AVATAR, the movie...

[Soundman]

I saw this on Sunday in 3D. Personally, I would skip it. Looked to be a decent drop in resolution, which is exactly what this movie requires using heavy amounts of CGI.

Store wise, it wasn't a shocker. I saw some parallels to other movies and stories, but I still thought it was an original movie. Eventually movies are going to overlap, get over it.

I found myself thoroughly enjoying the visuals and audio of this movie. Going to be a Badass subwoofer tester.

Recommended, in 2D.

SheepStar

Please explain what you mean by a drop in resolution? Also, why are you recommending it for 2D and not 3D? Everyone I've talked to says this movie was made to be seen in 3-D so watch the 3-D version.

 

[Vracer111]

I saw this on Sunday in 3D. Personally, I would skip it. Looked to be a decent drop in resolution, which is exactly what this movie requires using heavy amounts of CGI.

Store wise, it wasn't a shocker. I saw some parallels to other movies and stories, but I still thought it was an original movie. Eventually movies are going to overlap, get over it.

I found myself thoroughly enjoying the visuals and audio of this movie. Going to be a Badass subwoofer tester.

Recommended, in 2D.

SheepStar

I don't understand the 2D recommendation over the 3D. I've seen it both in RealD 3D and in 2D film and the RealD 3D presentation is not less detailed than the 2D film resolution, not to mention the amazing viewing experience of Avatar in 3D. The 2D version felt very lacking in experience after seeing Avatar in 3D the first time...

 

[majorloser]

I think I might need a shot of heroin to calm me down through it.

My movie going tradition is to alway bring in booze. Been doing it for real long time now. Longer the movie, the bigger the bottle.

 

[DTS]

Finally getting to go see this in 3D here in a few hours. Looking forward to it. All of my friends have enjoyed it.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Oh, and I also thought Sam Worthington did a great acting job.

 

[DTS]

Got back a bit ago from seeing this. Very good movie and an incredible 3D experience, totally immersive, totally cool. Although the only other recent 3D was UP, so not much to compare to. I don't get into the whole political aspects of things, I just like movies, but I did think of the Native Americans as I was watching. The soundtrack was good as well and I recognized some musical elements Horner used in The Perfect Storm. In my opinion its worth every penny, especially for the 3D aspect if you haven't see one yet and what it has to offer.

 

[JerryLove]

Like I and many others have said elsewhere. I am just sick of being preached to in a movie by some stupid actor or director.

I didn't know Cameron was stupid, but I've never met him.

Sometimes I like when a movie makes me think. I enjoyed V for Vendetta, and Watchmen, and City of Man, and Shindler's List.

Somtimes I just want to watch dinosaurs eat people.

Most often it depends on how well the message is delivered, and I suppose the merit it has.

Don't you think an anti-capitolist message in a movie that will make cameron millions is hypocritical to say the least?

Perhaps. Did Cameron say making money was bad?

 

[mtrycrafts]

No I better not; I might hurt someones feelings or god forbid offend someone

I think what irks me the most is that if I had posted saying how much I admire Cameron for voicing his opinion on the environment and making a parable about evil white man moving in and destroying, and taking while displacing another race and how he parallels the movie about Bush and his imperialistic ways, I would have been called a hero and a visionary for recognizing this important piece of film making.

Now that I think about it, wasn't Star Trek Insurrection somewhat similar?

 

[jeffsg4mac]

Now that I think about it, wasn't Star Trek Insurrection somewhat similar?

Don't know. I loathe the Star Trek Next Generation. Never saw it, but I will take your word for it.

 

[MidnightSensi]

Looked to be a decent drop in resolution

This.

It seemed like the 3D caused a loss in the resolution, especially during action. The motion blur was terrible in some spots, as though it was extremely low frames per second. I can't tell if it was intentional depth of field, but if it was it was too strong if their intent was for the 3D to immerse you. The depth of field was so strong it felt hyper-real. Like the optical illusion that it was.

That leaves me to the movie itself. My favorite character is the sargent, who was funny! I've decided the reason I thought he did a good job is because he was 'larger' than this world, a GI Joe sort. He matched the rest of the movie, big...bold...3D. The other characters, even alien, felt too human to me.... it drew attention that maybe the disconnect between making a movie on a computer versus a real set has some issues.

Spoiler

By the end, we're encouraged to clap as American soldiers are blown from the sky guided by a love-struck ex-marine on a giant colored bat... while in 2151 the best thing they can come up with to whipe the blue people out is a couple of crates worth of 1950s explosives. We kicked the Indians *** with some crappy guns on horsepack, and in 2151 we are getting killed by people with arrows inside of spaceships that look like they could knock the whole planet out without refueling. Ugh.

