A surprisingly technical conversation: James Cameron on reinventing the live concert experience in 3D
Real nugget here is how they achieved stereo with telelenses at a live concert.
"We put two cameras in "hyperstereo" at 18 to 22 inches of interocular baseline [...] it gives you an incredibly enhanced sense of stereo, but it destroy the background: the optical pathways cross at the subject but diverge radically in the background, which is not fusable by the human visual cortex.
We captured intentionally bad stereo and fixed it in post: we kept an eye as is and used generative AI to segment [Billie Eilish] on the other eye and shift the background 30 to 40 pixels. And then we used AI to outpaint the missing pieces of background. [...]
It worked perfectly, but not in every shot. If we saw her feet contiguous with the floor [in the frame] we couldn't slide the background as easily. But as long as she was in a close up, there was a discontinuity between her, the floor and the background, and [the effect] worked fine.
This system's applicability? Football, Basketball, Racing anything where we're forced to a long lens camera position. Now we just need to make this system real-time or near real-time."