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The show is over! Don’t cry, but if you didn’t get to see us at the CW Pro stand, i am afraid to say, you missed an opportunity to hear our well attended seminars. What a week it was. BVE seemed very well attended to me. The talk was all about 3D and there was a fair amount on show too, however, if i say it myself, the Belly Dancing tutorial really did come out on top. A lot of the other footage had the glamour and appeal a very shiny, well made dollop of custard. Tasty, but missing the pudding! And as you can see, i do like my pudding.
Tony Dickie, of CW[Pro] introduced Jamie and I, and from that point on we covered the adventure of Pogo Films: 3D Challenge. There is no point going over all of what we discussed, just read this blog and you will get the overview. But i do remember looking up each time we gave the seminar, and being surprised at how many people were squeezed into the space, and how many were overflowing onto the path. So I was very pleased at the level of attendance.
 Jamie helped me with more technical incite into the project. I think between us, we played a good game of ping pong! My mouth would get dry, so i found a crafty moment to engage Jamie in the debate. He would run to an end or get fed and bounce back to me. Most excellent! By Thursday, i think we had it down to a fine art and i think i am missing it! But click on this photo as I think Tony is the embodiment of tranquility, very restful.
 Whilst the talks were going on, the CW[Pro] stand was heaving. The combined effect of having our Belly Dancers there, handing out specs, and the word of mouth too, was producing a lot of attention and visitors. The clarity and colour of the Red, Stereoscopic footage was eye-popping and brought a lot viewers in. This gave James Dancer, of CW[Pro] the opportunity to discuss their products and have a damn-good sell!
By the end of the show, it felt as though the 3D Challenge was not just completed but a complete success. We got to learn an enormous amount about 3D stereoscopic production and post-production as well as delivery and future requirements thereof. On the back of the production, we have also secured several S3D bookings too and a huge host of interest. So for us, where do we go?
We shall be expanding our capabilities in S3D. In time, all of our online suites will need to go stereoscopic and our talent base will expand to become even more capable and educated in S3D than they already are (and we learned this BVE that we are already ahead of the game). We shall also be pushing ahead with production of our own and we shall see if that can include Dancing Dimensions in some form or other.
As for the industry itself, the way forward is to S3D. You cannot ignore its approaching presence. You cannot afford to stick your head in the sand. The money, whether it be enough or otherwise, is going to be available as a source of revenue and we have to be tapping it. If our industry has learned anything over the two deacdes I have been in it, it is that we must be as adaptable as we can. We must find new ways of generating revenue and saving costs, of developing multiple skills and above all… Seeing new markets. I see one, and it’s stereoscopic 3D.
Massive thanks to everybody who has helped and supported us in this project. You know who you are and without your help we would never have even got this baby off the ground, so thank you. Hopefully, we can all work forwards now to benefit all of us and make the British Stereoscopuc Industry, THE stereoscopic industry!
So where are we? Oli, Jamie and I are a bit tired from standing up and talking and walking our way around BVE 2010. That’s for sure. But as I write, I am moderately overwhelmed by the great response that we have had for “Dancing Dimensions: Belly Dancing”; The Pogo Films 3D Challenge. The activity at the CW Pro stand has been high. There is always a fresh collection of bespectacled faces looking at the film. Their responses are always positive, and when they’re critical, it’s a good critical. They are examining all the 3D possibilities, failures and successes of the film and i hope, learning from them as much as we have.
It is the very positivity of 3D that i feel marks this BVE as a success. 3D conjures up the hope of the new, a chance to make new marks in the snow, sign your name first in the register and stand out a little from the crowd. We can all be doing this, now. On Monday, Oli’ and I were at BAFTA as Sky were presenting “An Introduction to 3D” to Producers. Very much the emphasis there was the “Now”; The “Please come and pitch your ideas to us” – What Sky are needing to do is to actually reach out to the Production sector and force commission work to fill their 3D channel – and this is exciting! In my talks and panel discussion yesterday, this was the message i wanted to get across… come on industry, get stuck in. Of course, there will be budgetary issues, there will be impossibilities to be squeezed around, but as an industry, we must and we shall do this. It will be unavoidable, so don’t start dodging and miss it altogether.
We have one more day tomorrow, one more talk, one more opportunity to show everyone there, the film. If you are reading this and you have not yet been to the show, (and it’s still on) then get down there and come and see us. If you get there down there at half twelve, come and listen to CW Pro and ourselves taking a seminar on the work-flow. If you can’t get down, then i shall sum-up the whold project this weekend and you can read it on this blog… Incidentally, We shall need to adapt this blog now the challenge is over, so continue to watch this space!
BVE was live yesterday and Pogo Films: 3D Challenge was complete and on show and so we accomplished our mission. So without any further a-do, i want to thank everyone who was involved in one way or another. There has been a lot of collaborations and assistance and lots of things for reduced or free rate and it has all helped to make things excellent, so Pogo is delighted and very grateful.
