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3D Post Production Work Flow

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John Le

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Hi Everyone,

I am about to start experimenting with 3D and was wondering what everyone's work flow was?

At the moment, I've decided to the workflow to be.

1) Red One Mx -
2) Muxing with Cineform studio
3) Edit with CS6 Premier pro 6

Or is there a CS6 plug in that allow muxing at 4K?

Please, any help would be much appreciated.

John
 
Hey John,

Speedgrade, which is included in CS6, is the Adobe stereo tool. I have never personally used it, but have heard mostly good things.

I use DaVinci Resolve, which has convergence and framing adjustment, floating windows, and stereo alignment.

Scratch also has great 3D support.

As far as working at 4k in 3D, just know that you can't really exhibit it yet. There isn't a 4K3D DCP yet (allegedly it can be done with JPEG 2000's, but any theater you tried to show it in wouldn't know what to do with it). Red is obviously changing this with RedRay, .RED, and the Red projector, but unless you're future proofing there really isn't a point quite yet. However, i'm all for future proofing! just keep in mind that if you're working at 4k in 3d you HAVE to use a beamsplitter. Otherwise your parallax is going to be excessive and you won't be able to show anything in 4k (unless some small 4kTV's come out down the line, or you're shooting massive landscape stuff where everything is far away, like in helicopter shots.)


Last note, make sure you have one hell of a computer.
 
I've been asking for years for Adobe to support 3D properly (having done 3D movie title and trailer graphics in After Effects since early 2008!).

Premiere's 3D support kinda sucks, even with Cineform 3D hacked on. After Effects has very poor 3D support.

If you want a good NLE that supports 3D, choose Avid, not Premiere. It's what the people actually editing 3D features use, for good reason.

If you want a good compositor that supports 3D, choose Nuke or Fusion, not After Effects.

If you want good grading software... Speedgrade is actually OK (since it was made by another company that actually cared about 3D before Adobe bought them). But Resolve is better.

That said, since Nuke is not as good for designing titles as After Effects. So yes, I actually do a lot of stereo in After Effects still. Doing it right now in 4K 3D for a big movie title actually! Render times are awful even with tons of 12-core Mac Pros because After Effects is so poorly multithreaded. But yes, there is no playback standard for 4K 3D and very likely everything we're doing will be resampled down to 2K 3D for final delivery. But it'll look darn good, promise you.

If you're experimenting, Adobe stuff is fine. Just be careful if making a large investment!

End 2c.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
I'm new to 3D, but I'm planning a small stereo production with set extensions.

Is the metadata from a Pulsar/Neutron/Atom-rig sufficient for compositing, if only the position of one camera is known?
 
Jon MIchael Puntervold said:
I'm new to 3D, but I'm planning a small stereo production with set extensions.

Is the metadata from a Pulsar/Neutron/Atom-rig sufficient for compositing, if only the position of one camera is known?
Click to expand...

Dude, you're lucky if you get metadata :)

Usually it's not too much of a big deal to track cameras if you use a stereo-aware 3D tracking program (Nuke, SynthEyes, pfTrack = good, After Effects 3D camera tracker = bad because it isn't stereo-aware... of course).

But even before that, people got by through just tracking both cams by hand. Heck, for Avatar, ILM tracked both cams then reconciled them and improved the stereo alignment that way!

Hopefully there isn't too much mad convergence and IO pulling and you'll be OK.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Sven Seynaeve said:
quantel is a valid option as well. not so expensive any more then it used to be and can run on powerfull xeon workstations.
Click to expand...

how expensive are they? I know that's what lightiron uses, and I've heard nothing but great things. I was just always under the impression that a pablo setup was a major investment.
 
Park Road Post (Peter Jackson's company) used Mistika on The Hobbit:

http://www.sgomistika.com/
http://www.sgo.es/products/sgo-mistika-4k-2k-hd-sd/

Alec Morris said:
how expensive are they? I know that's what lightiron uses, and I've heard nothing but great things. I was just always under the impression that a pablo setup was a major investment.
Click to expand...
Note that Light Iron uses both Quantel Pablo and also DaVinci Resolve. There are also different versions of Pablo that do different things at different price ranges, including a software-only version (which I have not yet seen).
 
Thanks a hole bunch guys.

The fact is I am learning so that I can edit our low budget feature film.

We have yet to purchase the equipment or software so I think I might look into Avid.

Bruce, are there any suggestion with regards to reading or training on Avid with regards to 3D editing?
 
If you are using Nuke for compositing and Resolve for dailies/final color correction with AVID MC for editing, any tips on where/when the color correction should happen?

Should it be :

Resolve -> DNxHD36 dailies
Rough Edit in MC w/ Placeholder BG plate footage+separate track with video that'll be composited over BG plates
Output EDL
Import EDL into Resolve / basic color grade
Output DNxHD175
Import into Nuke / composite
Output VFX shots
Import into Resolve, final grade
Import back into AVID for final titles etc.

I'm a little concerned about conforming the VFX shots, and unsure about how timecode/tape values will work to ensure conforms are easy. Any ideas/tips? Thanks!
 
I've been deep in 3D for the last few years and tested pretty much everything out there.

