The first workshop on 3D Cinematography was held at CVPR 2006 in New York City and attracted 50 people. It was a featured in a special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, in May-June 2007. See http://perception.inrialpes.fr/3dcine/ for details.
The second workshop was held at the Banff Center in June 2008. This was on invitation only, with a attendance of 20 experts for an entire week, resulting in the book “Geometry and Image processing for 3D Cinematography” published by Springer in 2010, with 12 chapters covering all aspects of 3D cinematography.
Since the last workshop in 2008, this field is confronted to the emergence of stereoscopic 3D cinema, as witnessed by such spectacular movies as U23D, Coraline, Avatar, Pina or Hugo (to names just a few). Stereoscopic 3D Cinematography has become an extremely active area of technologic research and artistic experimentation for professional cinematographers, who have had to learn the science and technology of computer vision. At the same time, computer vision scientists are made aware of novel and unexpected issues that require their expertise in such areas as artistic control, human factors and the economy of pre-production, production and post-production of 3D movies.
Another important new factor is the availability of new sensors, especially RGBD cameras, which are bringing even more power to researchers in 3D Cinematography. In the near future, we also expect to see the generalization of open-source, programmable, computational photography cameras that can be operated at video frame rates. This makes the computer vision lab ever closer to becoming an experimental studio for live action 3D movie-making.
As a result, we believe it is the right time to have a third international workshop on 3D Cinematography where experts in all areas of computer vision can confront such questions.
