The Insight Media/USDC 3D workshop is over. Speakers, exhibitors, networking and the drinks over dinner are done. With over 100 attendees and 8 exhibitors showing their 3D displays and 3D accessories, the workshop was a resounding success.

Experts talked about the entire 3D food chain from image creation through marketing and business issues, with stops at human factors, file formats, the transmission standards that don’t exist yet, and 3D displays: We heard it all.  Or at least as much as you can hear in a single day.  There is no way to cover it properly in a single Display Daily.

Several speakers discussed 3D cinema.  This is a successful and growing part of the 3D market, so I will pass on the workshop results for this market segment.  Matt Cowan, Chief Scientific Officer of RealD and chairman of SMPTE committee DC28-40 on stereoscopic digital cinema provided the data in the accompanying table on 3D electronic cinema installations.  In addition to RealD installations, there are currently about 80 IMAX installations, plus a handful of others.

RealD does not install the electronic cinema projector or the other hardware, such as networks and servers, required to make electronic cinema work.  It installs the projector add-on that converts a 2D electronic cinema projector to a 3D projector.  According to Cowan, this takes about ½ hour.  While I don’t take him literally, this is obviously not a very complex installation.

But what a difference it makes to Hollywood and the theater owners!  As an example, the average box office per 2D screen for the movie Chicken Little was $11K, but it was $25K per screen in 3D theaters.  Hollywood likes these numbers because it gets most of the box office receipts, and it prefers $25K to $11K.  The theater owners like it because the extra box office comes from extra people, all of whom  buy popcorn.  From a theater owners perspective, popcorn and candy are where the money is, and a film is a minor but necessary inconvenience needed to get people into the snack bar.

But there are extra costs to Hollywood to make a 3D movie.  Typically, it would cost about $5M - $8M to convert a 2D master into a 3D master for showing.  If you have 85 theaters to amortize these costs, even with the added box office, it is a dicey proposition.   But if you spread these same costs over 850 theaters, they look much more reasonable. 

For this 8 million dollars, any movie can be converted from 2D to 3D.  They can do Chicken Little and they can do The Polar Express and that’s okay.  But I’m really waiting for them to do Casablanca. 

Look for complete coverage of the 3D Workshop in  the upcoming issues of Mobile Display Report and Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage.