Archive for June, 2010

Enhanced Dimensions 3D Short Film “FourPlay” is one of the films included in the final of the teamFudge Short Film Contest!

The final is kicking off at 8pm on Wednesday 7th July, at Banshee Labyrinth, 29 Niddry Street, Edinburgh. The makers of the film judged to be the best on the night will win the trophy and cash prize.

The contest organisers teamFUDGE will be taking part in the “Mongol Rally”, an annual ‘wacky races’ charity trek from the UK to Mongolia. 500 teams will be taking part this year, raising over HALF A MILLION POUNDS for charity.  Most teams will also be donating their cars on arrival to either be sold for the profits or converted for charitable use.

Amidst all the high profile earthquake appeals, it seems the plight of the Mongolians has been lost.  They are currently enduring one of the worst winters so far this century, thanks to a phenomenon known as dzud, which occurs when severely cold winters of below -50C are preceded by dry summers that preclude sufficient grazing.  It’s estimated that 3 million livestock will die by June, which would be devastating for a county that relies so heavily on their cattle, horses, sheep and yaks.

If you can do please come along on the night and support teamFudge in their fund raising… oh and shout and whoop when you see our film!

For more details visit the teamFudge website.

Last month Nvidia demonstrated 3D video streaming live over the Internet and their website mentions the upcoming launch of a 3D Vision Video Channel all based on using a NVIDIA® 3D Vision PC, Microsoft Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming technology. The demonstration during a press conference at Computex streamed the music video of “We Are the World” in 3D .

“We’ve been collaborating with Microsoft to enable 3D in an Internet browser so that it’s very simple to use,” said Phil Eisler, General Manager of 3D Vision technology at NVIDIA. “Just click on a 3D video and it plays in 3D, using the latest 3D Vision Silverlight-based video player and NVIDIA 3D Vision. Internet users can now enjoy 3D video content streamed in high-definition (HD) quality and viewed at full resolution. This is another great benefit of having a 3D PC.”

To take advantage of this technology, consumers will need an NVIDIA 3D Vision-based desktop or notebook PC equipped with the latest 3D Vision drivers and the Silverlight browser plug-in. Once these are installed, consumers can then navigate to any Web site hosting 3D Vision-based content.

Stereo 3D Movies, trailers, sports and in fact any form of 3D video can now be hosted and streamed over the Internet to a growing market of 3D enabled PCs. If the audio-visual quality of the streaming 3d video is comparable to Vimeo HD streams then the potential for 3d content creators is fantastic. Being able to create and deploy your own good quality 3d video content without the hefty requirements of 3d Blu-ray authoring, production and distribution is really appealing, and potentailly profitable via sponsoship/advertising deals or by subscription if the content is of a commercial level.

“Customers have a peaked interest in 3D entertainment experiences, and Microsoft is looking forward to working with NVIDIA to bring these experiences to users through their PCs,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. “Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming together deliver the highest quality HD video experiences over the Web and, with NVIDIA 3D Vision, will now provide consumers with a way to watch their favourite movies, sporting events, music videos and more, all in 3D from their own computer.”

For more details check out the Nvidia site.

Wow – a big thank you to everyone over the past few months for visiting and/or subscribing to our Stereoscopic 3D Video Channel on YouTube, we’ve been overwhelmed with the amazing level of interest and great feedback we’ve received for our short 3D films from visitors all around the world.

We’re really proud to announce we’ve had over 150,000 video views plus we’ve got a phenomenal 500 subscribers!

And some viewers comments are just too kind:

• WOW ur 3D effects are Awesome …
• your titles are great! Really nice work
• wow this is awsome! I want AfterFX to
• splendid!!
• This looks so cool!!

I did have a couple of less positive ones so to keep my karma balanced:

• that was absolutly crap, someone else should show you a tutorial, Sony perhaps?
• hmmm its ok

Do please keep coming and watching our videos, and if you like them do comment and pass on to a friend. And don’t forget to take us up on our free 3d glasses for YouTube subscribers offer – check out the 3d products page for more info.

Having recently purchased the passive Acer Aspire 3d laptop online, my first thought was getting my hands on more pairs of the polarised 3d glasses that this laptop uses. As the laptop hadn’t been delivered yet I thought I’d trawl around for info on additional glasses. I assumed that as it used circular polarised the standard “free” cinema issue passive RealD glasses would work with the screen but was interested to find out if this was indeed the case.

My first port of call was a quick google search to locate additional pairs of Acer glasses and after a few attempts I did manage to find a site listing Acer spares but considering the laptop was for portable use and the glasses could easily get damaged or lost the £30 a pair asking price seemed a bit steep. I hadn’t yet come across any mention of the possibility of using standard RealD glasses.

Further searches online still didn’t come up with a clear answer on this so it was only on the day of receipt that I managed to test the theory – and it worked. So for those of you who have bought, or are thinking of buying, the passive Acer Aspire 3d laptop here a confirmation that standard cinema RealD 3d glasses work perfectly well with the laptop. And supplies are inexpensive and wide spread… certainly a more practical and cost effective solution that me carrying around 20 pairs of active shutter glasses at £100 a pop!

Today 3D reports that Passmore labs, one of the worlds leading 2d to 3d conversion studios, is to convert the “classic” horror B movie “Plan 9 from Outer Space” to 3D. The Ed Wood classic, famously named as “the worst movie ever” was, along with the director, the subject of Tim Burtons “Ed Wood” film in 1994.

Passmore labs who previously converted George Romero’s “NIght of The Living Dead” to 3d, will take around 6 weeks to do the conversion with a budget considerably higher than the original $60,000.

Read more about it here.

During my recent “Low Budget Stereoscopic 3D” discussion panel apperance at Leith FIlm Festival, we took a break to run a DVD of my short film “FourPlay” to the audience to demonstrate the type of things you can do on no, or very little budget. I was apprehensive as I’d had to convert the full hd streams down to a low resolution, then convert them to an anaglyph MPEG 2 for burning to DVD to playback on a projection system I’d never seen before and really had no time to test.

The film started, I popped on my glasses and was mortified. The projector effectively blew away the red/cyan edges leaving an overly bright 2d image that had everyone staring through anaglyph glasses to no effect. As it was a small crowd I announced that the 3d had not worked for me and that if anyone wanted to see the film properly we could play it back on my 3D Acer laptop following the discussion. Fortunately a few members of the audience did come forward and have a look afterwards but this didn’t make up for the disaster that had occured.

With that in mind I propose starting an anti-anaglyph association – with the aim of stopping filmmakers from falling into the same trap as I did – never assume the projector will be okay, never reduce the quality of your work to have it shown and most importantly steer clear of horrible anaglyph projections!

Share your anaglyph horror stories – join the AAA now!