Need Urgent Help with 3D Project!

[Rudi Herbert]

Gentlemen,

I will be shooting an underwater project for which I'd like to make a 5-6 minute demo in 3D. I am very experienced in underwater and topside shooting but have never done anything in 3D. The goal is to have HD quality footage play out on TV sets in 3D, no theatrical distribution, no high end stuff, just good honest HD quality 3D that can be played on flat screen TV's at shows as a demo, that simple. I just came from a show where I saw very impressive 3D shown on what looked like regular LCD or plasma widescreen TV's with regular polarized 3D glasses and it was very, very good for a 40" screen size quality wise, while the 3D was very convincing. That's all I want. With that in mind, here's what I have and what I need:

- Cameras. I can either use EX-1's or the smaller AVCHD Canons. I've had good experiences working with them underwater, especially since I convert the XDCAM or AVCHD footage to DPX to edit and grade. I'll have Mike Hastings from Aquavideo build me a stero housing for either camera I choose. So that part is covered.
- Editing. I'm a PC/Adobe guy, and for what I gather, most off the shelf solutions are for FCP, Avid and the like. Any options on the PC side? If not, I can always cut and grade my footage from both cameras/eyes and then take it to a specialized house, so this is not a deal breaker but I'd like to do all the work myself if possible.
- Playback. After post production is finished, what are my options to show the footage at trade shows? What do I need for playback, a tape deck, a regular DVD or blu-ray player, what? And as for displays, what type/model/brand of TV do I need to show the footage with regular polarized glasses, not the more expensive type?

Again, keep in mind that this is just a side project to show some very cool and unique material in an attractive way. I'm not trying to make the next Avatar, all I need is to show a demo at conventions and trade shows, that's it. I'm not trying to skip any steps, after all, I need this material to look good, but I don't need RED or anything hi-tech for acquisition the same way I don't need to edit on a Pablo, etc. I'm willing to incur long hours of rendering/conforming or whatever to keep costs reasonable. Also, final product is meant to be 5-6 minutes long.

Any suggestions, information, help will be extremely appreciated!!!

[Jason Joseph]

dunno if this will help,
saw this in a theatre here and it was pretty amazing

http://www.dolphinsandwhales3d.com/

the director gave a talk about it and seemed pretty helpful maybe u could hit him up for some tips

[paulherrin]

Okay. I don't know alot - but here's what I can say.

Cameras
The rig is going to be interesting, since it needs to be underwater. I'm sure it can be done. I would assume the smaller Canon's would be a more realistic option. Not sure if you'd need a custom housing for it or if you have one big enough. 3D is typically shot with either a beamsplitter (mirror), or a parallel rig. You'll have to see what is most practical to use. You may end up with the side by side, though I think the splitter would be preferable. There are some cameras out there that can shoot 3D with a single camera... http://www.3d-one.com/
Now that I think about it - I would recommend something like this for your purposes rather than putting it all into stereo-rigs and custom housings. Also, I have heard of software that can generate a 3D output from a regular image, but I have no knowledge about it.

Editing
After Effects supports 3D stereo, if I'm not mistaken. I haven't used it for any, so check it out. I'm sure there's software and/or plug-ins available. You could probably even set up a workflow in Premiere to edit one "eye" and then apply it to the other side for the final output.

Playback
I know that some 3d is projected at 120 frames/sec switching back and forth between eyes. It seems a 120 hz TV could do this. Also there's the anaglyph (red/blue) glasses. This is a pretty simple way to do it and it would work with any display. The polarized seems to be preferable, I have no experience, but I've always assumed the images were simply offset. So, honestly I don't know.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful, I really don't have any experience with 3D stuff besides still renders in computer graphics. I hope that it helps a little, and others can correct and clarify.

[Pedro Guimaraes]

I have a AVCHD 3D underwater Rig we built & tested.

It works great. Shot some surfing and swimming with it......I've used the cameras out of the water plenty for 3D..... Sync'ing with lanc device and IR underwater.

Pm me if you interested in it.

You can edit in FCP using Tim Dashwood's stereo plugin.

Best way to display would be simple DLP TV you can buy at local best buy store. (shutter glasses)

during my first test with it......

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee298/ddragon76/pedro_misc/DSC_0978.jpg

Taken during fabrication.....

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee298/ddragon76/pedro_misc/DSC_7122.jpg

[David Wilson]

Rudi,

We just returned from six weeks of shooting some 20 hours of 3D material in what were at times remote and rugged parts of Russia and Georgia. We shot on a single RED with a mirror box that we made on the front end.

Shooting 4096x2048 yields a side-by-side raw 2Kx2K stereo pair from which a 1920x1080 stereo pair can be cropped. The mirror box offers some advantages over dual camera rigs (which I've also built and used in the past) but also has some disadvantages. The box we built had motorized convergence control and other bells and whistles but really, at the end of the day, you don't need all of that - just a straight forward mirror box would work fine.

