Stereoscopic grading on the Mac

[Steve Macmillan]

It seems like stereo grading is going to be a major feature included with the initial release. But I had lots of hard questions about the stereo demo I saw at NAB, and the answers were very sketchy.

It looks like most of the competition (Scratch, Speedgrade, Pablo, etc.) has a big head start in the stereo tools dept. One telling thing was there was no way to display the left eye and the right eye as two separate windows side by side for color matching.

Hopefully this is still early days, and that the software engineers are taking a hard look at what their competition can do.

STeve

[Peter Chamberlain]

Luke’s information is accurate. The Mac version will open stereo projects, you can work on them, you just can’t at the moment (due to third party hardware limits) view the stereo images. We continue to explore options but for now grading and monitoring 3D Stereoscopic in realtime at 4:4:4 ten bit is on our Linux solution.

At NAB 2010 we demoed 3D using an 8GPU Linux system of similar power to that which Modern VideoFilm used to grade Avatar. Yes graded on Resolve like many current stereoscopic Hollywood films. A key feature is both eyes are graded at the same time in real time without the need to render cache for preview/playback. The 3D tools include live on the fly interocular adjustments, copy grade left to right, R to L, swap eyes etc… of course we have a few other items in development which will come in due course and we welcome the feature feedback.

Given the Linux license is just $20K I imagine the incremental cost for the extra 3D hardware and this license is a small budget item compared to most Stereoscopic post budgets. This puts real time 3D grading in reach of most post facilities.

Peter