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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

3D Stereoscopic Film with HVX200 ?

Eric/VERAXYZ said:
Luki I really appreciate your post.

.... We have techniques that allow one to shoot with a relatively wide camera base separation and then to resample these parallaxes into a much more compressed range without compressing the fine 3d detail (our process is unique in this respect). .....


...We are hoping folks will buy rigs from us just to carry out tests to find out what all the permitted variance and tolerance in camera orientation should be (coupled with the appropriate post processes) I.e. use our equipment to determine what the “safety’ standards should be.....
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The Factory have with Nuke/Ocula a similar feature to change in post the IOD. As far as they showed it in Siggraph and also in IBC I suppose you saw how they work. May I ask you to tell us the differences between your and their solution?

And yes I would love to stop to develop my own rig and buy one if there is one ready with a good and easy control on the optics.
 
luki said:
For U2, 3ality used SCRATCH for conform and dailies. They used their own proprietary in-house tools for stereo correction and finish. Technicolor did the DI and DCP. It was exclusively digital delivery and wasn't printed to anything.

Hannah's conform and DI was on Pablo. DCP was also done at Fotokem.

Lucas
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I'm sorry Luki but you are wrong it was printed to 15/70mm for IMAX also and was just shown again just last week in New York to the GSCA (IMAX theater Association) and is disributed in IMAX format as well as Digital by National Geographic.
 
Wow, I just saw a making-of of "Dark Country" on reel-show.tv. It's a low budget 3D film noir. And they built an incredible 3D mirror steadycam rig using Silicon Imaging Mini cams. That thing looks so damn cool! You can control everything on the fly and dynamically move from ground to top level, roll the camera. That thing would even be great just for 2D, but combined with modern 3D it will totally kick ass.

They're also using Red Ones with a custom built mirror rig for tripod and crane shots.
 
luki said:
For stereo projection?

Lucas
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Yes U23D in Stereo3D 15/70mm Film projection.

I know it's playing in Monterey,CA at the IMAX theater as well as others around the world still.

I just looked at the website for the theater in Monterey and the film "Wild Ocean" that is also playing at the same theater. I heard also used the same cameras underwater as U2 And Hannah.

So Luki do you know if Photokem or Technicolor did the lab work and printed the 15/70mm of U23D for IMAX film projection?
 
istvanttt said:
The Factory have with Nuke/Ocula a similar feature to change in post the IOD. As far as they showed it in Siggraph and also in IBC I suppose you saw how they work. May I ask you to tell us the differences between your and their solution?

And yes I would love to stop to develop my own rig and buy one if there is one ready with a good and easy control on the optics.
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Istvan how fantastic to bump into you again! I hope you are well and getting on with RED. I will PM so I and we can catch up.

The technology we use is very different, and we have patent applications on the core CSTM (coherently stereo textured models) running since 2003, (favorably reviewed in Europe still pending US decisions). Our software works completely in VR space so normally we construct polygonal substrates for all the stereographic data. Then we grab stereo textures from the original imagery and very precisely map the imagery to the polygonal substrates. For each vertex there exist a special spatial relationship called a tri-homologous point, essentially parallax is completely eliminated for each explicitly modeled vertex and their corresponding left and right image points. Surface parallax is substantially eliminated for the explicitly extracted 3d points (as sparse under sampling is only required) whereas the point pairs that have not had surface parallax explicitly eliminated for them have the larger fraction of the surface parallax reduced. This results in what it called a residual parallax surface that preserves all of the high frequency elements and fine 3d texture. From basic knowledge of the camera orientation parameters and application of the collinearity equations a true 3d substrate is created that is the same basic shape of the objects in the scene. The stereo-textures are essentially baked into 3d substrates, the apparent polygonal surfaces of the substrates are invisible to the viewer due to stereo-textural dominance. This technique was originally designed to represent highly complex surfaces very accurately and in a computationally efficient way, one of the “industrial” byproducts of this process is if you move the left and right viewing frusta closer together to rein in the range of parallax to more comfortable viewing parameters it does not compress the fine three dimensional details and textures (as in conventional techniques). Normally when you compress the range of parallax the fine detail gets flattened as well, when you use CSTMs the fine residual surface parallaxes at the surface of the substrate are immutable and are not flattened. This gives rise to two new parallax controls one for Macro parallax and one for Micro parallax. Although this may be hard to visualize from a post on a forum I guarantee that we will personally demonstrate the technique to you in the not too far distant future. The basic technique allows one to shoot with wider base separations to capture very fine 3d detail and then to effect a re-sampling where the parallaxes related to macroscopic features can be compressed without compressing the fine 3d features. it’s a very cool technique and solves a lot of problems. I’m sure you can dig up my patent for a bit of light reading. Just think of it as a frequency re-sampling of the 3d data but done in a rather clever way. The CSTMs are very clean and maintain total realism.

