Michael Tronick cut the Jonas Brothers’ movie without the benefit of 3-D playback in his Avid. “It would have been extremely useful to be able to look at an edit of a song immediately in 3-D,” he says. “It would have been a creative plus, and it would have taken away a lot of lab costs doing 3-D conforms.”
That makes this an auspicious moment for Avid Technology to announce the release of a new version of its popular Media Composer software, this one with built-in 3-D playback capability. The product streets today.
There’s no question that 3-D editing and post has long been a major headache. “Cutting 3-D is not like cutting 2-D twice,” says CEO Steve Schklair of 3ality Digital Systems, which pioneered digital 3-D post-production.
Schklair says his clients have long had to use workarounds for visual stereo, which made 3-D post a big question mark. When 3ality meets with studios about 3- D, Schklair says, they ask, “ ‘How do we guesstimate our post in this project?’ The whole goal of these tools is to give filmmakers more predictability.”
Without the added capability, conforming in 3-D meant sending a cut to a lab, waiting a few hours, then watching the result in a screening room. “You almost needed a dedicated person and a dedicated setup to do that,” says Charlotte Huggins, producer of the 3-D Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Now that Avid, like Quantel’s complementary color-correcting tool the Pablo, offers off- the-shelf products for stereoscopic 3-D, the barrier to entry for live-action 3-D is falling. 3-D post technology is evolving so quickly that most of the commercially available tools in the marketplace today weren’t available when “Journey” was in post.
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