3D Goldrush

All Things Considered had a very gushing story tonight about companies like Legend3D. These are companies which take movies and 3dify them. Basically this means that a person Photoshops each frame adds a bit of offset to objects in the foreground to simulate parallax. The article managed to make this work sound like a glamorous, forward looking career choice.

This reminded me of a big customer of one of my startups many years ago. They were colorizing movies. Do you remember that fad? Basically they would take old black and white movies and convert them to color. This process basically involved Photoshopping each frame. We visited their site a few times. It really looked like a brutal, tedious process with rows of operators sitting in front of big workstations coloring frames. When the operator’s shift finished, the next operator would slide into the chair and start on the next frame. Each workstation was covered with Post-Its telling the next operator things like what color to use next time the actor pulls the flashlight out of his pocket.

I haven’t seen the work environment at these new 3dification outfits, but I’m guessing that it’s really about as glamorous as colorizing was in the those early days.