As far as I can tell the adjustments used in NUKE/Ocula are no different from some of those employed by digital photogrammetric workstations for the past 25 years. I built my own digital stereo photogrammteric workstation in 2000, and it has all the same adjustments and more besides (you have to for accurate stereo metrology). Most of these digital stereo-photogrammetic adjustments have been employed in analog photogrammetric systems for nearly 70 years. I think a lot of stereo cinematographers will essentially rediscover many old stereo photogrammteric techniques. I spoke to Lenny Lipton at the last SPIEE stereo group about what we were doing, and he said we were way ahead of every one else for the things we were doing.
 
Benni Diez said:
Really awesome stuff!
How about atmospherics?
Ocula's interocular tweaking algorithm seems to have some serious issues with smoke/fog. I guess semitransparent stuff in general is hard to tackle.
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Not for us, once you get your hands on the software all will become clear, possibly looking for Beta testers in the new year. Once you use a stereo textured polygonal substrate the surface of the substrate is completely invisible with respect to the correctly embedded stereo textures, just in the same way you don’t see the plane of a projection screen when stereo imagery is projected onto it. Our system was original designed for very high end VR applications. If the video games industry embraces stereo display technologies then our tools will offer an entirely new level of realism at extremely moderate compute power (compared to conventional techniques). You can create dynamic/streamed and animated CSTMs of atmospheric affects. I think however to get around a lot of the problems that some stereo-cinematographers are having more careful planning and organization is required to occasionally shoot or separate out different elements three dimensionally. So for example we can shoot clouds with a base separation of approximately 200 meters (precision aligned cameras) and then build CSTMs of the clouds. Here parallax can be reined in to flatten the macroscopic disposition of the clouds without flattening the fine 3d features and geometry. The main application of the technology is to represent fantastically complex subjects in a very accurate and computationally efficient way, where accurate measurements can be taken and yet the models appear astonishingly life like. The parallax control just happened to be an accidental by product of our main processes, but never the less a potentially very useful byproduct. The SW and HW we are developing has so many applications that we are tying to make sure that when we release that we have some very well worked out bankable and discrete application areas.
[I'm not sure that stereo cinema is bankable right now compared to other application areas?][Any thoughts?]
 
I think the biggest problem is still simply how to watch stereoscopic content. Lots of ways, everywhich has its downsides. Hopefully people will embrace the leap once all the new 3D movies come out next year.

You could produce 3d effects footage for starters. Like you said, clouds, or explosions, smoke...
Provide them as data sets with a small program that lets you input ocular distance and then spits out the desired stereo sequence for use in standard applications.

Or, as I pointed out, plugins for the most popular compositing and 3D programs. So one can make efficient use of the data within a 2D project.

Everything that can be used right now for actual VFX work, regardless if 3D-stereo will be bankable.

If you could give me a solution for extracting depht from video footage with minimal effort (2nd, synced cam), I'd let you date my girl... ok maybe not. :)
 
1000% agree! Unfortunately the RealD solutions seems to become the standard, which is bad because it eats up almost 90% of the light, AND to see and enjoy s-3D you need lights on the screen. The Z-Screen was not developed for the big screen, they used to sell it for about 5000.-US$ to everybody if I recall well.

The last time I saw a good stereoscopic projection was during NAB. PACE had in the basement a private screening with 2 Sony 4K projectors, linear(!) POL-filters and the distance to the screen was about 10m.

