...whilst James Cameron tries to keep the ball rolling until the economy picks up enough to accomodate his 'purer' vision of 3D film-making.

It's interesting to hear the man behind Hollywood's current mania for 3D movies criticising Tinseltown both for its choice of which movies to convert, and then - somewhat in contradiction of himself - for using post-production 3D techniques at all. If James Cameron can't make his mind up about the merits of 3D conversion, is it any wonder that doubts abound, even in what seems to be an unfailing string of recent cases where 3D has made a real difference to box-office take?

Speaking at the Blu-Con gathering at Beverly Hills, the director of 3D block-decimator Avatar said: "My personal philosophy is that post conversion should be used for one thing and one thing only - which is to take library titles that are favourites that are proven, and convert them into 3D - whether it's Jaws or ET or Indiana Jones, Close Encounters... or Titanic."

Cameron went on to criticise the rush-job 3D-conversion of the recent Clash Of The Titans, as well as Warner Bros' inability to run its promised post-facto 3D-conversion on Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part One in time for the Christmas release (mitigated, I suppose, by its announcement of 3D Harry Potter disc releases).

Cameron is in a difficult position - he's asking for one of the most expensive cinematic revolutions since the birth of cinema in a climate of caution and financial terror that is notable even by Hollywood's standards. Cameron wants real 3D, and clearly loathes conversions, but he's hedging his bets (and not overly-upsetting his executive friends) by saying that rushed 3D-conversions are the problem.

Rather than the fact that they are an immense fraud in themselves.

Post-production 3D such as that employed on Clash Of The Titans is truly a 'trick', and it's not even at good one. The principal is positively Victorian - copy and shift existing 2D elements and duplicate them for polarity in one eye only, via 3D glasses (see pic below). Where CG is involved, it is at least possible to return and re-render a second POV (although I'm not convinced that a great deal of that was actually done on the VFX in Titans, as the results weren't that great, and the process is both costly and time-consuming).

I'm not even sure that I'm that interested in the type of 3D that Cameron is able to produce with the revolutionary and costly new camera-system developed for Avatar. I'm damned sure that I'm not interested in a new rash of 3D post-conversions. As a re-marketing tactic, the prospect of 3D conversions of old movies provides a nice safety-net for Hollywood in case the hi-def age bypasses Blu-ray in the end, and a new tactic is needed to re-sell old product; but I can only assume that the consumers who manage to get excited about post-conversion 3D don't really understand that Hollywood can't go back and re-shoot the 'rolling stone ball' sequence from Raiders Of The Lost Ark with two cameras. They can only duplicate and rotoscope (isolate) elements that they want to stand out, and such duplicated elements will share identical perspective fall-off, providing a 'cel'-type 3D effect that would truly be recognisable technology in the Victorian era...

Even Cameron, the most aggressive and powerful of Hollywood's 3D proponents, agrees:

"Unless you have a time machine to go back and shoot it in 3D, you have no other choice [than post-facto 3D conversion]. The best alternative is if you want to release a movie in 3D - make it in 3D."

One thing not mentioned in discussion of retro-fitting 2D movies into 3D is the validity of doing so with purely CGI movies, much as is currently being done with the Toy Story outings. In such cases, one is able to genuinely revisit the exact circumstances of the original scene and add a second 'virtual-camera' some suitable distance from the original, to generate disparate viewpoints on the scene. Arguably there is also scope for revisiting classically cel-drawn animation features in cases where enough archival material has survived to justify the effort.

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