This past weekend, I took my nine-year-old nephew to see The Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I was somewhat intrigued, because some technologies were in play that I had seen before, but in a “not quite there” state.
Specifically, the movie (can I really still call it a “film?”) Was presented digitally, and in 3D.
In times past, I have seen films shown in 3D (the last 3D movie I saw was Stargate) and the cinemas have been using digital projectors to show interstitial programming for some time, but their performance has been less than stellar.
I am here to tell you that I was very pleasantly surprised. The projector showed none of the artefacts usually associated with digital projection, save for one stuck pixel located near the top of the screen, which, in a 3D presentation, sort of floated out into the middle of the picture’s field.
Researching the equipment afterwards, I have been lead to believe that the solidity, smoothness and clarity, both of the basic projection and of the 3D imaging, is a result of combining a very large DLP array for each colour, thus projecting each through a bright, small-pixeled matrix, then combining all three colours together and projecting them simultaneously through one lens. This eliminates both the rainbow and the screen-door effects.
In order to fix the misalignment problems typical of older 3D (including the system on which I watched Stargate), the pictures for the left and right images are projected alternately, again through one lens, using a liquid crystal panel to change the polarity so that the projected image will work with the supplied glasses.
In order for this sequential projection, in turn, not cause flicker, the image is projected at an astounding 144 frames per second, so that each eye sees 72 frames per second, triple what you see in a traditional film.
Seeing this film -er- movie has made me rethink my opinion of digital cinema versus film, and also made me believe that 3D is ready for the big time.
By the way, all future Disney/Pixar productions, and all Dreamworks Animation starting sometime early next year, are going to be using this system.
Incidentally, the 3D glasses are pretty high quality. No cardboard. They look like oversized horn-rimmed glasses. My nephew told me they made me look like a nerd, but so what? I am a nerd.
Oh, I almost forgot the film review. The movie itself was not the greatest. It made a good proof-of-concept for digital 3D, but if you can only see it flat, skip it. Stargate was a movie that happened to be in 3D. By comparison, Journey is all about the 3D and little else.