution in 3D. In the nascent 3D broadcast market I am concerned about the bandwidth bottleneck – especially when broad- casters are fighting for bitrates against mobile. I wouldn’t want to see the emer- gence of 3D slowed down by higher resolution.
When you compare Ultra-HD to 3DTV
you are not comparing apples with apples. 3DTV is half-HD compared to 8K at 120fps so you just remove all the motion artifacts with a resolution higher than the human eye can resolve a 2D image.
3D is more important in the long run.
The resolution in the camera will always improve whether we like it or not, but getting the production paradigm down to how you shoot 3D at the source is crit- ical.
On China...
Within five years China could easily be as big a gross revenue market [for film] as North America, and there are very specific economic incentives for having both Chinese content and Chinese co- production. We’re talking to the state government, the central government and to the major regional broadcasters in China. They are in lock-step that they want to accelerate very rapidly into 3D.
They have a sense of their emerging identity as a major economy and 3D is a part of it. They want it and they’ve got a sort of government mandate to do it. We believe we can demonstrate things there that will ripple back into North American and European markets. We will have access to a virtually virgin
mini-submarine built in secret for the endeavour in Australia. Cameron dived twice to a depth of 11,000 metres (36,000ft) last March, the culmination of seven years planning. The director, who narrates, was shown inside the sphere which was only 42 inches in internal diameter and contained life support systems, control joysticks and comms systems. At one point thousands of metres down, Cameron is shown having lost all communications contact with the surface support vessel.
“I knew that at that depth if anything
went wrong there would be no way out. You have to treat that as an intel- lectual challenge,” he said. 3D images inside the sub were from a pair of tiny 1080p 24 HD cameras twinned side by side designed by CPG. “When I went down to the Titanic the camera and housing weighed 150lb. For this we needed a unit that weighed just 5lb,” said Cameron. Outside the sub were two other pairs of mini-cameras inside a housing capable of withstanding 16000psi in pressure at 36000ft and connected to a small recording device designed by Samuari inside the vessel. They could be operated by Cameron on a pan and tilt basis to take pictures of the craft and surrounds. “Vince [CPG co-chair, Pace] and I love the challenge of doing something new. We had a supercharged time working with prototype technology.”
On 3DTV...
James Cameron Co-Chair, Cameron Pace Group
Region: Global
market where the audience is predis- posed to see 3D as the premium way for them to absorb their entertainment. The industry has got to get over the chauvinism of thinking through from a US perspective. If you want to make movies for the US, fine. If you want to make movies for the global market, think global.
To new depths...
Footage for a National Geographic 3D documentary James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge 3D included scenes of the various test dives at progressively deeper depths in the
I wouldn’t want to see 3D slowed down by higher resolution
We’re still in the pioneering stage but there’s a lot of activity in 3DTV and CPG is busier than ever. There is a reluctance to displace a 2D model that works at an economically challenging time.
The hurdle is not the technology. We have the technology. We make our tech obsolete every six months and put a great deal of our revenue back into R&D. The biggest problem is one of perception and culture – the perception that it costs double that of 2D. We’ve always said it was a goal to bring costs down to zero. We’re not there yet but we are getting close. 3DTVs are flooding into the market
but it’s a chicken and egg situation regarding content that compels people to go home and watch it in 3D. Autostereoscopic displays will
produce a very, very pronounced change - we could be a year away from a major expansion in 3DTV.