For those of you who missed the Digital Cinema Summit this morning, you missed an unusually animated director James Cameron aggressively preaching the gospel of 3D HD for the big screen. Cameron was in a particularly jocular mood, both in his keynote address, and on panels discussing specifics of making 3D stereoscopic imagery and putting it on the big screen, and discussing the future of digital cinema with NATO president John Fithian.

In fact, Cameron was positively Lucasesque in his digital fervor—not suprising, considering he and Lucas are, in his words, “in violent agreement about all this. In fact, George has the curse of being prematurely right most of the time.”

Cameron has obviously taken up the cause this NAB, big-time. Following are some of his more definitive musings:

*”Anaglyphs are bad. Very bad. Let’s stamp out this unholy practice,” he said, promoting the stereoscopic HD camera approach to big-screen HD that he has been pioneering with camera rig guru, Vince Pace. (Look for Vince shortly coming to our podcast section of this NAB blog …)

*”It should be a rule that all CG movies should be released in 3D.”

*”[Our industry] is so scared of piracy right now, we are willing to pimp out our mothers.” (And, he added, if you are really that concerned about piracy, you should postively love 3D movies, which cannot easily, if at all, be pirated and viewed in 3D…)

*”Since 3D is a business right now only for the bigscreen, 2D DVD sales and rentals will remain popular. And even if we come out with 3D DVDs some day, well, that’s just great. Everyone who loved my movie will go buy it again. Am I evil for thinking that?”

*”Making movies to watch on a cell phone? That would be an abomination.”

*(and later, continuing his rant against watching movies on new, mini platforms:) “People have to make some decisions about what their personal standards are! Would anyone watch Star Wars for two hours on a cell phone? That’s just plain silly.”

*”Artists do things they way they want to do them, for a lot of reasons that are not necessarily logical. … Some people, though, love technology. I do. I don’t think it dehumanizes my filmmaking. I don’t think the $30-million we spent on visual effects on Titanic prevents you from crying. You can still create an emotional response. To eschew the technical side of it in favor of some kind of abstract idea of a humanistic [way of] filmmaking doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a technical medium. … I think this idea that digital cinema will dehumanize or take away is ridiculous. … [In digitally acquired and exhibited films:] You will still be able to see grain, you’ll just be able to see it more clearly. ” (Cameron, of course, was responding to a question about Steven Spielberg’s desire to avoid digital filmmaking as much as possible.)

And that’s only a sampling of Cameron at his best …