We are PC/Adobe based as well and happily, just as we returned from our shooting, CineForm came out with a new product called Prospect3D which I'm very impressed with. We're just now getting into it but thus far, it offers truly excellent stereo image manipulation and control with the advantage of viewing in 3D during edit. We thought our stereo was pretty good coming out of the camera but we find ourselves able to improve on almost every shot in one way or another and are able to produce the best 3D we've ever done.

Like Pedro we are using a DLP rear-screen and shutter glasses which for the money offers the cleanest image in our opinion. Once you have your show in 3D, however, there are many options for presentation now.

I don't recall where you are located but if your in or near Los Angeles, we would be happy to set up our rig so you could see more easily what I'm trying to explain.

David

[Campbell Goodwille]

You'll struggle with EX-1s since, unless I'm mistaken, there's no way to sync them properly (no genlock)...

Probably better off with the AVCHD cams and a LANC controller.

[Jürgen Hansen]

Hi Rudi,
check this out for underwater housing for smaller cameras (the site is in German): http://www.digi-dat.de/produkte/index.html
For editing: If budget is a concern, check out Stereo MovieMaker (for PC, it's for free), otherwise Cineform Neo3D (good demo for free) or Tim Dashwood's Stereo3D Toolbox (both for Mac), as mentioned above.
Best regards, Jürgen

[Rudi Herbert]

Pedro, David, Jurgen and all,

Thanks for the replies, I have a better idea now. After reading your posts, I'll go over the issues one by one again:

CAMERAS/HOUSINGS
I will check the housings from the German company, they look good, and Pedro, in the meantime, let me know what cameras does your housing use and what's your pricing. You can PM me with that info or email me at Rudi@IdeasinBlue.com I don't think building a 3D housing for me should be a problem for Mike Hastings from Aquavideo, but if he can't or is too buys, or your product offers more features, then I might go with that instead. I prefer using the Canon AVCHD camera since they are the only ones recording at 24mbs, so any of those HG20, HF100, HF200, HG21, etc is what I'll use. Then later on I'll move to the EX-1, and I'm not worried about synching them, a good old clapper still works wonders :-)

POST
Great news that Cineform now has something for Adobe, I'll look into and buy the software. I already use Cineform in our studio as our working format.

EXHIBITION
The rear projection DLP surely sounds good, if you can actually find those anymore, but then, as I'm not too familiar with this technology yet, what 3D
format is that? The shutter glasses are expensive, last time I heard, they sell for like $150 a pair, so having those ready for tens of people at a booth might negate the savings from the TV sets. Is that the case, and if so, wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to go with the polarized glasses or the anaglyph ones?

Thanks again everybody,

[Campbell Goodwille]

If you don't sync them, you'll get some horrible effects. I'm talking about sub-frame syncing. There's nothing you can do about that in Post and it will have the effect of altering the perceived level of depth of fast-moving objects in your frame. Crucial if you're planning on filming waves or fish...
You should really consider a LANC controller to ensure they fire off at the same time - it will make a huge difference to the quality of your footage and you shouldn't have too much problem building it into the casing.
You've been warned!

[David Wilson]

Couldn't agree more with Campbell. Frame sync is (more or less) easy; with a two camera set-up you need to assure you have shutter sync or you get very strange spatial artifacts.

In terms of presentation, there are, at the moment, many more options. For us it has proven best to go with a Mitsubishi DLP. We paid just under $2K for a 72" which is perfect for the size of our theater. I am hyper sensitive to ghosting and DLP is (to my eyes) completely ghost free. Shutter glasses are available in quantities in the 10s of glasses in the $30-50 range. We typically set up our finished piece as either a side-by-side or two stream (Left Eye/Right Eye) and feed either approach into Stereoscopic Player which has, as one of its many many output options, "3D Ready DLP TV".

But there are many other alternatives. We began with a two projector polarized rear screen (Steward 3D virtual black screen material) set up. We worked with linear and circular but the ghosting was killing me - affecting significantly how aggressively we could grade our shots etc. I'm wondering out-loud, however, if underwater work may not be more forgiving in these aspects. Anaglyph is the poor step-child and virtually free to set up. Actually it delivers remarkably good 3D for what it is. You, however, invariably loose a great deal of color information and ghosting is going to be a problem.

The new CineForm 3D product is god-sent. Prospect3D, the PC version, is just now being released and is actually hard to find on their website. Neo3D, the Mac version, has been out for a while.

[Rudi Herbert]

Campbell and David,

Ok, I consider myself warned! :-) The EX-1 is out of the picture and I've gone for the Canon HF-S10 instead. I will integrate a LANC controller into the system, hopefully it is a straightforward thing to do, especially for two cameras, as I haven't used one of those since my old days of shooting mini DV...And yes, I think underwater is very suitable for 3D because there is a pronounced, both in focus acuity, image sharpness and color saturation loss, between foreground and background objects, and in fact, I was very impressed at how well footage from all types of situations worked when I viewed it recently. It was playing on JVC flat screen displays, not on DLPs, and though I know JVC recently announced a new 3D display, that one requires special shutter glasses and the glasses I wore at this show were the old polarized type...

David, I sent you a PM regarding a visit in the future, let me know what you think.