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Photo: Jasin Boland

To make Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in their customary high-octane style, directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine (filming a stunt, below) needed to shoot on rollerblades and flying off cliffs—hard to do if you’re lugging a giant, expensive 3-D camera. So they put off the depth-defying effects until postproduction. The move helped them spend more time letting Nicolas Cage free his inner Johnny Blaze and less time worrying about an 85-pound Red One 3-D rig weighing them down. Of course, it also saved them millions of dollars.

But just because Neveldine/Taylor knew they could fix things after the final “Cut!” doesn’t mean they weren’t thinking in 3-D. In addition to their conventional filming, they captured each shot with a Civetta, a camera that measures 360-degree spatial parameters in any environment. The directors were able to use that data in conjunction with proprietary software by the 3-D masters at Gener8 to make GR:SoV look as good as—if not better than—anything shot on a stereoscopic rig (let alone converted duds like The Last Airbender).

Ultimately, people want to see Marvel’s hothead demon biker—the format is irrelevant. “There’s a percentage of film nuts who care if you shot in 3-D,” Taylor says. “But most fans don’t give a rat’s ass whether it was shot on a Red or an iPhone—they just want it to be awesome.”