How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

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chrisdfw
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How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

I have searched everywhere and can't find an answer.

I want to be able to convert stereo side-by-side videos into the checkerboard format the new 3d capable DLP and Plasma's need to watch movie's in 3d. I don't want to have to hook to a PC to play back 3d movies using the TriDef or any other Stereo movie player software. I would like to stream them straight off of one of those new $99 Western Digital HD gadgets that lets you play movies off a USB drive straight out an HDMI cable to an HD TV.

So, has anyone had any luck finding how to convert something to checkerboard format that can be saved as an AVI or MPG of some type? I am guessing the file wouldn't compress well since every other pixel is from a different perspective, but theoretically it sounds like it should be easy to do. The stereo movie making software I have tried only appear to do side by side, over/under, page flipping, red/blue and interlaced files.

Thanks for any help!
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by pixel67 »

I don't think this is possible without some type of middleware player. yet. I seem to recall seeing a post talking about the folks at DDD embedding their technology directly into Samsung HDTV making them 3D friendly instead of 3D ready. These terms mean little to me but i guess we will see something on this sooner or later.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by Tril »

I think chrisdfw wants to reencode his videos in checkerboard format.

Stereoscopic Player supports the checkerboard format. Steroscopic Player works by using directshow filters. Maybe you can use Stereocopic Player directshow filters to do the conversion for you. Something simialr to what's shown on this page, except that you insert the directshow filter called "3dtv.at Stereo Transformation Filter" before the video encoding filter. I'm not sure it will work and I'm no video encoding expert so I can't help more than that.

I've got a better suggestion. Read this pdf file. There's an AVISYNTH script that shows how to convert to the checkerboard format. I don't know much about AVISYNTH so I don't know what code you would use with a side-by-side video. It's probably not too complicated. There must be some experienced AVISYNTH users on mtbs3d. I've seen AVISYNTH code posted before.
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chrisdfw
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

Perfect Tril, thanks!

That PDF file tells me just what I need. If I have time to do it I'll write a "How to" that will be easier than those instructions.

I am surprised with so many 3d capable TVs out there that nobody has added that functionality to their video tools with "one click and its done" simplicity. This should mean that any 3d video that is converted to checkerboard format will play without anything special hooked up as long as the video is natively in a 720p or 1080p format, the user turns on the 3d feature on the 3d DLP/Plasma, and they have the shutter glasses and emitter. People won't have to have their PC hooked up or buy an expensive Home Theater PC to play 3d and they can do it right now.

Perhaps I am the only one that is excited by this...

I am really surprised that I can't find any checkerboard 720p or 1080p videos already made that could play off a Blu Ray player and be seen in 3d by anyone with the 3d capable TV and glasses.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by Freke1 »

I also find it amazing there's a 3D film festivals when the 3D videos they watch can't be bought or downloaded.
The producers have a bad business talent I think. Very annoying.
You would think there would be 10.000 3D HD videos by now, but no :cry:
I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron shoots his homevideos in 2D.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by pixel67 »

doesn't there still need to be synchronization between content, tv, and glasses? otherwise the eye would receive random frames.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

The TV's control the synch. You send the checkerboard patterned video to the tv and it splits it to left/right view and controls the IR emmitter to make the glasses switch when it wants them to. This should mean any properly formatted video can be decoded by any 3d capable tv without needing a computer. It has to be in the format native to that TV like 720p or 1080p I believe.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

I have run into some problems creating 3d videos.

While it is easy to follow the instrcutions and create a 3d video with a checkerboard pattern, it is difficult to compress it to a manageable size. The 2 minute video I started with came out to 12 gig in size as an uncompressed AVI. When it gets compressed, that can compromise the on-off-on-off checkerboard pattern that makes everything work properly.

I fear that even if I can find a way to compress the video without losing quality that it will still be a very large high bandwidth file. My goal is to be able to at least get a normal length 3d movie to fit on a blu ray disc, but I am not sure if this will be possible with the difficulties in compressing a video in the checkerboard format. I'll keep people posted on my progress, and please let me know if anyone knows a good compression method that will deal with a checkerboard pattern without compromising the pattern.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by Marksanderson »

The problem is - compression will blur the pixel boundaries of the checkerboard pattern, destroying the left-right separation. This is why you don't find pre-checkerboarded video files. You have to use a player (such as Stereoscopic player) to decompress the left - right eye views into a buffer where they are checkerboarded together and sent to the display.

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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

Since compression algorithyms recognize patterns and convert them to take up less space, I would think there would be some method of compression that could deal with every other pixel. I'll keep trying different methods to see if I can find one that works. I should at least be able to use some type of "lossless" compression though the file will be pretty large (but not as large as the original raw one).

