| Video has the advantage over film of being more intimately tied to computer technology, which has made dramatic advances in the last few decades. One article describes how television is evolving in parallel with personal computers.6 Despite some applications of computer technology to film production (EditDroid, audio signal processor - ASP, and so on), no equivalent article could be written about film. 7 3-D imaging requires vast amounts of memory. A picture may or may not be worth a thousand words but it certainly requires a thousand times as much memory. A 3-D picture requires considerably more. However, this is precisely what informatics technology is moving towards. Optical disks to be used with the Next computer hold incredible amounts of information and fiber optics can process vast amounts of information.
The disadvantage of television over film is, as always, the small screen. Whereas the film image is blown up to as much as 500 times the size of the negative, the television image is at most 20 times the size. This is compounded in the case of three-dimensional viewing by the window effect. 8 The three-dimensional effect is lost when the image is projected out beyond the border of the screen.
Another industry interested in the development of 3-D imaging systems is holography. The major advantage of holography as the basis for a three-dimensional imaging system is that it is intrinsically three-dimensional. Photography is intrinsically two-dimensional. Film tricks the eye into an illusion of the fourth dimension of time by using the phi-phenomenon, which ensures persistence of vision from frame to frame. Three-dimensional imaging techniques in film trick the eyes again by simulating certain natural depth cues. They simply add binocular cues to the monocular cues available in the flat image.
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