Birthday and IMAX
My birthday was a few days ago. I'm 25 and old. The strangest thing to me about growing older is that time really does go by faster the older you get these last few years have really gone by.
I visited home the day before my birthday and got home really late on technically my birthday Jenny had setup a surprise by decorations, the door had a welcome thing I don’t know what to call it exactly and by having balloons and ribbons everywhere done very nicely. Sadly she was already sleeping so I didn’t have time to thank her until the morning, but I didn’t appreciate it any less.
The day of my birthday I had a good time Jenny and I went to see Deep Sea 3d which is an IMAX movie. It was quite fun, the theatre was full of giggling kids it was pretty adorable. Visuals were great, but the content wasn’t that interesting as the movie was made for kids and the biological aspects of the movie was greatly simplified. Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp did a really poor job narrating the movie, their dialog was really bad, but again it is for kids and they probably didn’t write the scripts. For those of you who haven’t seen an 3D IMAX movie do its really a fun experience, but sit in the far back row in the center believe me you wont be to far away and for how they make those 3d movies those are the prime seats I’ll explain below.
On the way back from the movie we went to check out some puppies at the pet store which is always a big tease because I always want to take one or two of them home but of course I can’t - yet. Afterwards we met up with one of my friends at Conner O’Neil’s and I had some yummy ribs and some draft Guinness which is I think best that way.
I’m a nerd so the rest of this is a technical rant about the IMAX movie I saw, quit here if you don’t care.
Back to the technical aspects of the about the IMAX movies visuals, I was pretty impressed with how good it looked most of the time. The polarized lenses are thousands of times better than LCD shutter glasses which can cause very bad headaches. I do have some criticisms though. The polarized lens which for those who don’t know are a lot like sunglasses and make things a bit darker when looking though them so consequently those glasses really washed the brilliant colors of the ocean life out, I think they probably could have mixed color better to compensate for that. Occasionally I would lift the glasses and see nothing but a blurry mess, but it was a vibrant colorful mess that made me wish so much of the color quality wasn’t lost.
The best seats for this movie were the back row, by far. I need to see more 3d IMAX movies to see if this is a consistent problem but the move we saw had too many scenes consisting of things too close to the viewers. I think perhaps the think for something to be 3d it has to stick out and smack you in the face with it, the problem is when something is close to your face you need to cross your eyes to see it. Try this really fun exercise, point your finger up focus on it and slowly move it closer and closer to your face until it touches the bridge of your nose between your eyes. Did you really try it? If not, do it damn it! How did it go? For the last few inches its hard to look at and hurts your eyes trying to focus on it and just doesn’t feel comfortable crossing your eyes that far in. It’s not that fun really so why did the makers of the movie make you do that consistently in the movie? I’d say maybe 10 to 20% of the movie made you look too close to your face and it can be fixed trivially and with no visual loss. In fact the most compelling shot from the movie was actually a shot where the depth came out of screen and went into the screen. I was the surface of the ocean with the sunset, the horizon of the ocean looked miles away, it looked real, I was quite amazed. But more importantly it could be enjoyed from practically every seat in the theatre, not just the farthest row.
Ghosting was really bad in some scenes in particular a jelly fish scene. Let me explain what this looks like, so if you were to imagine a fairly generic scene with a golf ball popping out of the screen on a black background ideally you should see only that, but with ghosting it would appear there is a blurry and flat ghost shadow on the surface of the screen of the ball. So in this jelly fish scene there was a bunch of bright jellyfish floating in the air with a bunch of ghost shadows everywhere which was very hard to look at. Ghosting is very visually distracting and confusing so it quickly kills the 3d illusion. They should have cut that scene or fixed it. For those interested let me explain why this happens ghosting in 3d images is a technical limitation on the separation of the left and right visual channel, so whenever there isn’t sufficient separation of the left and right images you can see part of both visual channels in one or both eyes which causes the ghosting effect. This mostly happens when there is something very bright in one eye and in the corresponding spot in the other eye there is a very dark spot, and the bright spot makes its way thought the filtering into the eye it shouldn’t. They could avoid this by checking any scenes where there is a significant difference in brightness or color overlapping and correct it by making the difference less severe.
My last complaint which is really the choice of a scene in the film, they had the coral reef seeds(for lack of a better common word) in a flurry much like the great 1888 blizzard so nothing could be discerned and it went on seemingly forever it was terrible. I could understand them doing it for a few seconds to just show the shear numbers of these new spawn, a kind of- there are so many of these you cant possibility comprehend- moment, but it went on for minutes.
I think the ocean is great, and the film technology is great, but the people who made the movie are morons.
This stuff is so cool I have committed to make a similar setup (obviously on a much smaller scale but none the less 3d) in my next apartment, I got all the shit priced out and I could do it for about the same price of a large screen TV not bad at all.
