Disney Digital 3-D

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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Real D Cinema. (Discuss)

Disney Digital 3-D is a brand used by the The Walt Disney Company to describe digitally animated three-dimensional films shown exclusively using digital projection. It is essentially a Disney brand of Real D Cinema technology.

The first film released using this technology was 2005's Chicken Little. For this release, the computer-animated film was re-rendered in 3-D by Industrial Light & Magic and exhibited in Real D Cinema format using Dolby Digital Cinema projection systems.

Disney re-released The Nightmare Before Christmas, twice, in a remastered 3-D version, first on October 20, 2006, and second on October 19, 2007; it will have its third re-release sometime in 2008. Disney also released a 3-D version of its computer-animated feature Meet the Robinsons, and launched the Hannah Montana Concert tour in Disney digital 3-D.

1 How it works
2 Confusion
3 Titles
4 References
5 External links

[edit] How it works

Audiences viewing a film presented by Disney Digital 3D are given a pair of plastic 3D glasses. The glasses have circular polarized lenses, each polarized differently. Circular polarization allows much greater head movement than linear polarization without loss of 3-D effect or ghost images. This increases audience comfort and helps to mitigate the "3-D headache" caused by many 3-D systems, especially those relying on film projection.

The movie is projected digitally, with a single Christie, Barco or NEC DLP Cinema projector (other digital projection technologies would work as well if fitted with the proper equipment) at 144 frames per second, six times as fast as a normal movie. Every 1/24th of a second (the projection frame rate for normal 2-D movies on film) the two scene views called "right eye" and "left eye" are each shown 3 times (6 flashes of image on the screen matching the 6-times-higher projection rate). Due to persistence of vision, the 72 image frames and 72 black frames fed to each eye in a given second should be perceived as a relatively flicker free image.

In front of the projector lens sits the Z-Screen, an electronic device developed by Lenny Lipton from Stereographics. It inserts a polarizing screen that matches the polarization of either the right lens or left lens of the glasses worn by the audience. When the left-eye-matching Z-Screen is in place, the viewer's right eye sees nothing at all (or almost nothing) while the left eye sees a normal looking frame. For the next frame of the movie, the Z-Screen swaps the polarizing screen to match the right eye lens in the glasses worn by the audience. Now the audience sees nothing (or nearly nothing) with the left eye and a normal but slightly shifted version of the frame in the right eye. The brain knits together the alternating left-right perspectives into a seamless 3-D view of the movie scene.

The single projector setup has a number of advantages over previous 3-D systems:

It eliminates most "ghost images" caused by the left eye seeing a bit of the right-eye frames and vice versa.
It eliminates any form of temporal (time) or spatial misalignment of the left-eye and right-eye frames that plagued previous 3-D projection systems relying on movie film. The mechanical jitter of the film in the projector and the poor frame-to-frame match-up generated most of the dull headache 3-D side effect caused by the eye muscle strain — along with the much improved, but still slightly flawed, horizontal/vertical polarization system seen for the last 20 years or so in motion simulation amusement rides, IMAX 3-D and in limited other venues (Walt Disney World, Disneyland etc.).

The main trouble with polarized 3-D systems for movies is a loss of screen brightness. As every other frame is "invisible" to one of your eyes, the image would seem only half as bright, if projected onto a normal screen.

However, this loss of brightness is counteracted to some extent by the fact that theaters must use a silver screen for this type of projection. A normal white matte screen dissipates the polarization of the projected light. The separation of the two images would be immediately lost, without the silver screen.

[edit] Confusion

Fewer than 100 theaters across the US were equipped to show the movie Chicken Little in 3D. Many viewers were not even aware of the 3D version because many people assumed "Disney Digital 3D" refers to the 3D modelling of the CG characters, not the 3D stereoscopic presentation of the movie.^{[citation needed]} The release of Meet the Robinsons was equipped for more than 600 theaters..

[edit] Titles

Title	Original year of release	Year of 3-D release	Notes
Chicken Little	2005	2005	digitally animated film re-rendered for 3-D
The Nightmare Before Christmas	1993	2006/2007/2008	stop-motion animated film remastered and converted to 3-D
Knick Knack	1989	2006	digitally animated film re-rendered for 3-D
Meet the Robinsons	2007	2007	digitally animated film re-rendered for 3-D
Working for Peanuts	1953	2007	traditionally animated short film from 1953, originally created in 3D; shown with the 3-D projection version of Meet the Robinsons
Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert	2008	2008	Concert tour directly recorded in 3-D for limited theatrical release^[1]
Bolt	2008	2008	^[2]
Up	2009	2009	^[3]
Toy Story	1995	2009	^[3]
Toy Story 2	1999	2010	^[3]
Toy Story 3	2010	2010	^[3]
Rapunzel	2010	2010	^[3]
newt	2011	2011	^[3]
The Bear and the Bow	2011	2011	^[3]
Cars 2	2012	2012	^[3]
King of the Elves	2012	2012	^[3]
Alice in Wonderland			^[4]
Frankenweenie			^[4]