Need advice for workflow on 3D music vid

[Nick Mulder]

Gidday,

 

My experiments with 3D films have been successful enough in that I now wish to go to the full extent of telecine and output of a music vid that will be released in at least one of the following formats: DVD, hybrid CD, TV play ... I'm after advice on how to go about the post part of the vid which in turn dictates how I get the film transferred which again is part of the parcel with regards to the output format/s ...

 

3D is pretty easy - I would have two super16 runs of film at 25fps (I live in PAL country) each of the same thing but with the required parallax ... They will be xtal synced so they run at the same speed but due to the 2 cameras individual idiosyncrasies they will most probably have a few frames at the top and tail of each take this way and that (I would slate but the shoot will be a live concert event... I'll have to deal with the time consuming work of lining them up in post)

 

The 3D will be the color anaglyph method where I take the red channel of one stream and the green and blue of the other and combine them via a 'multiply' or 'screen' composite modes (these modes are in effect inversions of each other, and I can rig the layer/channels to use either) ... That's a simplified version, but for the purposes of the discussion that's all that we need to know.

 

I then jiggery poke the layers on the screen so that they are 'in place' (to reduce eye strain :blink: ) - this means each image will be shoved off the screen in opposite directions leaving 'un-3D' sections on the edges - I then have to scale the left & right up (or in other words zoom the screen in) to remove these edges ...

 

Thanks for bearing with me so far...

 

Ok, imagine its not 3D so we dont get sidetracked by 3D discussions - its just a normal music vid where we basically need to scale the input footage and also combine them via a composite mix. I have figured out how to do this in FCP(5), and photoshop also so therefore After Effects shouldn't be too much of a hassle - I also have access to Shake but have never used it ... The computer is just one of those hybrid Mac/PC things 1.8GHz 1.5gig ram

 

Question:

 

What format am I looking at in transferring the super16 footage ? Do I just get it transferred as miniDV and work with that ? and the super16 gets letterboxed ? Or HD ? which I dont have much knowledge of ... Is there a 25 fps progressive scan ?

Does it depend on the output DVD format ?

 

Is there a format I can catch the footage on which can be converted to anything later ?

 

Scan ?

 

As I understand it most things like this get transferred as digibeta and a miniDV version to work with in editing and then an EDL is output for the digibeta to be cut to ? If I did it this way, how is the digibeta effected (composite modes etc..) like the work I did in FCP/AE on the miniDV version ?

 

I can certainly just go out and get something done somehow and work it all out afterwards, but I may end up loosing quality transferring from format to format as I battle through learning what, who, where and suchlike. I want to retain as much of the quality of the super16 neg as possible to the final output (would rather letterbox than crop sides) - I also want to try and do as much of the work on my puder here as possible rather than forking out for Flame or otherwise sessions etc...

 

So what workflow would you go for ?

 

Prob really simple ? Any help appreciated ...

 

 

Nick

[Nick Mulder]

no takers?

 

excuse the ramble, :huh: I really need to cut down on my unnecessary info giving - either that or ???

[Michael Nash]

The simplest (and often cheapest) way to maintain high quality is to telecine your footage to an HD format that your computer can handle, either HDCAM or DVCPROHD. Since it's a concert I imagine you'd want to keep most of the footage, so transfer all of it. Do a good quality transfer with a "base" color correction that makes the footage look good, but leaves room for some color correction further down the line. A good colorist should be able to do this for you no problem.

 

HDCAM may require some hardware for your computer that you may not have, and the decks are expensive to rent. But it does do 25P.

 

DVCPROHD can be imported quite easily and less expensively, but as a tape format will be 50P in a PAL environment (I believe). DVCPROHD as a codec (file only) can be 25P I believe.

 

In FCP post the show however you like, and output whatever format you like.