I got a chance to watch Avatar on Blu-ray, and it looked beautiful.
It looks great on Blu-ray doesn't it? We mastered it with the same colorist who did the digital intermediate on the theatrical release. Same guy, same machine, same color, and we were just able to preserve everything that went into the digital master for the release in the Blu-ray. Did you make any other tweaks or adjustments?
Interestingly enough, we were so rushed to get the film done that we actually improved a few things [on the Blu-ray]. There were also a few things that bothered me and I was like, "Can we fix that?" What did you fix?
Oh, just little things. Like maybe someone's face was a little dark or a little light, or we hadn't quite gotten color matching across the shot. But I figure the permanent record of the movie is the Blu-ray. If someone is going to be looking at Avatar 10 years from now, they are going to be looking at it on that. So we might as well get it right once and for all. This initial Blu-ray is bare-bones—no trailers, no extras. When can we expect a release with extras, and what goodies will you have on it?
We are going to do the full bells and whistles, multidisk, deluxe box set in November. That's going to have behind-the-scenes stuff, and scenes that were taken out at an earlier stage where you can see them just in their sketched form. Then there will be scenes that were taken out that have been actually completed in CG up to the same level as the rest of the film. That's why the release is being done this week; it's going to take us months to get all of this stuff done. We're actually going to do this in two stages—we're going to do a theatrical re-release of the film in IMAX theaters and digital 3D theaters in August with six minutes of additional footage, and then you'll be able to get the box set in November that has that footage plus a whole bunch more plus all the supplemental stuff. One of the things in the supplement that I think is going to be really cool is you'll be able to watch a scene the way we captured it. In other words, it will be cut, but all you'll see is the reference cameras and what the actors are doing with their marker suits on, or you will be able to click and watch it in the CG template, in the way that I see it when I'm working with the virtual camera, and then you will be able to watch it as the finished scene. You'll get to see all the stages of how the film was created. Not for the whole movie but for certain selected scenes in the film. I think that will be really cool.
Why not do a 3D Blu-ray right away?
We will, we will. That technology is out now and we just need more people to buy the players. We are not ready to announce exactly when we're going to do it, but we will be doing it. We haven't done the 3D master for it, although that will only take a day or two.Blu-ray has been pitched as basically the only format that is capable of creating good 3D because it's the only format that has the space to do it. But is 50 gigs enough to do hi-def and 3D?
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because they use a stereoscopic algorithm where they aren't actually doing double HD. What they do is they have a full HD image—I'm not sure if it's in the left eye or the right eye—and then they have the delta data between the right eye and the left eye is what is recorded for the other eye. Then it is reconstituted into a double HD picture. It's about 150 percent of the data of a single HD screen. It's actually something that I was talking about 10 years ago, that we should be able to do a stereoscopic compression algorithm and then I didn't do anything with it. And then somebody else came up with it and it actually works beautifully. Do you have a 3D television in your house?
No. There isn't enough content to run on it yet. Vince Pace and I have a camera company, and we're talking to the networks about providing them with cameras, and that new flow of 3D programming is going to be coming in the next few months and should be really building up by the end of the year. And I haven't been home, by the way, so it doesn't matter what TV I have. I've been in 107 airports in three months. Have you made any tweaks to the 3D rig since you used it in Avatar?
We're constantly evolving the 3D rigs and upgrading the technology. We're planning a new generation of the camera system for theatrical films as well. So that's an ongoing process. We're on about the third generation now.Have you seen any footage of the films that have been shot with it? I don't know if you've seen the trailer for the new Resident Evil, but it actually says "shot with the James Cameron/Vince Pace system."
(laughs) That's a good plug! I haven't seen any of the Resident Evil material, but I've seen some of Tron, and I've seen some of the sports stuff that we've been doing lately. But I think we have the philosophical approach that gets stereo right, and that applies to switched programming like sports, and it applies to theatrical motion pictures. The camera rigs are very flexible; they're great at managing stereo space and at creating good, cuttable stereo—because that's a critical thing, being able to cut rapidly and still have it look good.There's been a lot of talk about 3D sports, but I once saw a 3D football game that was filmed with a different system, and when the settings weren't right, it was literally painful to watch.
Vince and I have been involved with, I think, most of the good stereo production that's been done over the last few years. And the Ohio State University football game really proved to the football community that 3D and football worked well together, and it had been done badly before that by a competitor. That had actually been disheartening to the football community, but now they know it can be done right. And the same with basketball, and we just did the Masters tournament and the Final Four. We're basically dominating the sports market right now, and it wasn't easy. We had to go out and do a lot of pro bono work, shooting a lot of sports over the last five or six years at our own expense to figure out how to modify the systems to allow it. And one of the key issues is hyperstereo. You have to be able to go beyond the normal interocular distance in order to film some sports, whether it's a NASCAR race and the car is coming around a corner half a mile away, or it's a football play that's 75 yards away. You have to be able to create stereo that cuts well with a camera that's maybe right along the sidelines that's very close. So the stereo space has to be controlled through interocular to be compatible. We have these sports-oriented rigs that are a little bit different. They use the same basic camera technology, but they're a little bit different than the ones we use for feature film making.
