Customer Reviews

3D Movie Making: Stereoscopic Digital Cinema from Script to Screen

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This is certainly the definitive textbook on stereo 3D for both the novice and the professional film maker. In a very concise and understandable manner Bernard Mendiburu explains the fundamentals of the medium as well as technical and creative nuances that differentiate good 3D from bad 3D. This is a book that should be on every professional 3D film maker's bookshelf. The schematics are refreshingly non-threatening pencil sketches that can be used to illustrate stereo 3D concepts to clients, directors and producers who might be new to 3D. The accompanying DVD is loaded with valuable examples and information that include 3D movies and professional 3D demo reels. The DVD is also full of After Effects project folders of real 3D movies that can be used to study, modify and play with. It comes with software including tools, tutorials and Wimmer's stereoscopic player. There are still images that demonstrate the talents of many 3D artists showing autostereoscopic images, color coded images in various formats, 3D conversion examples and various 3D formats. Finally, there is a section on the DVD where you'll find invaluable white papers from companies and individuals that are notable in the 3D field. I've been waiting for a book like this and its release on the threshold of the next revolution in feature film making couldn't be more timely.

This book is the first one summarizing the new fully digital approach to the 3D stereoscopic movie making. I is targeted on both professionals working on big Hollywood projects as well as on total beginners. Even I as a professional working on 3D movie making a few years had found in the book a lot of interesting hints how to improve my work. It is clear the author have great practical experiences with 3D and uses them as examples in the book. Suggestions for improvement: replace the hand-drawn schemes in the book by some more clear one, make the book 2x longer and put inside more details about 3D projection technologies and visualization devices as well, put inside at lest the most essential stereoscopic equations ... But generally this book is a MUST BUY for anybody interested in 3D cinema or digital 3D movie and photo making.

This text prepares the reader for taking the plunge into 3D. It covers many areas of 3D and saves a lot of time experimenting and making mistakes. I was glad to learn from Bernard Mendiburu's experience and 3d know-how. In this book there is an enormous lot on the 2007/08 technology side particularly, in non-line post editing and SFX.
For me(yes some film makers still work with film...) the chapers on pre-production and production are worth their weight in gold. A little dry at times, but learn and enjoy.

If you have an interest in professional stereoscopic 3D, whether it's as a producer, cinematographer, editor, VFX artist or technical director, this is currently THE resource. Tasked with setting up a stereoscopic workflow at a broadcast production house I have found this book invaluable as far as filling in a lot of areas I was having trouble finding information on in other books,websites,etc. I'd love to see Bernard team up with a VFX/3D house for a companion to this book dealing with the post production side of things.

Cheers

I had great hopes for this book. The author frequently uses his jargon without defining his terms. He writes as though he is talking with the DP or director and he is not letting us in on what he is saying. He leaves the novice out in the cold. I was finished with the book before I noticed that there is a glossary of terms and concepts which should have been melded into the main text. These concepts should not be treated as mere footnotes. They are at the heart of the subject. Furthermore, the main text does not have any annotations to alert the reader to the helpful glossary entries.

I was half way through the book when I read a statement that this book was not written for people who want to record 3D and process it in post for later presentation. It is for those who want to do live broadcast 3D such as concerts and sporting events. The title of this book should have been "3D Live Broadcasting". For live production, the specialized equipment and requirements needed are generally very expensive and irrelevant for those who want to produce 3D cinema and other post-produced presentations. Most live tools are for aiding in making instantaneous decisions and real time image processing that would not be needed in a post-production environment.

The extensive section on camera rigs will probably not be applicable to the average reader. Rigs are basically a way to strap two monoccular video camcorders together to make them act as one stereoscopic camcorder. The bulk of these systems requires considerable manual adjustments that the newer stereoscopic camcorders take care of automatically. The author seems to say that having focus and convergence as independent adjustments is necessary for artistic freedom. But the truth is that it really never makes sense to have the convergence plane at any place other than the focal plane of the cameras or permanently parallel so that the viewer's eyes can do the convergence as Shannon Cassul describes. It is even questionable whether the interoccular distance should ever be anything but that for a human. When this distance is too small, you lose stereoscopy and when it is much greater than a human's then grand landscapes start to appear as though they are miniatures. I tend to agree with the reviewer who wrote that this author often didn't understand what he was talking about. I am more of an engineer than an artist and I think that artists often have trouble communicating with other people because their understanding is frequently insufficient as well as being a bit eccentric.

If you're getting ready to jump into 3D Stereoscopic film and television production and post production this is a must-have knowledge starter.

Mendibur's book is a classic text for us folk who
need in-depth info.
It has been most helpful in getting my first S3D conversion
of my movie "Fastback" started.
But... I am a long way from total understanding of this
complex subject. It is a well worthwhile $50 buck buy!

Pros can find this book useful, but newcomers should go elsewhere for an introduction to 3D production. I've been a TV producer for 15 years and I was lost one-third the way into this book. The author knows his stuff so well, he forgets to explain half of what he knows. He uses jargon terms before he defines them, or never defines them at all. (There is no glossary, and the index doesn't include many of the terms he employs.) Sentences are dense with terminology that is casually tossed out but never clearly explained, and the hand-drawn illustrations (for a subject where geometric precision is all) are terrible. You need to know basic cinematogaphy, Photoshop and computer programming jargon to follow much of what's going on here, and the newcomer is likely to be frustrated right out of the field. Even straightforward, easy-to-understand ideas are expressed in unnecessarily geeky terms, and as they pile up in sentence after sentence, you eventually realize that you're wasting your time. You need to take a course before you get this book.

The author describes convergence of the taking lenses as a valid technique, giving the caveat that it produces keystoning and other distortions that he goes on to say can be "fixed in post".
This is absolutely not true, and stamps the book as a largely valueless collection of tidbits that may be more or less useful, but overall cannot be trusted due to the author's misunderstanding of this basic concept.
There are also numerous typos throughout - don't publishers have proofreaders any more?

I wanted to learn about 3D movies ever since I saw Avatar in 3D. This book is filled with MS PAINT pictures of how 3D movies are made. It taught me nothing more than what a 5 minute Google search could have shown me. Spare yourself and don't waste your money.

This book will not teach you anything new about composing 3D movies or how they are made.