With the availability of new authoring tools,

3D can become part of the initial story
process, not merely be used as a gimmick,

says Dream Works CTO Ed Leonard.

purposes. The authoring tools will continue, and he expects it to have changed to make all this be quite obvious at the NAB Show. easier, and the big innovation is “We now have access to that the theaters, once they go workstations with extraordi-digital, can now upgrade with nary processing power,” he

stereoscopic 3d projectors. says. “And we can harness that

“When we put our plan to power for interactive tools – for that work interactively, in real commit to 3d together a couple authoring these films. That is time, is a big deal for us.” years ago, we expected more something that didn’t even exist Leonard also expects con- (stereoscopic) theaters to be a few years ago with scalable, tinued progress in 3d monitors out there than there are cur- multicore computing. We can that are better suited to dream-rently anticipated to be when now write software to take Works’ pipeline than ever before, we launch ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ advantage of very sophisti- and he fully expects to see that (in March), and the economic cated hardware architectures. trend continue at the NAB Show. downturn has certainly made Being able to move high-end “Today, every single big player it tough. But, if you look deeper, 3d graphics computation into is on the show floor with 3d you will see a commitment to the same box, localize that for capability (in monitors) – Lg, this by the industry that is real artists and put an interactive Samsung, Sony, all of them. It’s and long-term. For a time, it interface on it is a big thing. In moving from an experimental was a chicken-and-egg thing. the old days, we had to work prototype technology into a We asked them to convert the on files, send them off to a real mainstream. I’m expecting theaters, and they asked us, computer batch farm and wait we’ll find monitors that were ‘Where is the content?’ Now, overnight to see if we got it prototypes a few months ago I don’t know the exact num- right or not. It was a slow and turning into products. Last NAB, ber, but there will be dozens noninteractive process. Today, for example, Hewlett-Packard of 3d films in (2009 and 2010), artists sit in front of a 3d moni- brought to market their dream and almost all of them will be tor or in a theater with stereo Color display, which was pretty made natively in 3d rather than glasses on and interactively remarkable for a low-cost-point through post-processing.” control convergence and depth professional monitor. So those

Assuming that commitment and various other attributes kinds of monitors and commod-will move inevitably forward as that make 3d feel right. We can itized hardware that can run dream Works believes, Leonard now get real-time feedback software on a platform that is just says the revolution in recent on the 3d image, and we don’t a few thousand dollars – those years in CPU processing power have to guess anymore. To do are major developments.” ●

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