ABSTRACT
Stereographers who used to work with classical cameras and projectors state that the film-based 3D production and exhibition could be flawless if properly handled. According to them, stereoscopic digital postproduction is the only root cause of the 3D renaissance, leveraging CGI animation, 2D/3D conversion, and in-depth compositing. And they may be right, because digital stereoscopic postproduction, through post prepping, is the magic Pandora’s box that makes perfect 3D a reachable goal to most crews, not just the few geniuses who do not make a single mistake in a whole movie production cycle. In the near future, 3D-dedicated compositing packages, using depth maps and 3D layouts and cameras, will make 3D compositing much simpler. High-quality camera tracking in 3D is a very complex task. Compositing a shot in 2D includes matching the color, grain, and dynamic of the layers, plus making them “optically coherent.” They should seem to have been shot with the same camera lens and position.
