By John Consoli

Published: July 29, 2010

ESPN 3D has announced the telecasts of its first three 2010 college football games, beginning with two of the five teams ranked pre-season in the top five: Boise State vs. Virginia Tech at 8 p.m. on Sept 6.

The other two games will be Miami vs. Ohio State at 3:40 p.m. on Sept. 11 and Clemson vs. Auburn at 7 p.m. on Sept. 18.

ESPN 3D plans to televise 13 college games this season, concluding with the Tostitos BCS National Championship Game on Monday, Jan. 10, at 8:30 p.m.

Sony is the official sponsor of college football on ESPN 3D, and the college games televised on ESPN 3D will use Sony 3D cameras.

ESPN 3D will be announcing additional sports programming, including NBA, college basketball and Winter X Games 15, throughout the course of this year.

For details click here

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By John Consoli

Published: July 29, 2010

ESPN 3D has announced the telecasts of its first three 2010 college football games, beginning with two of the five teams ranked pre-season in the top five: Boise State vs. Virginia Tech at 8 p.m. on Sept 6.

The other two games will be Miami vs. Ohio State at 3:40 p.m. on Sept. 11 and Clemson vs. Auburn at 7 p.m. on Sept. 18.

ESPN 3D plans to televise 13 college games this season, concluding with the Tostitos BCS National Championship Game on Monday, Jan. 10, at 8:30 p.m.

Sony is the official sponsor of college football on ESPN 3D, and the college games televised on ESPN 3D will use Sony 3D cameras.

ESPN 3D will be announcing additional sports programming, including NBA, college basketball and Winter X Games 15, throughout the course of this year.

Link to the full, lengthy article with many pictures – the intro is below

by Steven Bradford
Seattle Washington USA
After years of mere trickles, a deluge of 3D is surging into the market in 2010. Consumers are finally beginning to buy 3D-equipped televisions, bringing the 3D theater experience home.

Steven has been helping push forward new media boundaries for nearly 30 years and has produced videodiscs for NASA, filmed video game sequences for Northrop and Sierra Online, taped neurosurgery, has filmed the band KISS, as well as the Space Shuttle in 3D. Steven is also known to early web users for his highly popular bluescreen site that helped advance the art of compositing during the 1990s. From 2004 to 2007 Steven was the director of the School of Film and Visual Effects at Collins College in Phoenix, Arizona. He currently spends his time forgetting obsolete technologies so he can learn more. You can find him in a dozen Creative COW forums, including Cinematography and Stereoscopic 3D.

In this article — which is a special expanded edition with extra images and more, taken from Creative COW Magazine’s Blue Ribbon issue — Steven Bradford shows you some of the cameras and tools that really shine.

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by Jennifer Allan

July 28, 2010

Electricpig got in on one of the BBC’s 3Dbootcamps, which are teaching its camera and production crews about how to film in 3D. The bootcamps are run by Buzz Hays, Executive Stereoscopic 3D producer at Sony’s 3D Technology Centre. Click through to find out five things Sony is teaching Auntie, that you never knew about 3D.
1. If you’re getting eye strain, it’s probably the director’s fault.
Eye strain is one of the key arguments against 3D. But if you feel like your eyes are doing too much work, it’s probably not your fault. Hays says that directors shooting in 3D have to think about the shots that come before and after whatever they’re shooting to prevent eye strain in their audiences. The strain comes from big differences in the ‘depth’ of the object in focus from one shot to the next, so if your eyes are having to switch to something near, then far, then near again, they’ll get tired. “There’s a very subtle difference between comfortable viewing and a splitting headache,” says Hays.

2. Most 3D screens don’t get enough light

When a standard was set for the amount of light a 3D capable screen should receive in the cinema, it was set well below the standard that normal cinema screens get. This means that often, your 3D cinema experience is not as good as it should be, and with some extra light on the screen, could be rendered much sharper, clearer, and brighter.

3. Polarizing glasses were invented in 1937

The plastic Buddy Holly specs you forget to take off when you walk out of the cinema were actually invented in 1937. The famous shot from Life magazine, of a cinema of people wearing red and green 3D glasses was actually originally a shot of people in a cinema wearing polarising glasses. The colours were painted in afterwards.

4. 3D doesn’t damage the eyes

“There are hundreds of people working in 3D all day, every day,” says Hays. “As far as we know, not one has complained of any health problems as a result.” Hays references a company that works in stereoscopic sales (selling 3D equipment). The company has had 250,000 clients over 20 years, and has had no reports of people having problems with their eyes after lengthy exposure to 3D. “And that’s a very big test group,” he says.

