[Crave Online]

This is not a story about pros and cons for 3D. This is about when the new technology malfunctions so badly that it cannot even deliver the simple result of seeing a movie at all. At the Los Angeles all media screening of The Avengers, several batches of 3D glasses were broken so that many viewers could not even see the screen. It is a coincidence that this happened the same week that another press screening had a projectionist accidentally delete the entire digital file ofThe Avengers.

This is not a dig on The Avengers. The movie is awesome, but as it happens to be the major movie being screened this week, it is now the vehicle to illuminate a major problem facing movie theaters. The technologies intended to reinvigorate the cinematic experience have the power to render cinema itself nonfunctioning. That is dangerous.

The Problem

The Arclight, a premium movie theater in Los Angeles, uses a 3D system called XpanD, which creates the 3D effect with an active shutter. …

Schklair explained that an infrared emitter goes in the booth to signal the electronic glasses when to switch images between right and left eye. If the glasses are broken, an extra emitter signal won’t correct them.

“I hate to point fingers but it sounds like the theater wasn’t doing a good enough job on quality control of the glasses,” Schklair said. “After a screening, they are supposed to legally wash them and sterilize them, and they should also do a quality check on them and make sure the batteries are good and they’re working. It’s actually not normal to hear of a theater distributing broken glasses. They’re pretty good with their quality control.”

Viewers like Yamato, Simon, Hanna, Pirrello and myself knew enough to exchange our glasses, and some of us ultimately found a working pair. Some poor folks in the theater continued to sit with broken glasses, thinking the movie was just dark. One gentleman screamed, “Fix the projector” midway through the movie.

What’s At Stake

This is a true case of “hoisted by one’s own petard.” Hollywood insists on pushing 3D, and their systems have arguably created more problems than solutions. Any new technology has growing pains but the potential disaster here could completely cancel out the benefit. If 3D glasses doesn’t work, you can’t see the film at all. If the digital file is corrupt or deleted, the entire movie disappears.

Arclight is supposed to be a premium theater so it would seem a good call by the studio to screen one of their premium movies there. It’s not Disney’s fault the screening went badly, but the situation indicates that even the studio that owns the film cannot enforce optimum conditions. (Disney declined to comment for this story.) …

“If I could find anything to do, I would be out there doing it,” Schklair said. “I don’t have input into the theaters. I wish I did because it’s more than glasses. It’s on a technical level, the screen brightness in most theaters is so poor that 3D movies look terrible because they’re dim.”

See the full story here: http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/188013-broken-glasses-experts-try-to-save-3d-from-theaters-