| Author | Message | ||
     Puppet Kite Kid Rating: N/A |
I realize I am probably preaching to the choir, but some of the great influential moviemakers seem to be getting hyped up about stereoscopic moviemaking these days, and I hope they are willing to make a few very important changes that I think will make the difference between "thriving and dying"... and I hope they hire enlightened professionals to do the stereoscopic work that they may not understand or care to learn about. Also, I am not saying they are totally ignorant about stereoscopy... they are obviously doing some things right... but the more you learn about stereoscopy, the more there is to learn :-) If anyone reading this happens to be in a position to "get the message to those who have influence", you can help save our stereoscopic Planet by relaying this information :-) Here goes, in my humble but highly stereoscopically educated opinion ;-) 1) Control the Stereoscopic Depth. Polar Express apparently did the right thing here. Repeat that :-) I haven't studied the movie, frame-by-frame, but I assume they animated the stereo base and avoided excessive stereoscopic depth (deviation). You can't effectively animate the stereo base with real cameras, so the solution is to control the maximum amount of stereoscopic depth, and also try to avoid too little deviation whenever possible. You can do this with a good stereo base calculator that factors in all the stereoscopic elements such as distance to near and far points, stereo base, focal length, etc, or you can simply control the visual amount of deviation during the recording. I plan to upload a demo next (I promise :-) that visually shows how to do this. If I ever designed a professional stereo movie camera, I would definitely design a viewfinder that has an overlay or some sort of deviation guide that you can glance at to guide you from shooting with too much or too little deviation. It's really fairly simple to understand, once you see it in action. 2) Do Not Toe-in the Cameras. Trust me... you don't want to have to correct 100 different variations of keystone distortion in one movie, which is what happens whenever you change the degree of toe-in. Make it simple... shoot parallel, then adjust the parallax in post production: 3) Adjust the Parallax in Digital Post Production. Hey, we've gone digital! Adjusting the parallax is now almost _fun_ to do :-) If you are shooting for the huge screen (like a huge IMAX screen), you won't have to crop very much at all, since in the end, you only need 2.5 inches of positive on-screen parallax. As long as you didn't do something really bad, like toe-in the cameras, this procedure is as simple as "snip, snip" :-) Now, if you have a viewing environment that can totally cancel the opposite eye's view, you don't have to worry about ghosting... but unfortunately, that might always be the minority of stereoscopic environments: 4) Eliminate or Reduce Ghosting for "Ghosted Environments". Be realistic. We are going to be cursed with ghosting until the sun refuses to shine :-) And please don't mess with the colors and image qualities to try to solve the problem. We need all the exciting image colors and contrast we can get. Don't kill those! The only valid solution to de-ghosting when the viewing environment or glasses can't do it, is to animate the horizontal parallax. I don't think most 3D moviemakers are going to worry about the resulting window violations, but in case they do, you can add a slightly blurred border to reduce this effect. It works :-) Animating the horizontal parallax to eliminate or reduce ghosting takes good software, but it isn't rocket science, and it's almost fun to do :-) Once you do this, you will hit a serious snag. You might introduce eye divergence in the audience. Don't do it! I personally would stick to a "1.5 degrees of allowable eye divergence" guideline. The problem is that is difficult to control. Smaller screens are obviously easier to deal with. I don't see any choice other than approaching each viewing environment uniquely. Eliminate ghosting when that is possible. When it's not possible, you obviously can't do it, but always avoid eye divergence, no matter what. Eye divergence is much worse than ghosting! You also have choices, like if you know what the maximum screen size is and the distance to the nearest seats, you can factor in a maximum amount of positive parallax, and avoid that during the digital parallax animation process, i.e., you'd only see ghosting during the scenes where the parallax limits would have been violated. Hey, at least it gets rid of some of the ghosts :-) Another solution is to de-ghost all the movies equally, then rely on the on-site projection to compensate for the amount of on-screen parallax, if and when that is required. I'm not sure how good of an approach that is, though ;-) You'd have to trust each and every projectionist ;-) BTW, movies for home theaters (DVD) can virtually be de-ghosted by animating the