Originally Posted by porkpie:
“I've ordered a 3D tv purely on the back of the announcement that Dial M For Murder and the original House of Wax are due to hit Bluray3D in the coming months.”
And both of them are superb examples of 3-D, much better than the vast majority of 3-D movies currently playing at your local cattleplex. HOW may be the 'showier' of the two in terms of stereoscopic effect, but the 3-D in DMFM brings the drama to life in a manner that's difficult to articulate, but you'll see what I mean when you view it.
Oh, and they're both proof-positive that dual-35mm - for all its lumbering awkwardness and impracticality - is miles better than HD video when it comes to shooting 3-D, no matter what people like James Cameron would have you believe!
Originally Posted by porkpie:
“Is it easy to convert anaglyph 3D to the current format?”
It's not ideal, since it represents a compromise (they separate the various colour layers and then reconstitute them into a dual-image format), but it can be done. For example, the short film STEREO-LAFFS was shot in 1941 in dual-35mm format but went unreleased until 1953, when it was retitled A DAY IN THE COUNTRY and played in 2-D only. SabuCat Productions located an anaglyph print in 2006 and, in the absence of the original dual-35mm elements, they were able to clean up the print, separate the layers and create a compromised - but workable - dual-35mm version which played at the World 3-D Expo in Hollywood that year. Such material could also be released in stereoscopic format on Blu-ray, and the same is true for every other 3-D film for which only anaglyph elements remain.
Originally Posted by porkpie:
“Not sure its worth listing Bluray releases here. OAR is par for the course with Bluray and dvd so its not really news like the tv broadcasts are”
That's true, but the lists here are for reference purposes only. Like the scope-films-on-TV listing, the Blu-ray lists simply say
this film and
that film was originally in scope and/or 3-D and that's what you should see on the disc itself. If not, you've been duped. For instance, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, the UK BR of PRIMAL is cropped to 1.78:1 from 2.39:1, and I believe the US BR release of BIG TITS ZOMBIE (no jokes, please!

) is in 2-D, whereas it was released theatrically in 3-D. My list gives you such info up-front - forewarned is forearmed, as they say.
Originally Posted by Paddy C:
“It's not the first surely. They have broadcast several films during the day/early evening in 2.35:1 before, this was just the first time they've done it to a Warner Bros. / Harry Potter film as previously any film from WB or any HP film was always cropped.”
But the big difference on this occasion was that the film was broadcast on ITV 1 from 7pm onwards and took up almost three hours of
primetime evening viewing. The BBC has already done this (with some of the
Pirates of the Caribbean films, for instance), but until this latest
Harry Potter premiere, ITV 1 has relegated all of its OAR scope films to daytime and early evening - from, say, 5pm onwards - and never slap-bang in the middle of the most valuable time-slot in the TV schedule (which is between 7pm and 10pm). Such a thing would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.