How are older movies post-converted to 3D?

soup_sam

I went to see Hugo in 3D today, and beforehand there was a trailer for the upcoming re-release of Titanic in 3D. I must say, I was impressed. How much of the conversion to 3D of a movie that was shot in 2D is done by hand? I assume they don't have to go through every single frame -- there are probably close to 280,000 frames for a 3+ hour film like Titanic. Perhaps for a scene can certain items be marked as in the foreground and a computer used...

Originally asked by tcrosley on Stack Exchange (movies) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

2D to 3D Video Conversion is the process of transforming the original 2D video to a 3D form, which in almost all cases is stereo, so it is the process of creating imagery for each eye from one 2D image. That is why the transformation is also called 2D to stereo 3D conversion, or stereo conversion. Two approaches to stereo conversion can be loosely defined: quality semiautomatic conversion for cinema and high quality 3DTV, and low quality automatic conversion for cheap 3DTV, VOD and similar applications. The idea is that a separate auxiliary picture known as the "depth map" is created for each frame or for a series of homogenous frames to indicate depths of objects present in the scene. The...

Full answer by Advicer: https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/1368 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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