horizontal parallax, and that can't be a bad thing :-) 5) Do Not Abandon the Red/Cyan Color Anaglyph. I know stereoscopic technology is getting exciting and there are more and more opportunities for great hi-tech viewing environments, but the reality is a "great anaglyph movies" can always have an important place in society, especially "among the masses" or in the home theater environment. The problem is most people have never seen a "great anaglyph". They can, however, be created. They have to be created by anaglyph artists, since a great anaglyph is an art form, not a process, more like the process of creating an oil painting or a watercolor than a technical exercise. Also, *great* global algorithms to automate the anaglyph process are impossible. Great anaglyphs will always require hands-on by a good anaglyph artist. You cannot treat the anaglyph lightly. Unlike many other aspects of stereoscopy, anaglyphs seem to have a tad bit of "rocket science" mixed in... at least just enough to make it difficult to do extremely well :-) -- P. K. Kid Stereoscopic 3D images and movie clips (all G-rated): http://www.puppetkites.net | ||
| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
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| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
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| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
P. K. Kid you are the great man! Thanks! | ||
| Larry Elie Rating: N/A |
I'm going to go aginst the grain here. I love Stereo 3D. I enjoy it. But I have also observed others watching it. I showed 7 movies in a row in a mini-anaglyph 3d-movies festival in January for 60 or so people on a 24' theater screen. I observed for 6 hours plus. Then I began to think about how I watched movies. I think part of it is psycological. After the first few minutes, it takes MORE of the WOW stuff to get your attention. Assuming the quality is not so bad as to make people ill, the quality becomes secondary. You begin to be enveloped in the movie. It's no longer a 3D film, it's a story. Don't believe it? Try watching a real story (not some short) in 3D. I even found myself doing it some time into Polar Express. I think the analog is watching an old B&W film on the TCM or AMC network. At first, it's a B&W film, later, you can forget it's not color IF you get absorbed in the story. Since the movie-maker's primary goal should be the story, NOT the medium (except for perhaps ride films), I don't find it at all surprising that 3D has not been more popular. BTW, that also tells the 3D film-maker to save the best stuff for later in the film. Do you really think if the 'roller-coaster' portion of Polar Express would have been at the beginning that people would have been impressed with still life later in the film? | ||
| Itsikw Rating: N/A |
Addition to PKK's list: 6) Avoid collisions with stereowindow border (Please)! | ||
| Puppet Kite Kid Rating: N/A |
>6) Avoid collisions with stereowindow border (Please)!< The reason I did not include that is it is totally dependent on how #4 is handled. If you can totally eliminate ghosting in the viewing environment, such as in an IMAX theater with active glasses, you can strictly control the stereo window and avoid window violations ("collisions with stereowindow border"), but if you animate the horizontal parallax to reduce or eliminate ghosting, like I do, you can introduce window violations in the process. The good news is a window violation is strictly defined by the edges of the image. I have experimented with using a thin, fuzzy border that virtually "makes the edges of the image 'undefinable'", and it really does work well to reduce or even eliminate the effects of window violations. Also, it is no coincidence that strictly controlling the stereoscopic depth has a huge influence on ghosting. I am trying to _never_ exceed 1/30th of the image width of deviation (stereoscopic depth), and that is nothing short of a "miraculous cure" for stereoscopy, for a number of reasons, including ghosting. PKK | ||
| Puppet Kite Kid Rating: N/A |
The "wow factor" is "old school stereoscopy" and is the number one cause of headaches from looking at stereoscopic images. "Good stereoscopy" is "new school". The "wow factor" is a fallacy, and it is also the number one cause of poor stereoscopic movies (or images). The "wow factor" is actually excessive stereoscopic deviation (stereoscopic depth). Unless the "wow factor" (stereoscopic depth) is strictly controlled, you cannot have a "great stereoscopic movie" (or image). I do not promote the usage of hallucinogenic drugs, but if you want to experience a real "wow factor", that might be a better way to do it, rather than "making people experience it, unwillingly" when watching a 3D movie, and then forcing them to take drugs after the movie to get rid of the headache it created. What people do to their own brains is probably their own business, but what people try to do to my brain is my business :-) Another way to experience the "wow factor" is to invite a fly to land on your nose, then focus on that fly for a while. This will also cause a headache, but at least you did not waste $15 on another bad 3D movie ;-) P. K. Kid Stereoscopic 3D images and movie clips (all G-rated): http://www.puppetkites.net | ||