5. Shooting in 3D is shooting blind. It’s all about the maths.

Directors shooting a 3D feature film generally can’t see the what the 3D will look like until they get the dailies, the raw unedited footage of a day’s shooting. This means that a lot more planning has to go into 3D shooting. Much of the 3D imagery is monitored by a stereographer to check depth, and that the objects that will be in the foreground and background aren’t interfering with each other.

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Movie studios may be seeing red this Christmas as they struggle to secure theaters that can show new 3D films in their multi-dimensional glory, DreamWorks Annimation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told Wall Street analysts this afternoon.

“Right now there is a logjam,” Hollywood’s leading 3D evangelist said. And that will get worse as several potential blockbusters including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1, MegaMind, and Tron Legacy target holiday season moviegoers.

There are about 5,500 screens in the U.S. that can show 3D. Katzenberg expects that to rise to about 6,500 by year’s end.

What’s holding the business back? Manufacturers of 3D projectors and other equipment are “trying not to balloon out production,” he says.

Consumers, though, accept the idea of paying an additional $3.50 to see a movie in 3D, he says.

As for 3D television, “it will be a number of years before you see (sales) rates that are meaningful.” He predicts as many as 4 million TV sets capable of showing 3D programming will be sold over the holidays — with sports fans and gamers leading the way.

The big breakthrough will come when people won’t need to wear special glasses to see television in 3D. That’s anywhere from six to 10 years off, Katzenberg says.

By David Lieberman

For details click here

Will air two days of PGA Championship in new format

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By Glen Dickson — Broadcasting & Cable, 7/28/2010 7:55:07 PM

Turner Sports, which aired its first 3D broadcast with the NASCAR Coke Zero on July 3, is following it up by teaming with The PGA of America to offer 3D coverage of the 92nd PGA Championship on Thursday, Aug. 12 and Friday, Aug. 13, from Whistling Straits golf course in Kohler, Wisc.

The stereoscopic 3D coverage, which will be carried by pay-TV operators Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, DirecTV and Time Warner Cable and also streamed on PGA.com, will focus on the par-3 12th and 17th holes at Whistling Straits from 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET each day. The 3D coverage will be hosted by Vince Cellini, and 2002 PGA Champion Rich Beem will provide commentary and analysis.

While the Coke Zero 400 production used 3D rigs from 3ality Digital, the PGA production will use PACE 3D rigs supported by NEP’s new SS32 truck, which handled ESPN’s coverage of the MLB Home Run Derby and Fox’s coverage of the All-Star Game earlier this month.  PACE and NEP also collaborated on ESPN’s 3D production of The Masters golf tournament this spring.

Whistling Straits is a links course set alongside Lake Michigan, and the two par-3′s were selected for being particularly picturesque, says Tom Sahara, senior director of remote operations and IT for Turner Sports. The PGA production will use four 3D rigs on each hole, with two located near the tee box and two alongside the green. One camera near the tee will be placed behind the golfer to capture the traditional look toward the green, while the other will probably be placed low and to the side, to give the 3D viewer the effect of standing in the gallery.

“The idea here is to really bring across the experience of being there in the gallery and taking in everything around you,” says Sahara, who expects that the rolling mounds and pot bunkers typical to a links course like Whistling Straits should really stand out in 3D.

One of the other two cameras will likely be mounted near the back of the green, to give a low shot of balls approaching and landing on the green; that angle was particularly dynamic during The Masters coverage. The other will be mounted on a crane that will allow for lateral movement for the most effective 3D shots once golfers are on the green.

“You actually need to have a little bit of movement so can see how much space there is between things,” says Sahara. “You don’t get that sense in 2D, but in 3D you can really see that the ball is three feet towards the viewer from the hole, while in 2D it looks like it’s two inches away.”

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July 28, 2010

RIDDHI PATEL

While the consumer electronics headlines this year have been dominated by 3-D television news, the real story in 2010 is about Internet-Enabled TVs (IETVs), according to iSuppli Corp.

Global shipments of IETVs—i.e., TV sets with built-in Internet capability—will amount to 27.7 million units in 2010. In contrast, 3-D set shipments will total only 4.2 million this year. While 3-D television shipments are set to soar in the coming years, iSuppli’s forecast shows the biggest near-term growth story is in IETV.

