3D Short film "The Shadow of Justice"

[Costa]

Hey everybody,
over the last 8 months we produced a 3D short film called "Der Schatten der Gerechtigkeit" (The Shadow of Justice). As far as I know it's the first German amateur short film in 3D.


It is in German but I created English subtitles for you guys. It wasn't that easy to create those in 3D because you have to place them correctly in the 3D space if you don't want to destroy the 3D effect. If you want to enjoy the 3D version without flying subtitles just watch the German original version.
For the production we used a side-by-side rig using the HD HV30 and HV20. Because we already own these cameras and also the rest of our equipment it was basically a no-budget production. Except for the catering we didn't put any money into it. In post production I used the Zalman 3D Monitor and the Acer H5360 for previewing the material in 3D. The editing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro and the compositing in Adobe After Effects.

Download:
3D Version Over-Under English Subtitles 720p (1280x1440, 523 MB) (In Stereoscopic Player: Above-below, left view first)
3D Version Over-Under German 720p (1280x1440, 386 MB) (In Stereoscopic Player: Above-below, left view first)
3D Version Anaglyph red-cyan English Subtitles 720p (1280x720, 450 MB)
3D Version Anaglyph red-cyan German 720p (1280x720, 450 MB)
2D Version Cinemascope German 720p (1280x720, 541 MB)

Watch 3D Version on YouTube (German)
Watch 2D version on YouTube (German)

Watch the Behind the Scenes Video on YouTube

Watch the 3D Trailer on YouTube (German)
Watch the 2D Trailer on YouTube (German)

That's the plot: James Tarento, a young police officier comes home and finds his dead girlfriend. His whole life collapses and a few days later an anonymous person finds him and gives him information about the murderer of his girlfriend. James plans his revenge and confronts his enemy face to face...
(sorry for my shitty translation, the translation of the subtitles is better, because I didn't do it^^)

Some Screenshots:











Here here are some photos from the production:







I hope you like it. We put a lot of effort into it.

Greetings from Germany,
Constantin

[taz291819]

Many thanks! Will definitely check it out this evening.

[cirk2]

Genial, einfach genial. Gute Arbeit

Die qualität des files ist echt klasse, kann sich mit so mancher professionellen Produktion messen.

Gute arbeit mit dem 3D, bis auf 1-2 close-ups sehr angenehm und ohne effekt- hascherei.


Translytion for the non-germans here:

Simply genius, good work.

The quality of the production meets nearly profesional levels.

You've done a great job with the 3D, only 1-2 close ups are a bit disorting.

[Bloody]

Great work guys, the final result is really impressive for an amateur movie in 3D.

Maybe you could share some more details around the shooting and production in in stereo 3D. Things like issues you had, problems you faced with both the hardware and software, so this could help other enthusiasts like you...

[gamgamman]

Very Nice!

[taz291819]

Just watched it, looks great. A few problems with ghosting, but overall nice. The only subtitles problem I saw was a few minutes in, when the subtitles were on the left side on the screen, centered vertically. They ghosted pretty bad, but whenever at the bottom of the screen, they looked good.

All in all, one of the better "live action" 3D samples I've seen.

[cybereality]

Looks cool, I'm downloading it now...

[Costa]

Hey,
thanks for the positive feedback. Glad to hear that you like the movie.

Maybe you could share some more details around the shooting and production in in stereo 3D. Things like issues you had, problems you faced with both the hardware and software, so this could help other enthusiasts like you...

Yeah, well it's not as easy at it seems. We drove to the location only after doing two little 3D tests. But 3D is more than just two cameras next to each other. Coming from making 2D movies I thought 3D filmmaking wouldn't be much more diffucult. It is important that you do some more tests in 3D, to get to know your cameras and know what you're able to do. What movements are possible, how near you can be the object without causing headaches, what cuts are possible... Well, we didn't do it. So I have to say, we had a lot of luck. After the first day of filming, I imported all the footage and was shocked. The 3D effects didn't work at all. The cameras had alot of height offset and also about 4° rotation offset which was due to our 3D rig. It has to be constructed perfectly if you want to get a clean stereoscopic image. But with our rig this wasn't possible, because we built it from different parts of our existing equipment. Pretty crazy stuff, we used the plate under the cameras from the rod support of our SGPro 35mm adapter and a Manfrotto hot shoe adapter was used to flip the one camera upside down which wasn't very solid. But it worked. In post you can do very much. Simply correct the height and rotation offset and you won't even notice capturing problem. That's the reason why we can only offer a 720p version and not 1080p altough we caputured 1080p footage (well technically 1080i footage^^).