| Puppet Kite Kid Rating: N/A |
I just spent the past couple of days trying to "once and for all" solve the problem of window violations, and I found a great solution. The stereo window edges (actually, the stereo window is defined by it edges) can actually be brought forward in front of the screen, and yet the actual horizontal alignment does not have to be altered... or it can be altered to minimize or eliminate ghosting on smaller screens, and the stereo window still placed in front of the nearest object, as most people prefer it. This was a lengthy experiment, so I won't go through all the gory details ;-), but here is my last example: http://www.puppetkites.net/stereo3Dtech/stereowindows13_P.jpg The background wood panels are just a way for me to represent "the screen", here, and I rotated them so the vertical orientation might best show any "border bending effect", if it was going to happen. The horizontal alignment (parallax) is set to the farthest object in the stereo image, like you would do to avoid eye divergence on a large screen. I left the top image border lines *hard* so you can see the potential for ghosting at those lines. The bottom image pair is identical to the top one, with the exception that I added fuzzy masks to both the inside and outside of the black border to reduce the effects of ghosting in those areas. View these images with a "ghosted environment" (anaglyph, shutterglasses, passive projection, etc) and you can see what I mean. So, to summarize, what I have here is an image with the horizontal alignment set close to the farthest point, and the stereo window placed well in front of the nearest point, where many people prefer to put it, avoiding window violations. No matter how large you projected this image, you would never have any positive parallax (it's _all_ negative parallax), and yet you would have a "proper" window placement. You could also control the effects of ghosting on smaller screens in "ghosted environments" by further adjusting the horizontal parallax without altering this stereo window placement :-) This really kills an entire flock of bad birds with one stone :-) BTW, all of these settings, adjustments and any variations can be animated in movies :-) I will be incorporating these techniques in my future work, as it totally solves the window violation problem! The demo image I posted was actually composited in Adobe After Effects, but the original imagery was done in Photoshop. The fire tower was shot in one location and Mt. Rainier in the background was shot in another location (via cha-cha's with a very huge stereo base :-). The fire tower was "cut out" with a transparent background and layered with the Mt. Rainier shot. I borrowed the image from my movie segment on my web page, called "Facing Reality". -- P. K. Kid Stereoscopic 3D images and movie clips (all G-rated): http://www.puppetkites.net | ||
| Allen Huffman (Allenhuffman) New member Username: Allenhuffman Post Number: 2 Registered: 11-2007 Rating: N/A |
P.K., I certainly understand that things can always be done better (and "great" instead of just "good" or even "lousy"). As a point of reference for your post, do you have any suggestions on "great" anaglyph movies available on DVD that would view well on a modern, higher end LCD HDTV? I've been fairly fine with all the things I've had in the past (Spy Kids, Shrek, etc.) and friends I've shown them to are always blown away at 3-D, but they'd probably be far less impressed if they'd seen as many Disney and Universal 3-D theaters as I have. Now that we have local RealD theaters here in Des Moines, I expect more folks will start understanding how good 3-D can be compared to Spy-Kids 3-D. Thoughts? | ||
| Roger (Roger) New member Username: Roger Post Number: 5 Registered: 4-2006  Rating: N/A |
I just added a group of tutorials about how to create automated, optimized, tweakable anaglyphs (images, videos, etc) with programs like Photoshop, After Effects, VirtualDub and StereoMovie Maker: http://www.puppetkites.net/blog/archives/category/optimized-anaglyph/ Try it. It eliminates almost all the retinal rivalry and you can tweak the colors any way you want. I'll try to make some "HD" anaglyph samples sometime in the future, using this method... or anyone can do it... they should look super on an HD monitor. http://www.puppetkites.net/blog | ||
| Roger (Roger) New member Username: Roger Post Number: 6 Registered: 4-2006 Rating: N/A |
Sorry... I just upgraded my Wordpress blog today, and now am using tags instead of categories, so the link to the tutorials is here: http://www.puppetkites.net/blog/archives/tag/anaglyph-creation http://www.puppetkites.net/blog |
