Douglas Trumbull demonstrated and discussed the MAGI medium (120 fps, 3D, 4K digital projection) at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday afternoon. The ten minutes of MAGI-captured footage he showed was from UFOTOG, a who-gives-a-shit? short about an eccentric guy tracking UFO activity. And yet the nighttime footage in this short was drop-dead amazing — it was the first time I’d seen footage that accurately simulated what nocturnal vision actually looks like. Trumbull’s main point was that shooting at 60-frame-per-seconds is just a matter of flipping a switch on any high-end digital camera — no extra costs, no nothing. All MAGI does is take 60 fps footage project an alternating left eye-right-eye image or 60 frames per second per eye, which results in 120 frames of pure fluid motion per second. I think it looks fantastic. The MAGI process costs very little, Trumbull stated again and again. It seems to me like the only way to really up the impact levels big-time when it comes to theatrical presentation of action and CG-driven fare. Trumbull believes that James Cameron will definitely be shooting the Avatar sequels in a high-frame-rate process, and he reported that a name-brand action filmmaker (possibly Michael Bay, I deduced) is also keenly interested.