On Friday i shall sum-up all that has happened in regards to the Challenge and the show and let you in on a few secrets and successes about the future of not just Pogo, not just the blog but of course 3D too! Come to the show if you can, it’s on until tomorrow and it’s great! Check it out at BVE 2010.
The subject of stereo 3D really draws attention to the issue of ‘realtime’ vs. quality. 3D is another demand on our systems which ideally requires realtime performance. The thing is that the word ‘realtime’ doesn’t mean much on its own.
Some systems say ‘realtime’ when they’re talking about previews or reduced quality of some sort. This is relevant in all sorts of situations and it can be particularly confusing when dealing with things like Red files. Quite often you might not need full quality but I’ve seen examples where the lower quality has produced some really nasty artifacts – shots with a person wearing a striped T-shirt which has gone totally haywire with Moiré patterns.
Another situation when picture quality can make a difference is stereo 3D. We discovered over the last few weeks, the quality of the image does make quite a difference to the stereo effect. The depth and overall 3Dness really changed when we unplugged the offline and plugged in the full quality 2K online.
I’ll be going to the BVE in Earl’s Court next week and trying to find out exactly what the different manufacturers mean by ‘realtime’ – plus I think I’ll get the chance to meet Laura…
Still a little sleepy after quite a late finish [ed: 00:30 !] on Friday. The reality of working with S3D keeps hitting us – issues like where to place text in Z-space. How to keep the ‘client’ (Phil) happy with the process while finding ways to keep the inevitable renders to a minimum.
To conform Phil’s edit I’d set the Pablo to bring in the Red .r3d files at full quality debayer, 2K. It then needed one eye to be flopped and matched in colour to the other eye, due to the mirror system used on the shoot. We then set a grade on one eye, which wasn’t all that far from the colours as seen set really. These settings then get transferred to the other eye and can render in the background.
After Phil had finished with the audio, we looked at how the stereo worked in his edit. The interesting thing is that you get much more 3D depth when you have two streams of uncompressed 2K going to the screen (down-res’ing to HD) instead of the offline from FCP. We tweaked the position, scale and ‘vergence’ of nearly all the shots so that it made full impact when we wanted it to and so that the cuts ran together more comfortably. Doing this in real-time, full 2K was great… but then came the hassles…
When it comes to putting on text layers and keying graphics over, you might understand that the system would slow down somewhat but I had some trouble finding a way to even view the two eyes, each with their text layers, in stereo in order to get the correct placement of each element in 3D space. Suffice to say, I need to work on an ‘improved workflow’ and I know Quantel are working on some improved tools for this. I won’t grumble because I know all the text for Avatar was done on a Pablo. I really didn’t want to setup the layers in isolation because, in one test I did, the text seemed to occupy the same space as Laura and our eyes went crazy!
Anyway, all the graphics went on and the blu-ray got made and we almost made the last tube home. I’m hoping to make some tweaks on Monday and, if there’s time, I’ll talk to the guys at Fugitve Studios to see if the graphics can be tweaked a bit too. Again, one eye in isolation looked nice but I don’t think the shiny nature of the graphics works all that well in S3D. Still, given the short amount of time we’ve all had – to go from storyboard to 3D blu-ray – I reckon it all looks great and we’ve learned masses. And it’s been good fun too.
It’s Friday night, about nine o’clock, as I sit in Edit 4 with Jamie. Large leaps have happened since my slight recovery from the lurgy. Thursday, whilst i lolled about with half a brain cell (some fifty percent above normal), I did manage to get the sound tracks layered into FCP. We are doing the sound house – a fairly simple mix, but still enough work for a day and a half. Jamie had to split himself between jobs: One part of the day working on a film by Yoko Ono and John Lennon and the other half of the day working on a film by Myself and Oli. You will have to ask him about which was best!
The grade for the film has been all executed on the iQ Pablo. This truly is the fastest machine to grade on. There are two 2K streams and vignettes and several layers but it just plays and looks great. You would not want to be rendering every change in the grade of a 3D Stereoscopic film – unless the onset of grey hair and bags under the eyes were top of your list. So whilst i finished the sound today (Friday) Jamie completed the beauty-pass (is this term strictly necessary? I feel like a doggy hairdresser) and by seven, Stuart from Fugitive Studios came around with the graphics for the film. These are basically a top and bottom bumper and very short stings between segments in the film. In what was a very, very short deadline, Stuart and Fugitive gave us a great little graphic and it does the job beautifully.
So right now, 21:30, we are just bolting on the last of the graphics and we shall burn a Blu-Ray or ten for the Sky Discussion on Monday and then tweak for BVE on Tuesday. I think we are going to actually pull this off but you know, there is still a fat lady waiting to sing… But fingers crossed.
