Last year YouTube has introduced a new function allowing users to upload 2D videos and then have them autoconverted from 2D to 3D by YouTube and today this beta functionality has been further expanded. Now every user can select to see an automatic 2D to 3D conversion for short-form videos uploaded in 1080p resolutions, there is no more need for the owner of the clip to select that he wants it autoconverted.
You can activate the 2D-to-3D autoconversion feature by clicking on the Options icon (the one with a gear) in the player and then clicking on the 3D button that will appear on the left. When you activate the 3D autoconversion feature of YouTube you will be able to select from less available resolutions up to 720p. It seems that the 3D button does not yet appear on all 1080p videos, so it may take some time, but you can test with the embedded YouTube video above – it already works. It is a quite different thing however how good the autoconversion to 3D is, it may work well on some videos and not that good on others, so if you are interested you can experiment with multiple videos.
Here is an interesting interview from fxguidetv with John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) who was a VFX supervisor for Star Wars: Episode 1 and has also supervised the stereoscopic 3D conversion of Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. In this interview John Knoll comments on his approach to the stereo budget, floating windows, parallel vs. converged, shooting stereo vs. post-converting and gives his views on how other studios are solving these complex stereo problems. It is a long and interesting interview not covering only the 3D version of Star Wars, but the use of stereoscopic 3D technology in movies in general talking about other good 3D movie examples and their approach to the use of 3D including Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon, so definitely worth watching, regardless if you’ve liked the conversion to 3D of the movie or not.
The Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace 3D has been available for a while now in movie theaters and although it may not have generate that much interest as George Lucas has hoped for, he can generally consider the conversion to 3D a success. Some people were Ok with the level of quality of the conversion to 3D, others were disappointed, but in the end it is all down to the numbers for the big guys in Hollywood. And it depends on these numbers if Lucas will decide to convert the other parts of the Star wars saga in 3D as well or not, but it is not only about the Star Wars as other movie studios are also interested in the results to help them decide should they convert old movies in 3D and bring them back to the big screen for a re-release in 3D…
So based on the numbers was the Star Wars Episode 1 3D conversion a success or not? The US box office shows that the movie has generated over $40 million dollars revenue and internationally the 3D release of Star Wars Episode 1 has accumulated over $46 million dollars, so getting something like $100 million US dollars worldwide in just about a month for an old movie that was converted to 3D is something that can be considered as a success. The budget required for a 3D conversion is significantly less that what you would need for shooting a large scale new movie and with a revenue from it going to something like $100 million dollars for everyone looking just at the numbers is a huge success. Does that make the viewers expecting a spectacular experience from the 3D conversion happy, probably not that much as the experience could’ve been better, and hopefully we’ll get it improved in the next episodes. And we can assume that with results like these Lucas will decide to give 3D conversion another try with the next episode from the saga, because these numbers seem encouraging.
Up until now there haven’t been that many old movies brough back to life on the big screen converted in 3D, there have been quite a lot of disappointments coming from new movies that were shot in 2D and then converted to 3D… and not that well converted. And until now animations were the ones getting the 3D threatment in terms of conversions from 2D to 3D, and the results that Disney’s The Lion King 3D and Beauty and the Beast 3D were so good (in terms of numbers) that Disney decided to convert more of its animated movies and bring them in 3D on the big screen again. The Lion King converted in 3D is by far the top grossing old 2D animation converted to 3D (and such movie for that matter) surpassing worldwide gross of over $160 million dollars so far. But now that the Star Wars Episode 1 3D conversion is old news, all eyes are directed on the upcoming digitally re-mastered 3D conversion of James Cameron’s Titanic that will be re-released in early April to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the ship Titanic setting sail.
