The gory truth about stereoscopic post
Posted on November 2, 2009
Filed Under Comp, Foundry, VFX | Leave a Comment
Just in time for Halloween, Studio Daily posted a short article about CafeFX’s work on Final Destination 3 that hits one of the often underestimated issues encountered in vfx post on a stereo show:
“3D can add a lot more time to normal workflows,” Williamson admits. “Some of the things that are normally very, very simple, that you don’t have to worry about, like a simple paint out, suddenly become more complex in 3D. For Final, we had to paint out a wire that was in front of a sofa in the background, with a pattern all over it. The human eye is very good at picking up discrepancies like that. And the minute you have any kind of shift and are only one pixel off, it lifts it or pushes it back in stereo space. If you patched it on one eye, you’d never know, and someone can make that fix in an afternoon. But in stereo, it takes three days.”
I’ve heard this over and over from our customers experienced in doing stereo work. It’s not just double the work — you need to think exponential. Which is scary, and possibly gory for your studio even if the project isn’t a horror film.
However, that’s today. The flip side is that having two (or more) views of the scene gives you a lot more information. The tools don’t yet exist commercially to take full advantage of this but if you saw any of the “how to” material about ILM’s Imocap system using multiple cameras on the Davy Jones work for Pirates of the Caribbean, then you have an idea. The applications of these basic ideas to vfx compositing are fantastic. Our research team is working on some very cool technology in this direction and things that were hazy “maybe somedays” just a couple of years ago are starting to look quite viable. (Scroll down to the bottom of The Foundry’s blog page for a little tease.)
But back to the article, I’m happy to add that CafeFX had nice things to say about how Nuke and Ocula made the whole process much more manageable and cost-effective. The article is short and well worth a read, especially if you are contemplating doing stereo work for the first time.
CafeFx’s 3D Gore Fest for The Final Destination
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