Skip to content

Shooting Brains In 3D – Part 1

By: Stephen Toback

IMG_9708 Blur

With the incredible demonstration of glasses free 3D we saw last week from Izon TV, we reached out to our go to technology innovator, Dr. Len White from Duke Institute Of Brain Science in order to create some new content for further testing when we get the monitor back in January. This was our first lab shoot with the SONY HDR-TD30V Camcorder (whose price has now dropped to $999!) We had never tested the close up ability of the camera before and given the fixed convergence of the camcorder, we thought this would be an interesting test.

IMG_9709 circle

We were joined by the amazing technology team at the Duke School of Medicine who helped us connect the HDMI output of the camera to the video screen behind us. This provided Dr. White a confidence monitor as well as helped us set lighting. We were all really impressed with the quality HD output of the camera. The camera is smart enough to know that you’ve connected at 2D monitor so it only outputs a 2D image. We also found out that the camera’s HDMI output can be set to either output the SONY interlaced format or standard side-by-side output. This may create an interesting use case for live, overflow monitoring in 3D.

Slamming door sounds not withstanding (it is finals time at SOM), Dr. White got some very nice HD 2D footage to work with. Preliminary viewing on our existing passive LG 3D display were quite impressive. One issue that we assumed we’d have to deal with is the close up work. If you think about it, if you stick your nose up against something close, your eyes cross. The 3D camera’s “eyes” are at a fixed distance so it doesn’t like being close to an object. We should be able to adjust the convergence in Final Cut X using the Dashwood Stereo 3D Toolbox LE ($99). Final Cut X appears to be reading the SONY interlaced footage but it will take more work to see how it translates (as compared to SONY Vegas). This is a major focus of our testing and we’ll write more about it once we’ve done some more research. The Duke Digital Initiative is also working on setting up a 3D content channel on YouTube that will allow you to view some of this content on your own 3D displays.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *