Still from CHAOS by Ruben Moller

This morning we had a workshop in the mocap studio all about stereoscopic projection.  Many people signed up…but only one of them showed up (yay Miles!).   So I guess we’ll have to have another one.  To those of you who didn’t show up:  YOU MISSED OUT!   Ruben Moller showed several clips of his new work in progress “Chaos”.  It mixes animation with real footage captured with the Rubot.  Stephen Wichuk also showed his DIY stop motion rig and a small clip of his work in progress.    It’s really nice to see the interest in 3D stereographics in the school.    Of course I’m a total stereo geek so I’ll do my best to grow this family.

Ok, so for those of you who missed the workshop and for those of you who are just curious about our setup.  Here is some info.

It’s a 2-projector passive Infitec system projecting on a 16ftx9ft screen surface.  The projectors are Projection Design Cineo30, 1920×1080 native resolution.

The Infitec filters are similar to the old anaglyph system (red/cyan glasses) but each filter has a little bit of red, green, and blue so most colours are reproducible in stereo.   Colours tending towards magenta and green will have a little bit of an ‘electric’ feel.  Personally I don’t find this disturbing but some people would want to tweak their colours to avoid the more problematic colours.

The system is driven by a Mac Pro running Windows.  It is dual boot so it can also run Mac OSX but in my experience Windows is still key in the 3D world.  The graphics card is a Nvidia QuadroFX 5600.  The stereo can either be driven passively (one DVI per projector), or actively (one active signal to an active to passive converter).  The advantage to driving it actively is that you can have a monitor to work on your animation/video and the projection to see the result in 3D.  The disadvantage is that so far we’ve had issues with videos/animation running at anything other than 29.97 fps.  It’ll still work but there is a slight ‘frame jiggle’ issue.

If you want to create your own stereo content to display on the system, there are several ways to do that.  The basic idea is to separate your real or virtual cameras by a standard eye distance of 6cm and shoot normally.  There’s of course lots of little details to be mindful of but trying it out will give you a sense of what those things might be.  It is best not to rotate your cameras to ‘look at the same thing’.  This is called toe-in stereo and it has the unwanted property of keystoning your image so that you get some vertical disparity (painful).  In some cases, you can get away with toe-in.  But if you can avoid it, do.

To play the stereo in the lab, you can just bring two separate left and right eye streams.  In other entries, I will talk about other formats possible.

If you’d like to try out the system, just contact me at mlantin at ecuad.ca.

Long live stereo,
M!

\n\n/n/ [\m/ in anaglyph, courtesy of Simon Overstall, the PMP studio technician]

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