“Despite aggressive promotions from the industry and intense consumer interest generated by the blockbuster Avatar and other titles, the 3-D TV market in 2010 will be limited to a small pool of enthusiastic early adopters,” said Riddhi Patel, director and principal analyst for television systems at iSuppli. “In contrast, IETV is entering the mainstream in 2010. This is because 3-D is still dealing with a number of barriers, including cost, content availability and interoperability, while IETV provides immediate benefits by allowing TV viewers to access a range of content readily available on the Internet.”

Shipments of IETVs in 2010 will rise by a remarkable 124.9 percent from 12.3 million units last year. Significant growth will continue during the following years. All told, IETV shipments will expand at rates north of 50 percent for the next two years, and then continue to increase at solid double-digit rates until the end of 2014. By then, global IETV shipments are anticipated to reach 148.3 million units, accounting for 54 percent of the total flat-panel TV market.

Consumer Pull, Brand Push for IETV
With IETV, Patel noted, viewers can connect to the Internet at all times by using their TV’s built-in feature, bypassing the need for a bridge device such as a set-top box, game console or Internet media adapter like Apple Inc.’s TV console. Such connectivity allows viewers to access content from a wide spectrum of providers—ranging from movie peddlers like Netflix and Amazon, to content aggregators such as Hulu, to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

At the same time, TV brands and manufacturers are working aggressively to create partnerships with the content providers in order to keep consumers interested and happy with continually updated material, Patel added.

“The arrival of Internet-enabled TV models is part of the ongoing evolution and enhancement of TV sets,” Patel said. “Because innovation is a must in order to drive consumer adoption and replacement, the TV industry has embarked on a path of enhancing the consumer experience through interaction with their TV sets.”

Among regions, North America and Western Europe will make up the largest consumption market for IETVs from 2010 to 2014. Japan will lay claim as the third largest market only until 2012, after which it will drop to fifth place, ranking behind both China and the collective area designated as Rest of Asia-Pacific—two distinct territories counted separately in the tallies.

Semiconductor Grows Because of IETV
From a semiconductor perspective, IETV will represent a strong growth opportunity for a number of component types in the TV semiconductor space, including multi-format decoders, DRAM and interface Integrated Circuits (IC), according to Randy Lawson, principal analyst, display electronics, for iSuppli.

Combined revenue from sales of these semiconductors will rise to more than $2 billion by 2014, up from just $222 million in 2009, iSuppli figures show.

The increased semiconductor content will be needed to support various complex IETV features, including network interface capability via Ethernet to link the television to the Internet—through either a wired connection or wirelessly—Bluetooth solutions for advanced remote controls and greater video graphics support.

Collectively, the new features and capabilities needed by IETVs will provide the TV semiconductor market with a much-needed lift in the general outlook affecting the core audio-visual processing and interface IC solutions, according to iSuppli. The prospect is encouraging, given that the general trend of integration and cost-reduction pressure has slowed growth of the market in this space in recent years.

Overall, IETV will represent the second-best growth area for the TV semiconductor market, next only to LED backlighting.

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by Deborah D. McAdams, July 28, 2010

LOS ANGELES: The MPEG Industry Forum is putting together a vocabulary for defining video quality. Motorola’s Sean McCarthy Ph.D., chairman of MPEGIF’s 3D Working Group, intends to circulate the draft for member comments this week.

“When we started talking about compression, it couldn’t be separated from video quality,” he told TVB recently. “We didn’t have a language for that. We’re looking at a creative vocabulary.”

The work is being done in conjunction with 3D@Home, a consortium of companies working on 3D content, transmission and display.

“‘Artifact,’ for example, refers to anything man-made or unnatural,” McCarthy said. “3D on a 2D display is, by it’s nature, slightly unnatural.”

With high-definition video, artifacts are referred to as “noise,” “macro-blocking,” or “motion blur.”

“Those are great for monocular,” he said. “When you talk about binocular and depth perception, you’re engaging another part of the brain.

“You might have ‘ringing’ around an edge,” he continued. “If you have a high-contrast sharp border, and you compress it too strongly, the edge will have waves or ripples. That’s a ringing artifact in 2D.”

Ringing on the dual images of stereoscopic 3D would not likely be in sync, and therefore it would produce a sparkling or fluctuating appearance to an edge where depth is supposed to be perceived.

“Depth ringing” then refers to this phenomenon in 3D.

Another term, “cardboarding,” refers to the phenomena when 3D content subjects look like flat images on a deeper flat background, like a diorama.