BEST way IMO to edit 3D is to create side-by-side (or over-under) DNxHD and edit in Avid MC6. Cutting 3D in Avid MC6 is super easy, stable and flawless - and you can adjust HIT on a per shot basis, etc. - it just WORKS.

For $10,000 - you can purchase emotion3D - which is a new plug-in suite for After Effects that is nothing short of mind-numbing. Even if you DI in another system such as Resolve, Scratch, etc. - emotion3D allows you to easily depth grade, color match, and automate geometry correction.

http://www.emotion3d.tv/tech/stereoscopic-suite

If money is no object - SGO Mistika is king.

But other than Mistika, no DI system offers the 3D firepower in emotion3D - you can use it before DI if you want to go to balanced, corrected DPX log files - and then just grade color in 3D in any DI system - OR - do your 3D DI first - and use emotion3D to depth grade and correct and polish the 3D.
 
Mathieu Ghekiere said:
Maybe interesting is also the Dashwood Stereo Plugin. I don't know which programs it's all compatible with, I use it with FCP 7 and FCP X, and I'm pretty sure it also works in After FX. Don't know about AVID/Premiere Pro CS6.
Click to expand...

The Dashwood plugin is nice but the problem is that it has to hack around FCP / Premiere's total lack of 3D support.

With Avid you just have a clip... and it can be 3D. You can edit and apply effects and the thing knows you're in 3D and works appropriately.

Less hacking / grouping clips / eyes / weirdness / trying to trick your NLE.

I'm not saying it's a perfect solution... but trust me you don't want to go back to hacks after that :)

RE: workflow - yup, agree with Mark Pederson of course. Avid DNxHD36, then just edit. For finishing: DPX log as usual (or EXR if you're feeling adventurous), and definitely consider doing a pre-VFX-pass where you fix on-set issues.

Mark - yes I saw Emotion3D - although for that price why not Ocula? Do you consider Emotion3D better? I'm interested! The Foundry have sales like once a year where you can bundle Nuke + Ocula for 50% off and then the price is similar... I'm a bit leery of buying any more plugins for After Effects, which sucks so hard for 3D and sucks so hard at multithreading - ironically I was actually working through the weekend on a big movie trailer title in 3D in After Effects right now... and it's 4:05AM on Monday. If it were done in Nuke I suspect I'd be done by now. But then Nuke sucks for designing fancy movie titles. If I were doing stereo VFX though I would be on Nuke in a heartbeat. Ah man.

Nikhil, your workflow sounds pretty good. Sorry it's super late and don't feel like thinking about timecode right now.

John - Avid's 3D support doesn't really require much extra training. The main learning curve is just learning Avid :)

The one thing I would suggest though is that you start working on a big screen as soon as possible (or whatever your target screen size is). Now that I've done a lot of 3D work, I can look at a small screen and kinda think about how it will look big... but at the same time, you really just don't know. We keep driving back and forth to Technicolor to see it really big on a RealD screen and that is super helpful. Despite it taking an hour out of each day driving back and forth... it's worth it!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Hey everyone. New to 3D editing and about to shoot a 3D short next week. My biggest concern is post workflow. I'm working on Premiere Pro CS6 and debating on whether to go Cineform or Dashwood. I have an extremely tight deadline/turnaround so My main concern is diving right in and just cutting the 2 minute piece. We will be shooting with two Red Epic's on a ET Quasar 3D rig with macro lenses. The good thing is that its one setup and the camera is locked and not moving. The only changes and takes are what's in front of the camera.

I'd like to have this properly color corrected in Da Vinci as well. What is the best workflow using these factors? Would really appreciate any sort of advice / step by step guidance.
 
Noah, your working with premiere cs6, get SpeedGrade, it has a great workflow with adobe for muxing your shots and grading them...
I've used it couple of time so far with 2 epics on side by side rig and beam spliter !
just works great fast, and cheaper than most other workflow...
 
Noah Shulman said:
Hey everyone. New to 3D editing and about to shoot a 3D short next week. My biggest concern is post workflow. I'm working on Premiere Pro CS6 and debating on whether to go Cineform or Dashwood. I have an extremely tight deadline/turnaround so My main concern is diving right in and just cutting the 2 minute piece. We will be shooting with two Red Epic's on a ET Quasar 3D rig with macro lenses. The good thing is that its one setup and the camera is locked and not moving. The only changes and takes are what's in front of the camera.

I'd like to have this properly color corrected in Da Vinci as well. What is the best workflow using these factors? Would really appreciate any sort of advice / step by step guidance.
Click to expand...

Well for budget editing i sure was impressed with the dashwood FULL suite for FCPx and Premier. I really like that all works with native R3d as opposed to using Cineform and transcoding.
 
i'm using it since haft a year or so,
its true, not so intuative, but it works great once you get to know it a bit better...
since my r3d workflow is totaly adobe, its great, no loss, no proxie, everything is pure and native...
I like it, and no more expenses for another program...
 
Nice thing about Resolve Version 10, that it includes 3D aware editor. if your folders are named correctly, Resolve wii automatically assign images to Left/Right automatically. And the best part you'll be able to finish in Resolve without the need for the roundtrip back to the NLE for the finish.
 
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