May Demo at StereoScope
Surrounding the StereoScope stage were 6 stereo rigs capturing a girl in a motion capture suit. This was simply to demonstrate the many flavors of 3D and not so much what the cameras were pointed at. But how weird is that, up there with capturing someone in a green suit up against a greenscreen...
The cameras ranged from a pair of SD cameras to a pair of 4:4:4 2Ks, and lots in between. Even High Speed rigs were in the mix. The goal was to give visitors a hands on look at what is available for use when it comes to 3D.
Image/data capture was done both locally to the rigs and out to stereo Rave recorders via both HD-SDI and Telecast fiber. Telecast fiber is an amazing tool, as it allows standard SDI to be converted and run over fiber for miles. Cooler was the fact that many strands could be packed over a single cable that carried streams to and from. Beats the bulky cable runs by a long shot.
In addition to capture SpectSoft provided two 3d Live systems that showed immediate 3D images off the cameras. 3d Live was not only useful in the set-up of the stereo camera rigs but provided the ability to adjust stereo images on the fly. The stereo mix was then fed into other capture devices for both uncompressed or proxy creation, all in real-time.
The demo was also packed with little bits a pieces that really made the workflow complete. Items such as the ability to capture and playback directly to/from a SAN. This was shown with the Rave/Bright combination.
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Cine-tal monitors were fed both single eye and stereo mixed images for crucial monitoring, Mobile Motion with the motion capture solution and BitJazz with their lossless real-time encoding.
From camera head to delivery the workflow showed how images could be captured as individual uncompressed DPX right/eye frames, fed simultaneously for 3D viewing, captured as 3D proxies and stored direct to a SAN all in one sweep. One could easily walk off set with uncompressed circle takes and proxies in hand...in 3D or otherwise.
The attendees were from every level of film making. Camera ops to studio execs.rolled their sleeves up and got a taste of 3D and the tools available to get the job done. Images of the event can be seen here.
By Ramona Howard, SpectSoft