Till we don't have theaters were they prefer to show the highest possible quality in s-3D instead of making the "fast" money we will not get people to understand the real esthetical potential of stereoscopic filmmaking.

During IBC I brought this up during a discussion and the answer was: this would mean to do a second color-correction on each movie which is out of discussion.

Benni Diez said:
I think the biggest problem is still simply how to watch stereoscopic content. Lots of ways, everywhich has its downsides. Hopefully people will embrace the leap once all the new 3D movies come out next year.

.....
Click to expand...
 
Benni Diez said:
I

Or, as I pointed out, plugins for the most popular compositing and 3D programs. So one can make efficient use of the data within a 2D project.

Everything that can be used right now for actual VFX work, regardless if 3D-stereo will be bankable.

If you could give me a solution for extracting depht from video footage with minimal effort (2nd, synced cam), I'd let you date my girl... ok maybe not. :)
Click to expand...

O.K. no problem.

The software we have been developing has the capability to piece together 3d models from multiple stereo camera input. I always assumed that given a lot of movie work obviously involves figurative subjects, that relatively complete models are required. Due to problems of angular occlusion, that in general a minimum of two stereo pairs (I.e. four cameras are needed). For example if you shoot to capture a face in explicit 3d you find that you capture ¾ of the face on one side. Because of angular occlusions, noses tend to cast a data shadow on the other side of the face. So to accurately or nicely record just 180 degree view of a face another pair of cameras is required to fill in the data shadow and record the other side of the face up to the other ear. This is why we have had to engineer fiendishly precise equipment to make sure 360 assemblies composed of multiple 3d fragments all fit together.

So lets say I gave you piece of software that ONLY allowed you to construct 3d models either static or dynamic from a single pair of stereo cameras, allowed you to make various parallax corrections, what do YOU (Benni et al.) think you would be able to do with it? …and also what would you be willing to pay for such a piece of software? [We don’t have to worry your girlfriend just yet… ;) ]


The software we have is very easy to use but has a lot of fundamental capabilities. You can output models into standard formats(OBJ .3ds, max, maya, and soft) and you can output standard stereograms for further composites or process work, the CSTMS are proprietary as yet no else has the capability (other than us) to render stereo textured models.

Bear in mind plug ins are a good idea as you suggest and in principle we are willing to license our technologies. However in our experience a lot of established 3d software packages have very unwieldy complex, ancient, and gnarly architectures that make implementing advanced and efficient stereo capabilities almost impossible. SW such as 3d Studio Max are completely incapable of implementing deep level stereo based tools. Our software is written from the ground up from the first line of code with a totally stereo capable architecture, every tool and feature is created with a core level of stereo functionality. We have spent several years developing a very solid platform for this. Most likely our software will run side by side other applications rather than as a plug in. It also has features I have never seen on any other piece of software. If we wanted to become megalomaniacs we would say that we can implement CAD/CAM, 3d modeling and compositing and editing into our software, but other well established software with twenty years of code bloat cannot implement stereo to the core of their products.
 
istvanttt said:
1000% agree! Unfortunately the RealD solutions seems to become the standard, which is bad because it eats up almost 90% of the light, AND to see and enjoy s-3D you need lights on the screen. The Z-Screen was not developed for the big screen, they used to sell it for about 5000.-US$ to everybody if I recall well.

The last time I saw a good stereoscopic projection was during NAB. PACE had in the basement a private screening with 2 Sony 4K projectors, linear(!) POL-filters and the distance to the screen was about 10m.

Till we don't have theaters were they prefer to show the highest possible quality in s-3D instead of making the "fast" money we will not get people to understand the real esthetical potential of stereoscopic filmmaking.

During IBC I brought this up during a discussion and the answer was: this would mean to do a second color-correction on each movie which is out of discussion.
Click to expand...


I really agree with the above statement. I have yet to see a stereo movie that contains a single stereogram that is good as the shots we used to do for 3d architectural/conservation work. A lot of the shots one typically sees are very sensationalist Disney type whooshie sequences, or very ill conceived or careless technical set ups that cause real pain to the viewer. Very rarely do you see very fine and rich 3d textures from comfortable well prepared stereo footage. I really don’t think you can blindly apply standard cinematic techniques to a hand-full of stereo rules-of -thumb; in essence a new craft and methodology of 3d visual story telling have to be learnt and developed over time.