McCarthy said there are about four pages of unique terms for stereoscopic 3DTV. His group’s intent is to make them available across the industry in about a month.
– Deborah D. McAdams

If 3-D makes you happy

by Michael Grotticelli July 22nd, 2010

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An intimate live show by Sheryl Crow was captured in New York City on Wednesday by All Mobile Video’s new 53ft Epic 3-D production truck, in both 2-D and 3-D, for a future edition on the PBS series “Soundstage.” The production is one of the first 2-D/3-D events captured with a single truck and represents a model of how to produce events more economically than using two separate trucks.

The concert, promoting songs from Crow’s new “100 Miles from Memphis” release, will be broadcast on PBS in 2-D in January, with the 3-D footage archived for future use such as Blu-ray distribution or carriage on a 3-D network.

The show was recorded live to tape with 13 Sony HDC-1500R HD cameras and some box-style units, all with Canon HD lenses. Ten were used in five pairs mounted on 3Ality Digital camera rigs. Two beam-splitter rigs were operated on tracking dollies to give a nice effect without having to zoom as often. Another side-by-side rig was mounted at the back of the Roseland Ballroom venue for wide shots of the stage. The 2-D production made use of all 13 HD camera views, including one mounted on a boom and two used handheld. None of the 3-D rigs were operated from the shoulder.

The truck features Sony’s new MVS-8000X production switcher, SRW-5800 HDCAM SR recording decks and several prototype Luma 3-D production monitors (production models will be available this fall). The one switcher was used for both the 2-D and 3-D shows, which were taped as ISO records. There’s also a Pesa 480 x 480 router and Studer Vista 8 digital audio console. The Epic 3-D truck also includes a converge area in the middle of the truck, where one technician per camera rig had to tweak the left and right signal to make sure it looked good in 3-D, before the director included it into the final show. A separate 61ft “B” unit is being built to house convergence operators, in order to handle larger productions.

HD Ready, an Illinois-based post-production company (which has posted several other 3-D events, including a recent Kenny Cheney concert), produced the Crow show under the supervision of Joe Thomas, a director by trade and a founder of HD Ready. He directed the Crow concert from the truck, carefully instructing camera operators on how to best frame their shots, and seemed excited about the concept of practically producing two shows simultaneously.

“We used some of the left-eye camera on the 3-D rigs for our 2-D show, and everything went very smoothly,” Thomas said. “Contrary to what others are saying, I don’t think you need to stay on shots longer with 3-D; you just have to make sure all of your camera views complement each other, which takes more work and a lot of time. Proper framing is very important. Luckily, we were not broadcasting a live show, so we could control things a lot more.”

He said that many of the things directors might want to get rid of in a 2-D shot, such as microphone stands and lighting trusses, they should keep in 3-D to make it interesting to watch because they add depth to the shot.

Prior to the show airing on PBS, the show will be post produced at HD Ready using a Quantel Pablo system to boost the 3-D effects and fix any uncomfortable viewing issues. “In post we’re adding another layer of work that has to be done, because 3-D done wrong looks terrible.”

Set up for the production occurred a day before, with slightly more time required when compared to preparations for a typical 2-D HD show. Eric Duke, president of AMV, said the other advantage of the Roseland Ballroom is that the venue is intimate and rather wide, allowing them to move the cameras closer to the stage and place them in ideal positions, without having to kill existing seating as some 3-D productions have had to do. Duke called the Roseland Ballroom “very 3-D friendly.”

“There’s no question that losing house seats is a major issue we have to resolve when doing 3-D projects, because some venues are not willing to give up revenue-generating, premium seats,” he said. “With this show, we could set up the seating the way we needed to support our 3-D shots. That makes a big difference.”

The stage was outfitted with extra truss pieces and lighting to support the 3-D production, while a circular truss was installed in the ceiling that provided a point of reference for viewers by shooting through the truss in some shots.

Everyone involved with the production agrees that 3-D imagery puts viewers “at the concert” in ways 2-D viewers just can’t experience. “It gives you that added sense of realism and depth that fans who can’t make the shows really appreciate,” said Jason Goodman, stereographer for the production and CEO of 21st Century 3D (in New York).

While it began in the mid-’70s, “Soundstage” was reborn in 2001 thanks to a new partnership between WTTW National Productions and HD Ready. Thomas’ original vision was to combine the one-hour musical performances of the original show with state-of-the-art HD video equipment and innovative Dolby 5.1 audio. The majority of the concerts are recorded before intimate studio audiences at WTTW’s Grainger Studio in Chicago, but “Soundstage” occasionally hits the road.

Thomas said 3-D continues that same concept of keeping the series fresh, and the technology is now becoming more accepted by major artists like Sheryl Crow, so he anticipates more concerts to come in the near future.