What's Behind the First 3D Super Bowl Ads

by Mark Hachman

Who or what is InTru3D? That's the message of one of the first two Super Bowl ads to be displayed in 3D, which will feature Intel, DreamWorks, and Sobe.

Two spots will debut on Sunday: a 30-second trailer for the DreamWorks animated movie, Monsters vs. Aliens, and a second spot highlighting Sobe LifeWater energy drinks. A 3D-encoded version of the NBC show "Chuck" will be shown the day after the Super Bowl.
The 3D advertising block will air at the end of the second quarter of the Super Bowl, Intel said. Over 125 million pairs of free 3D glasses, which use a new type of 3D technology, were created by Intel and distributed by PepsiCo through their brand SoBe Lifewater.

The glasses include the InTru3D logo, although it's unclear how high profile Intel and DreamWorks will make the brand. Intru3D represents a "premium 3D cinema experience," an Intel spokesman said.

And how important is 3D to DreamWorks? It's the future of moviemaking, according to DreamWorks chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose support was documented in a video blog shot by an unnamed Intel representative during the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

"The whole enchilada," Katzenberg replied, when asked if the studio's films would be made in 3D following the release of Monsters vs. Aliens. "[It's] all 3D from here on out for us."

InTru3D represents the fruits of a partnership Intel and DreamWorks struck last July, where DreamWorks said that Intel microprocessors would be used as the rendering engines to create DreamWorks films. Intru3D is a "new set of rendering and animation tools that run on top of Intel hardware," according to an Intel spokesman.

The Intel spokesman referred to what DreamWorks refers to internally as Shrek's Law, where the processing power needed to calculate clothes, hair, backgrounds, and other scene components in the Shrek movies with the appropriate visual fidelity doubles with each film. "With 3D, you're quadrupling your processing requirements," the Intel spokesman said.

DreamWorks used Intel's Xeon processors to render the film, and will move to "Nehalem" processors, the Intel spokesman said; the first Xeon server chip will be known as the Nehalem-EP, Intel executives have said previously. DreamWorks will also be a future test site for "Larrabee," Intel's upcoming multicore graphics processor for PCs and rendering farms, the Intel spokesman said.

Most of the 3D glasses people are used to wearing use a technology called anaglyph, which can create stereoscopic images from opposing colors – usually red and blue – that are slightly offset in order to create the illusion of depth. The problem is that any red and blue colors in the image get filtered, meaning that colors often have to be de-saturated to achieve a believable 3D image.

The new spots use a technology called "ColorCode," which will display a normal-looking 3D image when viewed without the glasses. However, the minute color offsets included in the image will translate into a 3D image when viewed with the glasses on.

"We are doing a bit of a stunt; this is the first time in history with a 3D broadcast in Super Bowl," Katzenberg said. "And there is a process that is just really come into own, called ColorCode. Instead of red and blue lensing, there is a different set of colors that is used, and it broadcasts with a different set of filters. And the result of that is that it…retains a lot of the color. If you look at something red and blue it turns to gray. And so now through this new lensing it doesn't leave all of the color out of the image, so right away it makes what you're looking at much much more compelling.

"And the second thing is that there is a greater level of precision in terms of the broadcast signal: the right eye-left eye stuff that is needed," Katzenberg added. "A lot of the fuzzy, blurry kind of stuff is cleaned up a lot. It puts out both a better signal and we translate better through these glasses. So relative to what people have seen before, this is a very good quality experience and obviously we feel good putting out our name and brand on it."

That, however, will differ dramatically from what viewers will see with the actual Monsters vs. Aliens movie in the theaters, Katzenberg added. "It's like a Rolls Royce to a razor – there's no comparison to it."

And how important is the Super Bowl ad? Well, it depends on how sloshed its viewers are, apparently. "One hundred million people are going to be introduced at the Super Bowl to InTru3D and Intel and Dreamworks through this presentation," Katzenberg said in the Intel video blog. "And since most of them will have had a couple of beers or so, they probably won't even notice. They'll be seeing it in 3D whether they put the glasses on or not."

Source : http://www.pcmag.com