Combustion for Stereoscopic work.

#1

Hey was just wondering if anyone has used combustion for stereoscopic work.

We have been approached by a client to do a stereoscopic project, that is going to be displayed at a trade show.This is our first time doing such a project. We will probably go for a the projector with polarised glasses.

We understand the process upto the point of the rendering, but are confused by the compositing side of things. do we just render out of combustion an AVI or is there a special format. Is there a plugin that we have to run in through? If anyone has any links or suggestions that would be great.

#2

I have a bit of experience with this.

A project I worked on a year ago was stereoscopic, targeting those special glasses. You basically render out both eyes, composite them separately, and then load them as two separate streams into the player. The player then makes sure the streams are synced and that the correct stream gets shown to the correct eye.

I don’t know if Combustion has any useful features for doing that kind of work… You may end up having to just reconnect footage once composites are done and render out each eye in that way. I believe Toxik has something where you do the comp once but it’s smart enough to know that you have two sets of source footage that need to be rendered, one for each eye. I’m almost positive that Nuke and Fusion both support that workflow.

As far as the AVI format goes, it’s up to the projector and whatever player you’re using. For example, on our project we had to output Indeo 5.0 AVIs. (Yes, you read that correctly.) It’s not a huge deal to recompress for whatever player you use, but I’d get my hands on one of the projectors as soon as I could.

At the moment there are no special plugins or anything-- just two sets of the same footage. I hear they’re adding support for 3D to the H.264 spec, but it’s a ways off yet.

Hope that helps!

#3

Hey

Thanks for that info that was quite helpful. Does the projector come with a software to load in the two streams? Do you remember what kind of projector you used? we are looking at the ones from Real D.

#4

Hey again,

I’m not sure how much I can say about the projector, apart from the fact that it was not an off-the-shelf leasing or purchase. I didn’t have much of a hand in it. However, it wasn’t Real-D. IIRC the arguments against using their stuff is that you have to convert to some weird proprietary format, and the expense. I don’t know how true any of that is nowadays; I haven’t done stereoscopic since, apart from anaglyphic tests at home.

The player, I think, came with this stereoscopic monitor we were also using on one station for quicker previews. It was called something like “Stereo Player”; I can’t tell you the company name or anything else useful, sorry. :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

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