Technicolor gets into 3D

TECHNICOLOR, the company that brought colour to movies for the first time, is throwing its considerable weight behind 3D, both in the cinema and broadcast arenas.

At an event at its Chiswick facility in London today, the company revealed it has launched the first independent broadcast services platform ready to broadcast 3D channels.

According to Ahmad Ouri, chief marketing officer of Technicolor, despite all the hype so far only 25 major studio titles have been made in 3D in the last five years, with 19 more coming in the near future.

Despite this the company predicts that over the next five years, adoption will increase exponentially, in the cinema and the home and later on mobile phones and media players. He even postulated that Jobs' Mob was almost certainly working on a 3D device.

Ouri explained that the company is now able to manage live or pre-recorded content, from post production through encoding for satellite, cable, IPTV or terrestrial distribution, as well as being able to generate logos and other visual effects for 3D broadcasts.

The company has deals with all the major studios and broadcasters as well as digital distributors like Lovefilm, Itunes, Hulu and even Tesco.

"Broadcast 3D is a natural extension of the many services we're already providing, including upstream in production and post production, as well as delivering the highest quality 3D images to theatres and to the home via Blu-ray Disc, broadcast and digital delivery," said Chuck Parker, president of Technicolor's Digital Content Delivery business.

Parker highlighted that there are still a lot of challenges facing mainstream adoption to 3D, particularly around a lack of expertise in the industry at this stage and a lack of education about the technology among consumers.

In terms of cinema, only around six or seven per cent of screens in the US and Western Europe are capable of showing 3D content. To this end Technicolor has developed a film based 3D system to help bridge the gap. This effectively puts the left and right eye image on the same frame, which is then projected through a new lens which splits the image to produce the 3D effect. The cinema will need a silver screen, but overall it is a lot cheaper than upgrading to a 3D capable digital projection system. Both use the same passive 3D glasses.

Parker also warned that in the desperation to get content out there, there is very real possibility of creating bad 3D content that would do more harm than good to general adoption. Whether the nauseating content he referred to was due to poorly shot 3D or because of something like Hannah Montana 3D we're not sure, but either seem pretty worrying to us. Similarly the attempt by some players to allow the conversion of 2D content to a type of pseudo-3D, be it in real-time as Samsung are doing with its new TV range or pre-rendered as with PowerDVD 10, was worrying for the same reason.

The company concluded that all of these challenges are in the process of being overcome and that 3D is an inevitable trend with mass adoption coming over the course of the next five years. µ