Stereo 3d using syncd PlayBackPro?

[Walter Soyka]

[Ken Geary] “I’m very impressed with PlayBackPro running on MacBook’s and have used in several live events, including 3-sync playback on wide screen. Has anyone had experience projecting the left/right eye video channels thru synced PBP’s ?”

I’d test this extensively before bringing it on-site.

Another possibility might be using a single PBP with a Matrox DualHead or similar — but I’d suggest testing that extensively, too. A big benefit here would be a single operator GUI to manage.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Joel Hufford]

Hello Ken,

About a year ago I was involved in a project that involved exactly the setup you described, and the PlaybackPro system worked flawlessly.

Ok, well, I suppose I shouldn’t say flawlessly. There was some todo about getting all of the machines we were running to correctly sync over their LAN using the SimpleSync application provided by DTVideoLabs. The difficulty was with the setup of the NTP Server on the controlling machine. However, a quick phone call to DTVideoLabs support quickly helped us to get everything working and there is now a link on their downloads page to an NTPd configuration file for setting up SimpleSync machines.

We had 6 machines running on the network plus the SimpleSync controller machine (a mac mini) 4 of the machines were running stereo video plus backups and the other two were running supporting media on two outboard screens. The stereo video feeds were run to 2 18K LCD projectors hung as a stack, and used some custom built frames to position the polarized filters in front of the projectors. I was not involved in producing any of the content, so I can’t speak to any of the challenges they dealt with in that regard, but for playing back I found the Playback Pro system to be very easy to setup and reliable to work with.

Hope that helps!

joel
Corporate and Special Event Staging Services
http://www.pacificstaging.com

[Bruce Wheaton]

I would try Walter’s approach for a few reasons. First is that doing 3D without exactly sync’ed outputs – as in genlocked, not just showing the same content, is a poor idea. Even if it did seem to work with two projectors, you wouldn’t be able to feed those two lines into a decent 3D projector (that makes active from dual pipe internally). It’s also a lot easier to handle side by side files and guarantee they follow the same processing path.

Bear in mind – you being able to see 3D, and the average audience member being able to see it is not the same thing, and you can have apparently working 3D that can give people screaming headaches after watching five minutes of it. A temporal difference of, let’s say up to 1/60 sec, like you would expect with two machines (no external processing) and software, could be enough to cause that.

The dual-head 2 Go will produce 2 time aligned outputs that are definitely the same frame. Even better is two outputs right from a GPU.

Bruce