One of the questions that keeps arising for our customers who may not have followed our story/evolution over the last couple of years is the difference between EYEPOP-3D and Plan-D, so in this post I'll do my best to explain the slightly blurring lines between the two.
EYEPOP-3D
In it's simplest terms EYEPOP Titles are our Premium releases where we go all out to fix (nearly) every flaw in the conversion and we create a Platinum Edition with slipcover and extra goodies to deliver a superb limited edition collectible. We also release these with a Kickstarter campaign which helps to drive up initial interest and allows us to offer even great premium options like VERY LIMITED packages including books, comics, vinyl records, etc.
We originally launched EYEPOP-3D as an experiment to see if it was possible for one person, or a very small team to convert and release a 2d to 3D feature film conversion, and most importantly it should be of a high enough standard that 3D enthusiasts would enjoy it and hopefully get behind us in our mission to get some of the classic public domain films, or others if we could get a license, out on Blu-ray 3D.
The quality drive for this led to us developing an approach of peer reviewing - each of us would review each others work-in-progress and point out areas where we thought it could be improved. This would result in ever decreasing flaws as each version was converted and refined. This iterative approach often meant week or months of slaving over the same 5 or 10 minutes of footage until it was perfected, then moving on to the next sequence.
Fixing the flaws was of course where most time was taken up. Creating a conversion based on an AI depth map is not very difficult, creating a GOOD conversion using an AI depth map is on the other hand pretty tricky! For many shots where we felt the flaws were excessive it would often mean fixing the depth map but also doing extensive rotoscope work on the source footage to fix problems.
So EYEPOP releases take a long time and a lot of energy to produce, and to distribute. USing this approach we knew we could likely only release 3 or 4 titles per year which we felt was a little limiting and also made the conversions very expensive to produce in the limited quantities that the market supports.
We needed a way to get conversions out quicker and cheaper, whilst maintaining as close to EYEPOP quality as we could. Looking at where time was spent meant that we could see where we could save time to make things quicker/cheaper and examining our process meant we could look at where we could save time and produce near the same level of quality as an EYEPOP conversion.
PURCHASING EYEPOP-3D TITLES
EYEPOP-3D Discs are available from our GUMROAD STORE (whilst stocks last). PLEASE NOTE: Nightmare Castle 3D (EYEPOP-01) is now out of print..
PLAN-D
So we came up with Plan-D: a less labour intensive approach, without all the fancy packaging and promotion, with a very simple (fos us) disc-on-demand production process which meant we didn't have to order stock and ship out ourselves. We also found ways to get around excessive rotoscoping and found quicker ways of fixing problems, a simpler peer review process and of course the technology we use to generate the depth estimation maps were also improving all the time.
So our areas of saving were:
Conversion: Aim to do zero rotoscoping on the source footage, fix other problems more efficiently.
Iterations: At the same time we reduced the iterations of peer reviews which sped up conversion process although may also allow a few more visual anomalies to slip through the quality control net.
Peer Reviews: We approach peer reviews looking at a wider sequence, steering clear of an absolute shot-by-shot, frame-by-frame reviews. We put quality control on the individual conversion producer to self-check and certify quality of their own output.
Design: Keep packaging design to one simple Blu-ray cover, no fancy limited edition goodies or slipcovers.
Production: Simply produce a master .ISO and upload to Kunaki to produce disc-on-demand
Distribution: Again the disc-on-demand production meant the provider ships direct to the customer, we don't need to get involved.
Promotion: As opposed to month long Kickstarter campaigns with loads and loads of extra design & marketing work we just put out regular posts on social media/forums and hope word-of-mouth works in our favour.
Accounting: In order to simplify accounting, each producer has their own Kunaki Store, which means the income goes directly to the individual.
This gave us a substantial saving and almost meant as an aside that more experimental titles such as the "Conversion Curiosities" disc could be produced even though we guessed it wouldn't sell in nearly the same quantities as a feature film.
Purchasing Plan-D Titles
The sales set-up for this is somewhat more cumbersome. Due to the income going directly to the conversion producer each has to have their own store and only sell their own product. It's imperfect but all of the savings listed above allow us to sell discs from around $5 to $25, a reasonably good reduction on EYEPOP prices.
From the USA you can buy select Plan-D Titles from:
From Outside of the USA you can buy select Plan-D Titles (while stocks last) from:
Select Plan-D Titles can also be purchased for Digital Download:
What lies ahead?
As we head into 2025 there are plenty challenges, a large part of the 3D audience don't seem to have interest in these conversions for a variety of reasons: whether it's not their types of film, they don't "approve" of converting films not originally design for 3D or they assume our conversions are substandard like the historic ones from Europe where the film was flat 2D and pushed back into the screen or that we are some kind of totally AI driven nerds turning out any old crap.
We're also up against one-click pirates who share more contemporary films online, many of which we'd love to be able to do really great conversions of but there currently isn't a large enough audience to support film licensing costs in order to do these legally. And of course there's the one click AI tools which allows users to create conversions at home which people may consider "good enough" that they wouldn't want to pay for our more refined hand-crafted conversions.
And the aging technology with no MAJOR support currently available for mainstream 3D TV shrinking/limiting the market to more niche serious enthusiasts with home projection, or VR systems.
So we have harsh challenges to face, and an awful lot of people to convince. We'll do our best. Come on 2025, let's get this on!