If you want to create a high-quality 3D program, having the best-of-the-best in production equipment is a must – that and a great crew, of course.
So while we’ve been in post-production for our first 3D documentary, our editor Brian Mann and I have been on the hunt for a picture-perfect 3D monitor to QC our cuts.
The latest contender: Panasonic’s 25” BT-3DL 2550, a passive circular-polarized monitor with dual processors.
The Panasonic comes with all the bells and whistles any 3D editor could ask for: pro-connectors, 10 bit 3D LUT for great color accuracy, 3 stereo viewing options including simultaneous, line-by-line, and side-by-side.
But when we brought it in to try it out we ran into an unexpected problem – the display’s polarizing filter wouldn’t work properly with our RealD glasses. The colour was off – pink tinges galore.
Funny thing was when we turned our 3D glasses sideways it seemed to work. Hmmmm.
We’re not sure whether it’s a proprietary or technology issue. The Panasonic tech support team wasn’t sure either.
So in the end, we chose to send the Panasonic back.
We weren’t up to buying another set of 3D glasses on top of the ones we already had. Panasonic charges $100 per set which, along with the pricier monitor—Panasonic $10 000 vs. JVC $6 600 —is a bit hard to swallow.
We’ll nail down a dual stream monitor soon enough. It’s just going to take a little more digging.
The Parallax team and I are always keeping an eye on what electronic companies are doing to get 3D out into the universe.
Because it’s their inventions that will play a key role in determining how many of you get to see our first 3D documentary in its full stereoscopic glory.
As 3D popularity climbs, electronic companies are competing to see who gets to annex that coveted spot on your living room TV stand.
And so begins the format wars, with active-shutter glasses coming up against passive-polarized.
Earlier this year at Consumer Electronics Show, LG, Toshiba and Vizio showcased their upcoming lines of consumer 3DTVs using passive displays.
Their promise: a high quality 3D experience without burning a hole straight through your wallet.
What makes Passive 3DTVs more economical than the consumer lines is their use of lightweight and cheap polarized glasses instead of the costly active-shutter glasses.
Which means you can outfit the whole family and your dog affordably.
Making 3D technology cheaper and more accessible is undoubtedly a good thing – but like most things cheaper does not always mean better.
Turns out Vizio’s passive screens do provide a high quality and comfortable viewing experience, but there are also noticeable losses in resolution, jaggies, and occasional blurring of objects due to the way their screens display 3D images for each eye.
This is probably why Samsung, Sony, Panasonic are still pushing active shutters.
Nevertheless, passive-polarized technology has a great impact on the 3D market.
Light-weight, cheaper glasses make way for cheaper and more compact 3DTV’s—currently Vizio’s smallest consumer model is 42” 3D HDTV with even tinier models rumored on the horizon.
And like 1080p took over the top price bracket in HD dropping 720p prices and enticing consumers into HD converts, passive displays have the potential to influence 3D rollout in precisely the same way.
So in the end affordable passive-polarized displays provide the right nudge to get more people on the 3D train. After that, there’s no going back.
Reactions were mixed, but whether the VFF-goers praised it or panned it, it was clear that my little road trip stirred up a nice dose of stereoscopic buzz.
It’s also clear that our 3D monitor travels exceptionally well strapped to a bike rack … bonus.
Super frustrating news: after some serious testing, it seems that YouTube 3D-enabled videos do not decode properly for playback on our 3D monitor when sourced by a MacBook Pro or PS3.
For the majority of people this may seem like an inconsequential technological glitch.
But for me, it’s a huge setback in our mission to get top-notch 3D content out into the universe.
Where we’re at
But after seeing the same footage in stereoscopic 3D I just wasn’t satisfied – I wanted to give people with 3D-enabled devices the chance to not only experience the stuff we shot, but to judge its quality for themselves.
So I had my editing team upload a side-by-side version of interior shoot selects to YouTube:
It seemed like a simple plan – put the videos on and set them to 3D.
We managed to get anaglpyh playback working fine, with the correct aspect ratio and eye orientation. We then pushed forward to see if modern stereoscopic 3D methods worked.
They didn’t. When we tried to play the clips using half-width, side-by-side, 3D they were a no go on our JVC GD-463D10U monitor. We tried using both a MacBook Pro with DVI to HDMI and a PS3 with HDMI to HDMI.
We also tried to play three other 3D-enabled videos on YouTube that were uploaded by other people and came up against the same issue. I’ve embedded these at the end of the post if you’ve got 3D-enables gear and would like to give them a go.
What’s going wrong?
From what my team can tell, the problem seems to be that YouTube does not map the pixels properly for TV playback.
A huge caveat – and my call out to the 3D-enabled – this is not to say the YouTube 3D function definitely doesn’t work. It just doesn’t seem to work on the equipment that we have access to – a Mac computer, a PS3, and a passive filter 3DTV.
More equipment than 99.999999 per cent of the world has … but still. Our tests were not exhaustive.
The next move
This setback has put me in a difficult position. YouTube has the potential to offer a free 3D online playback solution that’s more comprehensive than anything else. And I really want to get our stuff on there so people can check it out – especially since more and more consumers are buying 3D-enabled viewing devices.
But YouTube just isn’t working for us. So where do I go from here?
We could host future 3D content on our own web server or perhaps on another web video community like Vimeo, but doing so would seriously cripple our reach. Missing out on YouTube is clearly a doozy when it comes to exposure … it’s one of the top-searched sites in the world.
And there’s another downside: neither our web server or Vimeo offer the ability to toggle between different 3D delivery formats that YouTube (in theory) could. This means we would have to render out and upload many different versions of the same video – more work for my team.
We can do further YouTube tests, and see if we can work around the issues we’ve encountered so far. But this means potentially re-encoding and uploading new videos. It will probably require a great deal of time to invent workarounds, render new files, and upload the new tests – especially since my edit crew also has to meet the demands of film projects that are currently in production.
Also, further testing at this point feels like it could be a gamble. As far as we can tell Google has very limited support for the feature, so our only option is try, and try some more, to see if there is something undocumented that works, or try, and try some more, only to discover that it really doesn’t work after all – at least not yet.
The other option is to abandon YouTube. That means abandoning any desire or investment to attain any of the benefit of having our 3D content on the mega site – at least until the 3D feature becomes more mainstream and (hopefully) functional.
Or finally, the wild card option: you, dear reader, have successfully watched this type of footage on YouTube, have the magic solution to this seriously irritating problem, and can’t wait to share it with us …
There were some hiccups when we first got the software, but we worked out the kinks and it’s been pretty solid ever since.
Now our compositor has added the program to his arsenal – and it’s paying off once again.
Before incorporating CineForm, our VFX team gave our editor ProRes videos. They would then to be transcoded into CineForm files and muxed – two extra steps for our editor for each video every single time.
Now, he can read, write and export CineForm 3D files in Adobe After Effects, and deliver them – already muxed – directly to the editor.
