ANALOG vs DIGITAL - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

sion. The dead time could be used
to sell snacks, but the intermission
lengthened the time between
showings and cut into profits.
The projectionists required
special training to keep the films
in perfect step. That worked with
fresh film prints, but now and then
a film would break and need to be
spliced. The two prints would then
no longer be in step.
For a while it worked, because
it was such a novelty that audiences
would watch nearly anything in
3D, then as now. The first 3D
movie of the new wave, Bwana
Devil, was one of the worst films
ever made, remembered today
only for the spear thrown at the
audience. One quickie, Man in
the Dark, was in 3D but in black
and white! Some better films were
released too. The House of Wax, a
horror feature starring Vincent
Price, was watchable. Hitchcock’s
Dial M For Murder was released
in 3D, and was a unique chance to
see Grace Kelly in depth. A major
musical comedy, Kiss Me Kate,
was shot in 3D but was mostly
released in 2D. The only sign of
its 3D origin is the bevy of objects
thrown at the audience. There
would be no more 3D movies,
until…
Now and then there would be
an attempt to bring it back. The
Stewardesses was a 3D soft core
porn film shot in 16 mm and barely
watchable. There would be 3D
features at theme parks and world
fairs. like the Muppet Vision 3D
film shown at Walt Disney World.
But one of these special movies
would ultimately launch the next
3D wave.
The event was Expo 86 in Vancouver.
The Canadian pavilion
had an IMAX cinema which presented
the first 70 mm IMAX film
in 3D, a production of Canada’s
famed National Film Board. It was
a mere demo, but it was spectacular,
and the giant IMAX screen solved
one of 3D’s nagging problems: screen
cutoff.
The problem would manifest itself
when an object or a scene would protrude
from the screen. One or the other of the
images making up the 3D image would
be cut off by the screen edge, shatter-
ing the illusion of reality. But the
IMAX screen was so huge, and the
edges so distant from the centre of
the screen, that the problem all but
vanished.
That first IMAX 3D movie
was such a hit that a cornucopia of
documentary films were shot in 3D
over the next decades. They would
feature natural scenes, travelogues,
and even 3D films shot in outer
space, at the International Space
Station and at the Hubble telescope.
The IMAX 3D success would, with
time, lead to the latest wave of commercial
3D movies.
But let’s back up a little. Could
3D be brought to television?
Following the success of IMAX
3D in Vancouver, work picked
up on 3D television. In 1989 an
international conference on 3D in
the media was held at the NFB in
Montreal. One of the exhibitors,
from Japan, showed up with an
impressive 3D-TV system which
looked resolutely modern. Its LCD
active shutter glasses would darken
and lighten at high speed in order
to keep each eye from seeing the
image meant for the other eye.
UHF was invited to the conference,
and we were enthusiastic, but then
something odd happened.
The Japanese visitors who had
brought their marvelous system to
Montreal, spoke nearly no English,
and so most media covering the
conference ignored them. At the
same time, a US exhibitor with a
totally bogus glasses-free system
was represented by a glib presenter
who could talk enthusiastically on
camera. His system wound up on
all the newscasts, and the Japanese
3D system was ignored for several
more years.
The concept was ultimately
brought back by a company that,
like IMAX, was Canadian, named
Sensio. It developed a home 3D
system that could be used with a
projector, and — like the Japanese
system of years before — used active
LCD glasses. It got distribution rights
to a number of IMAX 3D films, and
announced that new films would be shot
ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 29
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