We have a set up with two digital projectors onto 12ft wide screen and approx 10 meter throw (linear polarizers). In some of our early work we had some color mismatches between stereograms yet they still looked beautiful on screen. I think the excuse given at IBC about color is total B.S. as long as the contrast matches reasonable well, the human brain can fudge the differences between chroma rather well between left and right eyes.

Its good to see you sticking the tough questions to them (as you should), nice one!
 
Eric/VERAXYZ said:
I really agree with the above statement. I have yet to see a stereo movie that contains a single stereogram that is good as the shots we used to do for 3d architectural/conservation work. A lot of the shots one typically sees are very sensationalist Disney type whooshie sequences, or very ill conceived or careless technical set ups that cause real pain to the viewer.
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A few months ago, I would have agreed with this.

Recently, we have been doing work with the Hyundai stereo monitor, which has a line polarizing filter applied to the front of the glass.

It is a true 1920 x 1080 monitor, so stereo sequences are show at true 1:1 pixel resolution. It is hands down the best stereo imager I have ever seen. The U2 sequences that 3ality and Sassoon did looked ok on the screen. RealD Ghosbusting makes me friggin crazy, but once I got beyond that, it looked ok.

But on the Hyundai - there is *no* ghosting. It's crisp and clean and a 1:1 representation of the original image.

Easily... easily... the best stereo display device I've ever seen.

Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
luki said:
Recently, we have been doing work with the Hyundai stereo monitor, which has a line polarizing filter applied to the front of the glass.
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But this would have to be a flickering monitor right? I guess the fast and bright enough flat screens are still pretty expensive. As are those pol-panels.
 
Benni Diez said:
But this would have to be a flickering monitor right? I guess the fast and bright enough flat screens are still pretty expensive. As are those pol-panels.
Click to expand...

Well yes, but all monitors and projectors flicker, eh? There is always a refresh rate. Even film projectors have a gate. :)

The Hyundai is a triple flash 120Hz progressive display with a line alternating passive circular polarizing filter embedded onto the front of the LCD.

Lucas
 
Yes I meant that regular LCDs with 60Hz and slow reset are not flickering as necessary. :)

What exactly does that mean, "line alternating passive circular polarizing filter"?

Hehe I just tried out my old plastic anaglyphs. I just can't understand how one could sit through a whole feature wearing those.

Nice tool though: http://www.3dtv.at/Index_en.aspx
 
luki said:
Well yes, but all monitors and projectors flicker, eh? There is always a refresh rate. Even film projectors have a gate. :)

The Hyundai is a triple flash 120Hz progressive display with a line alternating passive circular polarizing filter embedded onto the front of the LCD.

Lucas
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Luki thanks for the heads up.

We have been somewhat concerned that when we ship our 3d software cameras and systems, that we have to explain to our clients that they have to use bulky CRTs from View sonic (not a very cool accessory for cutting edge software!) until such time Sony makes large OLEDs accessible with fast refresh rates, or Canon gets its act together with the SED technology.

Do you have a good link for the Hyundai 3d monitor specs?

Normally our software outputs a frame sequential signal, is a dual passive signal required for the Hyundai, or does it use a frame sequential signal but you wear passive eye wear?

Thanks a million in advance.

(would be nice to work with something on the desk-top that didn't suffer from green phosphor ghosting)
 
luki said:
A few months ago, I would have agreed with this.

Recently, we have been doing work with the Hyundai stereo monitor, which has a line polarizing filter applied to the front of the glass.

RealD Ghosbusting makes me friggin crazy, but once I got beyond that, it looked ok.


Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
Click to expand...

At SPIEE stereo group last year (san jose) Real D seemed very proud of their Ghost busting. I wondered how clean it was or Wondered how clean the processes is or whether there is a lot of hand work required? I spoke to Lenny Lipton, and he seemed interested and a little nervous about our techniques, he was asking us whether we could do our parallax re-sampling real time. Now I understand more clearly what he was fishing for, as well as issues concerning stereo occlusion problems (that we don’t have for our applications).
 
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