After the success of Avatar the movie, 3D video is all the rage. 3D flat screens, cameras, animation systems… you name it and it’s getting lots of attention in the video production world.
Panasonic announced a 3D HD camcorder for just over $21,000 and Ikonoshop, a small high end camera company, announced a 3D version of their soon-to-be-released video camera.
The question is… what does this mean to you as a film maker in the real world?
It seems to me that this is like any major advancement in technology. From VHS to 3/4″ U-Matic, Beta-Cam, 1″, DVD’s, Blu-Ray, HD and Flash video online have all transformed our industry when they swept through. Fortunately, there is a well defined path that all new technology follows and it’s documented time and time again.
In a landmark book called Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
released in the mid 90′s Geoffrey Moore described how technology moves to markets. In short, there are early adopters that will buy and try almost anything. Then there’s the mainstream market that won’t buy new technology until their current tech is obsolete.
In between these two is a chasm and many great products die before they get across.
The same is true for production technology. Not everyone has moved to HD yet. It’s still not completely across the chasm.
I just completed a live two-week production. We had three studio SD cams feeding the projection systems in the room and two HD cameras capturing the event for edit later. The cost of projecting HD into the room was high enough that it made sense to run dual systems. That is not likely to change in the near future.
There are those who feel that you don’t need to capture HD footage if your only distribution channel is the web. Now that you can buy decent HD camcorders for a few hundred dollars and youtube.com is putting everything in a 16×9 format player that thinking is pretty well obsolete but there are plenty of people making online video that still work in SD formats.
Another client of mine has tons of SD footage and keeps generating more. It all goes online and is shot with quality cameras, good lighting, and good sound. It’s all interviews and talking head video on a web page doesn’t get remarkably better with HD.
So yes, there will be projects and clients that demand 3D but it’s likely that you’d want to rent the equipment and hire people who know how to use it. The only caveat to this thinking is if you decide to be one of those people who become 3D experts. Otherwise, I would keep moving toward making the best films you can using at least 720p technology.
In the long run, you’ll still need top level skills from preproduction through distribution to be successful. 3D is now just another option for image capture and distribution.
-a-