Please explain what you mean by a drop in resolution? Also, why are you recommending it for 2D and not 3D? Everyone I've talked to says this movie was made to be seen in 3-D so watch the 3-D version.

You should see it in 3D, but .... it's like there is a ton of depth of field. You have to keep refocusing because the focus point changes, but not in a way that is realistic if you were looking through your eyes. It's like if you looked at your keyboard and the monitor behind it was completely blurry, where normally if you looked at your keyboard the monitor might be 'slightly' blurry but mainly still focused.

 

[speakerman39]

Went and watched this film on the IMAX-3D last nite. All I can say is wow! This was my first time doing so. The audio F/X really took hold and the visual F/X were the best I have seen. There were, at times, a bit of blurring as others here have mentioned. My take is this the film was awesome in 2-D and even better in 3-D. Especially, at the IMAX 3-D theater. Very well done!



Cheers,

Phil

 

[JerryLove]

Saw it. Liked it. Severe plot-realisim problems (what else is new). Agree a bit *too* messaged: but so was the movie it's based on (Dances with Wolves).

Oh... and I was bugged that every character placed the same importance on people that the audience did. Someone could loose their whole familiy and yet get very worked up over a wounded protagonist.

 

[mtrycrafts]

Why can't we just enjoy the movie simply as a piece of entertainment and leave all critizism aside?

Does James Cameron have to SAY anything for us to enjoy this movie?

Everyone copies from someone else. If it's not from this decade, then it's from some other time.

Everyone agrees that the special effects of AVATAR is among the best if not THE best.

The sound effects were awesome too.

I'm sure many people do like the story and some people don't like the story.

Did James Cameron tell everyone that his story is the most unique and orignal story of all times?

All 3 of us enjoyed the film but the 3D was not very good at all. All 3 of us disliked it, especially on some control room shots that was poor. Other friends had the same experience. So, the 3D experience was poor to say the least. Certainly not like the Michael Jackson 3D at Disney that comes out into space.
Certainly will get the BD

 

[sparky77]

I watched the movie tonight in a small 2d little drive in theater, and I thought it was quite remarkable. Considering it looked pretty blurry through the last third of the movie when the snow started blowing again. Thankfully the sound system in my truck is eq'd for quality rather than quantity, so even my friends in the next cars got to enjoy it.

I would easily nominate for best picture of the year, considering the contenders I've seen...................

 

[Sheep]

Please explain what you mean by a drop in resolution? Also, why are you recommending it for 2D and not 3D? Everyone I've talked to says this movie was made to be seen in 3-D so watch the 3-D version.

I don't care about everyone you've talked to. I saw it in 3D, and found the resolution to be lacking. Also what Midnight said, the 3D effect dictated what you could focus on. It was cool at first, but I'd rather have more depth of field in focus.

SheepStar

 

[Sheep]

I don't understand the 2D recommendation over the 3D. I've seen it both in RealD 3D and in 2D film and the RealD 3D presentation is not less detailed than the 2D film resolution, not to mention the amazing viewing experience of Avatar in 3D. The 2D version felt very lacking in experience after seeing Avatar in 3D the first time...

I prefer less blurred out background elements, and I don't like shots where the only thing that is distinguishable is a small piece of fluff.

SheepStar

 

[Soundman]

This.

It seemed like the 3D caused a loss in the resolution, especially during action. The motion blur was terrible in some spots, as though it was extremely low frames per second. I can't tell if it was intentional depth of field, but if it was it was too strong if their intent was for the 3D to immerse you. The depth of field was so strong it felt hyper-real. Like the optical illusion that it was.

That leaves me to the movie itself. My favorite character is the sargent, who was funny! I've decided the reason I thought he did a good job is because he was 'larger' than this world, a GI Joe sort. He matched the rest of the movie, big...bold...3D. The other characters, even alien, felt too human to me.... it drew attention that maybe the disconnect between making a movie on a computer versus a real set has some issues.

Spoiler

By the end, we're encouraged to clap as American soldiers are blown from the sky guided by a love-struck ex-marine on a giant colored bat... while in 2151 the best thing they can come up with to whipe the blue people out is a couple of crates worth of 1950s explosives. We kicked the Indians *** with some crappy guns on horsepack, and in 2151 we are getting killed by people with arrows inside of spaceships that look like they could knock the whole planet out without refueling. Ugh.

