Recently, lots of 3D movies come forth and become hot topic around the society, like the "UP", "Christmas Carol", "Avatar" etc. , these can also be called as "Digital movies". After we go through 2 articles, maybe you still do not understand, what is digital movies?

Digital movies, mean that we use digital method rather than using analog way to encode video and audio, just like video, they will use DV instead of film to produce video; for the audio, the simplest example is: analog is just like audio tape, the digital audio is like your MP3 file. If you want your AVI file to use sound from analog signal from the middle, you need to transmit it to MP3 or other audio format, it implies that if your audio length 1 hour and it is on the middle of the tape, you need to play to that location and re-record it into digital audio format for 1 hour. For the digital audio, you can just cut that length directly.

Thank you for indymogul's tutorial!

Now you may know, the original 3-D films need us to wear a 3-D glasses otherwise, you can only see the ghost of red and blue just like the previous tutorial. The Principle of 3-D film is, as human eyes have different angles (if you do not notice, try to close one of your eyes!), the 3-D film use the same principle, they use two cameras in side by side in 90 degrees angles in order to make audiences have an illusion of depth view. (See How do 3d glasses work!)




However, nowadays we can view 3-D films without using 3d glasses, thanks for the computer graphic! We simply call that type of movies as "pseudo-3D films" and they definitely do not need two cameras worked at the same time.


Probably you may heard of IMAX (http://www.imax.com/), it is a motion movie format, it used 15/70 mm film and it is 10 times of the normal 35mm films, it means audiences can see every pixels clearly on the enormous screen. Also, in IMAX theatre, the layout of the seats will be steeper and there would have many small holes in theatre to keep the audio clearer and create realism. The audio system there would use IMAX Proportional Point Source System, a 6-channel system with uncompressed sound, so the audience can enjoy movies with clear sound.

Besides of that, the IMAX movie use a different approach rather than the previous red-blue-glasses approach, it encode two films for left and right movies and play it simultaneously, with the 3-D glasses of IMAX, audiences can receive two movies in the same time and create a vivid effect.

This is the IMAX movie trailer for 2010, Alice's Adventure in the Wonderland! (For a larger version, click here)



The only IMAX in Hong Kong is in MegaBox, a shopping mall in Kowloon, you can find its location in the Google map. Also, according to the news (Chinese version only), a new IMAX cinema will locate in Tsim Sha Tsui.

MegaBox's location:

View Larger Map



4-D film, it means that besides of the 3-Dimension experience, you also can have a physical experience, like raining, or feel the perfume ... etc. However, in order to create these physical effect, its cost is too high, so you would only view them on some theme park like Disneyland or some small venue. Practically, in the next few years, the widespread of 4-D films remain to be impossible.


As the cinema use harddisk instead of film to show movies, the cost would be lower and it also helps 3-D movies build their realm. Moreover, more and more movies remake in 3-D, like Tron, the bloom of 3-D films would be continued for a long time.

This is the finale of this series, do you know more about present and the future of movies? I hope you will love this series! Thank you!