Problematic is the big interocular distance of 6.5 cm which is about the distance of our eyes. But for a Hollywood production this would be way too much. On the big screen the whole depth increases and I doubt our film could play on a big cinema screen without causing headaches. I would have loved to use some kind of a mirror rig, but that wasn't in our budget. At least it works on monitors, TVs and small screens.

Well synching the both cameras was also a big problem. They don't have a LANC port but we had an infrared remote control which worked for both, HV20 and HV30. Actually synching via the remote control never worked. Often the cameras were a few seconds (!!!) off. So, synching using a clapperboard was necessary. In post I adjusted the two clips precisly frame to frame. Sometimes it seemed to me that even the sound wasn't synched completely so I had to correct the framing by looking at the motion of both videos very closely. If you're lucky both cameras are synched to the same frame (so the frame of one camera is not in between the frames of the other camera), but that doesn't happen very often. So you have to live with it. In most cases this isn't critical, but fast motions might destroy the 3D effect a bit. I can see it when this happens (because I saw the film over and over again...) but you probably wouldn't notice.

Oh, and be overprotective and always check if both cameras record. Astonishingly we never forgot to do that. And god, I hate miniDV tapes. Sometimes parts of a take from one camera were damaged, so the take wasn't usable. Always use new tapes, old tapes tend to drive you crazy. Of course this isn't a problem of 3D specificly but you have double the risk of unusable footage. If one view is damaged, the other one is also not usable.

We never used any zoom on the cameras because they weren't synched and more zoom without decreasing the interocular distance would cause more headaches. Also we had alot of problems with the focus. Like I said, the cameras weren't synched, so we had to trust the automatic focus. After both cameras were focussed on the same object we locked the focus. Sometimes it took more than a minute to let them focus on the right object Automatic focus sucks... At least we had a high resolution 800x480 monitor available to check focus.

In post we tried avoiding stereoscopic window violations but due to our big interocular distance the infinty point was often too far away, so we had to push the stereoscopic window back a bit. But in general I recommend trying to avoid violations because it breaks the stereo effect a bit (BTW that was the only aspect I didn't like about Avatar )

In After Effects I wrote a preset for processing the 3D material which was very useful. I don't pay for a 3D plugin. Stereoscopic footage is quite simple to process. Luckily I was able to preview everything directly on my Zalman 3D monitor in After Effects because you simply have create an interlaced image for which drivers aren't necessary. Using that preset I was able to implement visual effects, correct the offesets, match the colors of both views, set the convergence, colorcorrect the video, preview in any format (interlaced, red-cyan, blue-amber, green-magenta, side-by-side) and render out both seperate files.
Sadly it wasn't always possible to create the visual effects we wanted because everything has to be created twice and it has to be exactly at the correct place in the 3D space. And this is not as easy as it seems. Retouching is next to impossible if you don't want to spend your whole week on one take. ^^ It was very annoying to create every visual twice. The first time it's fun - yeah, well, rotoscoping for 10 hours isn't that much fun either - but imagine doing all that work a second time. Please take a look at all the windows in the movie. I had to rotoscope every window inside the castle to colorcorrect them darker in order to make it look like the sun wouldn't shine outside.

Editing in Premiere was quite comfortable. I used 4 tracks for the edit. Track no. 1 contains the left video, track no. 2 the right video, track no. 3 the right video again but with an interlaced effect applied. If you make only track 3 and track 1 visible, I was able to preview the 3D image on the Zalman. Track No. 4 contains the 2D video which is often a bit different from the 3D video. After arranging one take that way I grouped the video so could edit them easily.

I hope I could give you slight inside view into our 3D project. So, as you see, it's a self-made way of producing stereoscopic content, but after you're incorperated in the process, it works like charm (well, probably not, but works kinda fluently).

All in all, I can say, it was alot of fun and I loved producing this 3D movie. But for the next time, we will produce in 2D again until equipment gets cheaper and better software solutions become available (which will be probably sooner as I think ). Nevertheless the next CGI short movie we are currently working on will be released in S3D as well. So, stay tuned.


Oh, and @ Bloody: Thanks for promoting our movie on your blog. I've been following your blog for some months now and I really enjoy it. THX

[Bloody]

Thanks for the information Costa, it can be really helpful for other people following your steps. The idea for the interlaced preview on the Zalman is quite original and it helps to work in S3D without the need to actually have the built-in support int he software

You should get your video featured here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_3D_Movies.html
There is a form at the bottom of the page you need to fill in, so that more people will see your work.