You should see it in 3D, but .... it's like there is a ton of depth of field. You have to keep refocusing because the focus point changes, but not in a way that is realistic if you were looking through your eyes. It's like if you looked at your keyboard and the monitor behind it was completely blurry, where normally if you looked at your keyboard the monitor might be 'slightly' blurry but mainly still focused.

OK, I think I know what you mean. I'll have to check it out and see for myself though.

 

[MidnightSensi]

I had a few more thoughts...

No implied meaning with the bottle of booze, but this is exactly what I found the movie to be like:

Versus a realistic depth of field would be more like this:

I'm not sure if the movie was made with strong DOF intentually (for effect/artistic reasons) or because of technology limitations. I work in a field that does some 3D rendering, I'm no expert, but a lot of times if there is a time, space or resource crunch a lower resolution will be used for the background and then blurred for a depth of field effect. This isn't really a 'bad' thing, as basically everything 3D has some sort of limitations and you have to decide where to spend time and resources based upon your money and time budget. This movie had a big money budget, but if the resource 'budget' wasn't spent well, a lot of processing power can be spent on things that people don't care about or there can be a lack of continuitity (like some things look great where others look bad). Even with huge rendering farms (huge clusters of computers that render frames and then combine a 'composite') they may have still had some limitations. If they saw some of the moving action stuff didn't look so good, or didn't match the focused action, they may have upped the motion blur to hide problems. A typical render on my, fairly fast, computer that would take 2 hours might only take 20 minutes at a farm, but if you have a long movie like this, with tons of green screen too, it is a giantantic undertaking. The 3D of the organic forms in this movie are especially impressive, the textures and mapping are extremely detailed. To give this some perspective, for me to render just one frame of those forest scenes on my computer, I bet it would take half a day, on my high-end workstation. ONE FRAME. For a few seconds of the movie, I bet it would take my computer all week. Everything is raytraced (the computer 'fires' light rays and lets them bounce around with respect to the physics of light and the materials), almost no grain (with what is in focus), so they must have let it cook a long time. In an action scene, they'd need to basically re-render every frame, so computationally it becomes /much/ greater. So, the blurring action wasn't a surprise to me once I thought about it more.

I remember reading in one of my magazines that they used roughly 20GB per minute of storage, 24 hours a day, for nearly four months to make this movie. Something like that. That's massive, considering a farm that could do 20GB per minute of rendering has to have some serious power.

So, I'm not really taking away anything from the movie, it still is technologically impressive. Maybe if I was to be the art director of the movie (which, I would be not qualified for), I would have used resources differently to increase the focus of the background during action scenes.

End of my ramble.

 

[MidnightSensi]

Oh, I noticed some things that maybe didn't make sense.

This is what I mean by 'grain' (which Avatar had basically none of):

The above is a nice 3D interior render, but because it wasn't left to 'cook' very long (as we call it in industry), it has some grain. The grain is easiest to notice in this image along the white walls, and at the base of the couch. The lighting is very good in the image, but because raytracing is so computationally heavy, the artist of this interior probably said "I'll let it cook for 24 hours and then I'm done."

Everying in focus in avatar is served with basically no graininess, and with all the organics they had, that's frickin' impressive.

But, the DOF was still a bother.

 

[Vracer111]

I had a few more thoughts...

No implied meaning with the bottle of booze, but this is exactly what I found the movie to be like:

Versus a realistic depth of field would be more like this:

The railroad track picture is NOT a realistic depth of field if you are talking about the focus of a human eye. Either the fore ground will be in focus or the background, not both at the same time, the eye can only focus on one subject at a time and the trees in the background are far too much in focus when looking at the rail close up at the bottom of the picture. The water drop picture however is almost exactly what you would see based on perceived distances of the objects involved. The closer the subject you are focusing on is to your eye the blurrier the background will be. Here's and easy, simple experiment - hold your hand out in front of you with arm stretched out. Focus on your hand, now how clear is the background? Then focus on the background, now how clear is your hand? Does it resemble the railroad track picture...even remotely? Photos can have much more DOF than the human iris/pupil can give in a single instance... and looking at the DOF in 2D (i.e. looking at a photograph - no physical distance separation of foreground from background) is not the same as focusing on the same scene in 3D space (where the fore ground and back ground are physically separated with distance.) A human iris/pupil has equivalent F-stop ranges of around 2-10, maybe 14. Camera lenses normally range from 1-32, and that picture of the railroad track looks to be around 22.