I went down with a vengeance! The norovirus struck me on Tuesday night and I lost Wednesday because of it, so I apologise for the lack of witty incite into the 3D Challenge. The good news is that the conform from the completed offline is going well and Jamie will blog about that soon, won’t you Jamie!
Phil
The close of last week was a high! We had taken the week from the shoot to get a lot of prep work done. Not quite what we expected to do with the time, but unavoidable. One issue was the parallel file naming between both RED cameras. They were set to name their outputs, Left or Right and then follow on with sensible, extension names and numbers. However a few camera problems with one camera created some incompatibility between the names.
Getting the Red Rocket in and working was okay. Getting rushes for me to review in a DVD took a while but only because of some abstract Meta error between the Mac and the PC. What do i mean by that? I mean that something is weird and hovers quietly in the background of the QuickTime movie and wont work on my PC – And i don’t actually know what it is. Always use the term meta-data at this point as it makes you sound very clever and can cover a multitude of sins. Meta-Data blah blah blah!
Inition sent us over our JVC 3D monitor and Jamie and I hauled the blighter into the suite and got it mounted. The photograph below is of the plethora of monitoring that Jamie now has to chose from.
By the end of Friday, we had checked all of the shots and we have got the cover we need – IT WAS ALSO AMAZING! Yes, Avatar is great, and all other 3D content is probably great, but to see your own produced material in 3D – is greater than a great thing which is especially awesome. Even though we were there at the shoot, seeing the performers in the flesh 3D, it’s still eye-popping to see the depth in the shot in the suite. I don’t care if I sound like a kid, it’s great! No wonder people call post-technology “toys” – I compare this feeling with getting Big-Trak for Christmas when I was twelve – Awesome! (I have since sold my Big-Trak, grown up and out and got married!)
Where are we now? Well Jamie has been working this morning on getting a usable first cut. We must get some shots over to Fugitive Studios for some graphics work so the rush is on for a rough-cut. Our feelings so far about the edit? The difference in quality of the depth varies a lot between offline PAL resolution and the 2K derived 1080 resolution of the end result. The depth is there in the offline but when you see the full res, the depth drops back and looks fab! However, this means that we do have to be careful with cutting in the offline to avoid sudden depth changes on the focal point of the viewer as the eyes go mad!
More to come. This is where we learn about the language of editing in 3D…
 Laura doing the shimmy Having helped Phil get the 3D telly into Edit 4, I have to say Laura and the belly dancers look absolutely brilliant. Joking aside, it’s such a visually engaging subject for 3D. The test edit which I’d graded in the Pablo looked superb and the realtime convergence tools on the 2 x full-res HD outputs (from the 2 x 2K) really come into their own.
One other thought I had about the offline (see below). We could use the 3DTool Box method of editing and I can alter the EDL for one eye to create the other eye for online. It will mean some careful replacing of reel names since the Red clip IDs lost their relationship some time during the shoot. The clips are all sync’ed in FCP so I can go through and note what the errors are. It’ll be worth it if we can have the 3D telly on while we offline. What d’you think Phil?
So, all good now…
Whilst the way the RED stereo setup should work would have been more straightforward, there were extra clips recorded in one eye or the other so the correlation between the clip IDs was lost. If that had remained then I could have easily generated an EDL for the other eye. Not to worry, by sorting the FCP Bin by Media Start it wasn’t too bad to find matching eyes and the same for the audio.
The way we’ve decided to go is to create a Merged clip of Left Eye with audio and another Merged clip of Right Eye with the same audio. Then create a MultiClip of those two clips. This way we can offline with a single eye but easily get hold of the other eye. We need this when we put it into the Stereo 3D Toolbox plugin and when we want to create EDLs (or AAF) for conforming on the Pablo. So we’ll rough cut looking at one eye, then get the other eye from the multiclip (then make a Subclip to sync the In point for the 3D ToolBox!) and take a look in 3D anaglyph.
Stereo 3D Toolbox seems pretty cool and it’s nice that you can apply it to extra text layers on the timeline etc. the only thing is that the path from offline to online edit doesn’t seem to have been considered, unless I’m missing something. The problem is that one eye is only held in a clip ‘well’ in the plugin so there’s no reference to it when outputting an EDL or AAF. And, to further complicate it, the suggested workflow uses nested clips which don’t carry over the AAF very well either. So this is why we’ve hit on the current method. I’m going to keep trying to refine it. The Pablo is conforming a 2K test edit right now.
More disjointed ramblings as and when…!
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Whilst the talks were going on, the CW[Pro] stand was heaving. The combined effect of having our Belly Dancers there, handing out specs, and the word of mouth too, was producing a lot of attention and visitors. The clarity and colour of the Red, Stereoscopic footage was eye-popping and brought a lot viewers in. This gave James Dancer, of CW[Pro] the opportunity to discuss their products and have a damn-good sell!
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