Experimenting with Garageband

January 28, 2008 | Filed Under Music | Leave a Comment

I’ve wanted to experiment with Garageband on the Mac for a while and finally got around to it last week. HERE IS THE RESULT. A sort of House/Trance/Techno song. I had so much fun putting this together. It was kind of like photography for me, I can spend hours and hours working on it without knowing time is going by. Thinking maybe something more acoustic for my next song. Call me DJ Al

How U2 3D works

January 28, 2008 | Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment

First off, the movie is really amazing. If you haven’t gone to see it, do it today! You can find local theaters here. Immediately after watching the movie I kept wondering how the 3D technology works. I had already seen the Beowulf movie in 3D so I’d seen the round polarized glasses before, but this U2 3D movie has so much more depth than I’ve seen in any other 3D movie before. How did they do that? Well I Googled “How U2 3D works” and didn’t find much so I had to dig much deeper. I came up this information and resources that might help satisfy your curiosity a little.

By the way, I think this technology has some pretty amazing implications for how we’ll consume entertainment media in the future. Maybe it won’t be long before 3D content is more common and streamed right into our own homes.

I think 3D movie watching also gives new meaning to what we call “high definition”. For year’s we’ve been used to referring to “high definition” in terms of the pixels on a screen along the X and Y axes. 3D introduces demands that High Definition also be thought of in terms of the Z axis. each pixel along the Z axis is really a layer in the image that helps give an image detailed depth. The U2 3D movie is probably the most “layers” of 3D any movie has had to date. I think I read that it has 4 and sometimes 5 layers of 3D. It reminds me of the way cartoons used to be made where artists had to draw on distinct layers of film and then literally slide the layers in front of each other on camera to give the illusion of depth. My Sonic the Hedgehog game on the Genesis, and for that matter any side scrolling arcade game does the same thing - it uses layers to give the illusion of depth. The more layers, the better the illusion. The same should be true of 3D movies. I’d rather see my next 3D movie with more Z axis layers (i.e. pixels) than with more X-Y axes pixels. That’s where I, as a consumer, would want “HD” to focus on next. Anyway, here’s the info on how the stuff works.

The content is created by a company called 3Ality. By created I mean captured. They use to cameras side by side to capture what our eyes would see. Eyes are typically 65mm apart so that’s how far apart the cameras need to be. What they’ve innovated on is the way the two cameras focus on the same layer even though they’re each looking at two different objects. Their crew traveled with the U2 crew all over South America to capture the concert footage. The band also did some special performances just for the cameras, without an audience (you’ll see what I mean when you see the movie).

The next step in the process is the editing part and that’s also handled by 3Ality. In this phase they’ve developed pretty amazing editing tools that give producers the ability to change the depth of any layer. This allows them to make things look closer or farther away - which allows them to create very smooth transitions or dissolves from one shot to the next. Apparently if a transition goes from a close-up shot to a very far away shoot, we’ll get a headache - which makes sense. Their tools allow them to move layers closer or farther away so that the dissolve from one shot to the next goes through a more gradual change in depth… (damn that’s cool!).

The final step is distribution and projection. I don’t know how the content gets to the theaters but once it does, it’s projected on special projectors that have RealD software running on them. A few years ago there were about a hundred theaters who had this 3D capability - now there are thousands. The projected image needs to go through a filter of theirs that polarizes the images for the left and right eyes separately. The screen also needs to be able to reflect the polarized images correctly. You can read more about how the technology works by reading some of their presentations on how 3d works.

Hope this is useful for any of you curious about how the 3D technology worked in the U2 movie. I can’t wait to see the next one. Here’s the trailer for the movie. Go see it!!