BTW have you tried using a digital camera flash in a high-speed mode to get the sync pointer for both cameras, I think this should work out nice as it is a method I've used as a pointer for editing when shooting one scene with multiple cameras from different angles? I think it should work out nice, but I haven't tried it yet myself for stereo 3D shooting.

[kbatman99]

Einfach nur super !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ich beginne gerade selbst mit 3d Filmen mit 2 SONY HDR-CX11E Kameras.
Das neue Medium ist einfach faszinierend.
Könntest Du mir die presets für after effects zukommen lassen ?
Danke !!!!!!!

[Costa]

You should get your video featured here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_3D_Movies.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There is a form at the bottom of the page you need to fill in, so that more people will see your work.

I tried this. The form is a bit confusing because there is no gap for the download of the file. Nevertheless I submitted the form but I don't know if it worked, because there was no confirmation after submitting and I didn't even receive an automatic mail response from Nvidia.

BTW have you tried using a digital camera flash in a high-speed mode to get the sync pointer for both cameras, I think this should work out nice as it is a method I've used as a pointer for editing when shooting one scene with multiple cameras from different angles? I think it should work out nice, but I haven't tried it yet myself for stereo 3D shooting.

Thanks for the tip. No, haven't tried this but it could be nice solution to the synching problem although it is a bit elaborate.

Könntest Du mir die presets für after effects zukommen lassen ?

Könnte ich machen, aber ich weiß nicht, ob es dir viel weiterhilft. Es ist eben für unseren Film ausgelegt, den wir in 1080p aufgenommen und in 720p weiterverarbeitet haben. Wenn du das auch machst, kann ich dir das Preset gerne zukommen lassen. Ansonsten nutzt es wenig. Es is hauptsächlich auch eher eine voreingestellte Komposition mit ein paar Script Befehlen.

[shonofear]

dude, congrats on a well made short film
Just watched it then using my new Pro-Ana Anaglyph glasses and only had a few shots with ghosting but the majority was pretty perfect. The subtitles seemed to be ghosting the most consitently for me though, I thought having them at screen depth would of been a better option but maybe not
I totally understand the delima when doing the visual effects twice coming from a vfx artist background myself. I guess The Foundry's Nuke compositing pogram and their Occular plugins would of made life a lot easier but with a high price tag... maybe try get them to sponsor your next project and use their great features for stereo vfx comping...
Would be great to be part of a team working on new stereo 3d content, I hope to one day complete a short film in stereo as well.
Cheers and well done matey,

Shono

[Freke1]

Great movie! I have put the english dl link on my site (hope it's ok?).

Problematic is the big interocular distance of 6.5 cm which is about the distance of our eyes. But for a Hollywood production this would be way too much. On the big screen the whole depth increases and I doubt our film could play on a big cinema screen without causing headaches. I would have loved to use some kind of a mirror rig, but that wasn't in our budget. At least it works on monitors, TVs and small screens.

If You zoom in I believe You have to move the cameras apart to avoid it looking inflated instead of zoomed and if You align the cameras parallel then You will have almost zero depth and 100% popout until You adjust otherwise (in postpro) from my understanding. So You should have no problems with the 6.5cm distance but it might be a must to make a big screen version if You plan to show it in a cinema (on a single projector).

[Costa]

Great movie! I have put the english dl link on my site (hope it's ok?).

Thanks. Of course you can put up the link, why not?

Problematic is the big interocular distance of 6.5 cm which is about the distance of our eyes. But for a Hollywood production this would be way too much. On the big screen the whole depth increases and I doubt our film could play on a big cinema screen without causing headaches. I would have loved to use some kind of a mirror rig, but that wasn't in our budget. At least it works on monitors, TVs and small screens.

If You zoom in I believe You have to move the cameras apart to avoid it looking inflated instead of zoomed

Well, as far as I understand a higher focal length flatens the objects. But it also increases the 3D space because everything simply looks bigger. Here is an example (Zooming is same as scaling the image in post).

Original


Scaled


Comparison


Look at the background of the scaled images. The difference of both images is bigger, therefore greater 3D space and it's more likely to get headaches. Decreasing the interocular distance should avoid this problem. Of course in exchange of flatened objects.

I guess The Foundry's Nuke compositing pogram and their Occular plugins would of made life a lot easier but with a high price tag... maybe try get them to sponsor your next project and use their great features for stereo vfx comping...

Yep, that would be great although I really like After Effects and I struggle changing the program becuase I'm working with AFX for many years now. Let's see, our next project will be in 2D again and perhaps afterwards better software solutions are available.