Ok I’m done.
I visited home the day before my birthday and got home really late on technically my birthday Jenny had setup a surprise by decorations, the door had a welcome thing I don’t know what to call it exactly and by having balloons and ribbons everywhere done very nicely. Sadly she was already sleeping so I didn’t have time to thank her until the morning, but I didn’t appreciate it any less.
The day of my birthday I had a good time Jenny and I went to see Deep Sea 3d which is an IMAX movie. It was quite fun, the theatre was full of giggling kids it was pretty adorable. Visuals were great, but the content wasn’t that interesting as the movie was made for kids and the biological aspects of the movie was greatly simplified. Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp did a really poor job narrating the movie, their dialog was really bad, but again it is for kids and they probably didn’t write the scripts. For those of you who haven’t seen an 3D IMAX movie do its really a fun experience, but sit in the far back row in the center believe me you wont be to far away and for how they make those 3d movies those are the prime seats I’ll explain below.
On the way back from the movie we went to check out some puppies at the pet store which is always a big tease because I always want to take one or two of them home but of course I can’t - yet. Afterwards we met up with one of my friends at Conner O’Neil’s and I had some yummy ribs and some draft Guinness which is I think best that way.
I’m a nerd so the rest of this is a technical rant about the IMAX movie I saw, quit here if you don’t care.
Back to the technical aspects of the about the IMAX movies visuals, I was pretty impressed with how good it looked most of the time. The polarized lenses are thousands of times better than LCD shutter glasses which can cause very bad headaches. I do have some criticisms though. The polarized lens which for those who don’t know are a lot like sunglasses and make things a bit darker when looking though them so consequently those glasses really washed the brilliant colors of the ocean life out, I think they probably could have mixed color better to compensate for that. Occasionally I would lift the glasses and see nothing but a blurry mess, but it was a vibrant colorful mess that made me wish so much of the color quality wasn’t lost.
The best seats for this movie were the back row, by far. I need to see more 3d IMAX movies to see if this is a consistent problem but the move we saw had too many scenes consisting of things too close to the viewers. I think perhaps the think for something to be 3d it has to stick out and smack you in the face with it, the problem is when something is close to your face you need to cross your eyes to see it. Try this really fun exercise, point your finger up focus on it and slowly move it closer and closer to your face until it touches the bridge of your nose between your eyes. Did you really try it? If not, do it damn it! How did it go? For the last few inches its hard to look at and hurts your eyes trying to focus on it and just doesn’t feel comfortable crossing your eyes that far in. It’s not that fun really so why did the makers of the movie make you do that consistently in the movie? I’d say maybe 10 to 20% of the movie made you look too close to your face and it can be fixed trivially and with no visual loss. In fact the most compelling shot from the movie was actually a shot where the depth came out of screen and went into the screen. I was the surface of the ocean with the sunset, the horizon of the ocean looked miles away, it looked real, I was quite amazed. But more importantly it could be enjoyed from practically every seat in the theatre, not just the farthest row.
Ghosting was really bad in some scenes in particular a jelly fish scene. Let me explain what this looks like, so if you were to imagine a fairly generic scene with a golf ball popping out of the screen on a black background ideally you should see only that, but with ghosting it would appear there is a blurry and flat ghost shadow on the surface of the screen of the ball. So in this jelly fish scene there was a bunch of bright jellyfish floating in the air with a bunch of ghost shadows everywhere which was very hard to look at. Ghosting is very visually distracting and confusing so it quickly kills the 3d illusion. They should have cut that scene or fixed it. For those interested let me explain why this happens ghosting in 3d images is a technical limitation on the separation of the left and right visual channel, so whenever there isn’t sufficient separation of the left and right images you can see part of both visual channels in one or both eyes which causes the ghosting effect. This mostly happens when there is something very bright in one eye and in the corresponding spot in the other eye there is a very dark spot, and the bright spot makes its way thought the filtering into the eye it shouldn’t. They could avoid this by checking any scenes where there is a significant difference in brightness or color overlapping and correct it by making the difference less severe.
My last complaint which is really the choice of a scene in the film, they had the coral reef seeds(for lack of a better common word) in a flurry much like the great 1888 blizzard so nothing could be discerned and it went on seemingly forever it was terrible. I could understand them doing it for a few seconds to just show the shear numbers of these new spawn, a kind of- there are so many of these you cant possibility comprehend- moment, but it went on for minutes.
I think the ocean is great, and the film technology is great, but the people who made the movie are morons.
This stuff is so cool I have committed to make a similar setup (obviously on a much smaller scale but none the less 3d) in my next apartment, I got all the shit priced out and I could do it for about the same price of a large screen TV not bad at all.
Ok I’m done.