Featured in this issue is a case study on the JM Rental and Sony PCL production of 3D Video for FIFA World Cup this past summer. That application featured 3D LED walls — a sort of big staging counterpart, if you will, of the 3D flat panel phenomenon in the home consumer flat panel world. An interesting application. But highpowered IMAG or other big-screen imaging in the staging world is still mainly about big-gun projectors.
Alan Brawn reports in this issue that 3D is coming on strong in the high-lumen projection world. Mike Levi, the president of Digital Projection, told Brawn that “3D is here to stay.”
“We have 3D connectivity across all LIGHTNING and all TITAN 3D models,” says Levi. “When we say broad, we mean it. All of our 3D projectors provide straight-out-of-the-box compatibility with all 3D formats, from dual pipe to frame sequential, and even support the HDMI 1.4 3D standards. Native 24p 3D sources, such as the Frame Packed output of a Sony Blu-ray player, can be displayed at up to 144 frames per second for the smoothest 3D imaging possible. Regardless of the 3D source encountered, the user interface on our 3D projectors is adaptable and straightforward.”
According to Levi, “when paired with one or more of our dual-lamp TITAN units, or with LIGHTNING projectors, customers can literally ‘paint with digital light,’ on any surface configuration the application requires — even in 3D.”
Christie Digital told Alan Brawn that it is the first full 1920x1080 HD resolution 3D active stereo solution utilized in a single-projector or multi-projector array. The Christie Mirage HD18 enables a higher level of compatibility with computers and infrastructure that supports HD active stereo, up to 120 Hz output, due to their unique image processing technology from up to 60 Hz input, without requiring super bandwidth DVI or analog infrastructure. It works over standard single-link DVI-D or analog. According to Brawn, “The cool part is that this sounds complex, but is really easy to setup. It comes with the things we all expect, like 10 bit processing (we are spoiled today) built-in blending, lens shift, and, as an option, an internal enhanced image warping and edge-blending module.”
DPI and Christie are promoting 3D heavily. There are others, including projectiondesign, and Barco, that are doing interesting things on the 3D front. Look for coverage of all them in 2011 in the pages of this magazine. While lot of people are skeptical about the prospects of 3D catching on in the consumer world, for staging, whether for concerts, corporate shows, or entertainment venues, I do believe 3D is here to stay. And it should provide some great opportunities to for stagers to upsell clients on a technology that still provides that elusive magic they are looking for, and to set them apart.