I would think that TI or the companies that produce the 3d tvs would try to push for a standard method of compression that takes into account a checkerboard pattern. Otherwise, this will never catch on if it requires a computer to output the 3d over HDMI instead of an appliance like a Blu Ray player.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by Marksanderson »

This is a problem that has plagued digital 3D video forever... neighborhood compression (that average pixel groups that are near each other) smear line and pixel-pattern interlacing. JPEG and MotionJPEG (MPEG) are notorious smearers. Any digitally lossless technique (e.g. RLE) should work fine - but will result in massive files that tax the read bandwidth of the storage medium.

I am also hopeful that a pre-checkerboarded compressed video file format can be achieved. The result will have to be decode-able by hardware as modest as is currently possible with "checkerboard on the fly" solutions to be viable, however.

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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by Marksanderson »

The H.264 Joint Video Team (MPEG4 working group) is considering the addition of pre-checkerboarded stereo encoding into the H.264 Multi View (3D) standard:

"6.2. Checkerboard multiplexed video data SEI message

JVT-AC010 (Prop 2.0/3.1) [A. M. Tourapis, W. Husak (Dolby)] SEI message for checkerboard multiplexed video data

This contribution proposed interleaving left and right image views each as quincunx sampling structured images, such that the sampling pattern of a given view corresponds to the squares of a given color on a checkerboard. This checkerboard sampling structure is reportedly supported by some types of stereo displays. It was claimed that the disadvantage in terms of compression (relative to coding the views as different pictures) is not large. The main asserted advantage was that conventional AVC decoders could directly be used for this specific type of stereo displays (with post-processing of the decoded pictures to separate the views). The ability (without specific presented results) of enabling 1080p Blu-ray encoding at 20 Mbit/s was suggested as an application scenario. "

This sounds VERY promising!!

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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

Wow Mark, that does sound good!

Where can I go to keep up with the developments on this?

I imagine we not only have to wait for the encoding to be available, but for firmware updates to any existing hardware to handle playback. That may be a long way off.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

Well...I haven't had luck yet with creating compressed content. I was able to create some uncrompressed checkerboard movies but just a 2.5 minute movie was over 12 gig.

I also encountered one other problem that will make it difficult for a 3d ready TV to be able to display 3d content straight off a Blu ray player. The checkerboard video must be rendered to the exact width of your monitors native pixel resolution.

Now while that may not seem like a big deal, it means the Blu Ray would have to at least have 3 seperate versions of the movie encoded on it. My Samsung 42 inch plasma is 1024X768, the 50 inch is 1365X768, and the DLP rear projection models are 1920X1080. There may be some other 3d TVs that are the standard 720p resolution of 1280 X 720 and that would need a 4th version of the movie.

I am guessing the only solution is for someone to create a device that takes seperate left/right images and scales them to the correct native pixel width of the monitor on the fly before creating the checkerboard patter, or use a Home Theater PC and software that could do all of that.

If Neil can score an interview with a maker of a 3d capable TV or producer of a 3d movie, it would be nice to get some questions answered of how these limitations will be overcome. I would especially like to see an interview with Samsung, since they have the biggest range of different native resolutions and should have thought about this before branding everything 3d ready.
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by ssiu »

chrisdfw wrote:Well...I haven't had luck yet with creating compressed content. I was able to create some uncrompressed checkerboard movies but just a 2.5 minute movie was over 12 gig.

I also encountered one other problem that will make it difficult for a 3d ready TV to be able to display 3d content straight off a Blu ray player. The checkerboard video must be rendered to the exact width of your monitors native pixel resolution.

Now while that may not seem like a big deal, it means the Blu Ray would have to at least have 3 seperate versions of the movie encoded on it. My Samsung 42 inch plasma is 1024X768, the 50 inch is 1365X768, and the DLP rear projection models are 1920X1080. There may be some other 3d TVs that are the standard 720p resolution of 1280 X 720 and that would need a 4th version of the movie.

I am guessing the only solution is for someone to create a device that takes seperate left/right images and scales them to the correct native pixel width of the monitor on the fly before creating the checkerboard patter, or use a Home Theater PC and software that could do all of that.

If Neil can score an interview with a maker of a 3d capable TV or producer of a 3d movie, it would be nice to get some questions answered of how these limitations will be overcome. I would especially like to see an interview with Samsung, since they have the biggest range of different native resolutions and should have thought about this before branding everything 3d ready.
Hi chrisdfw: In your first append you were wondering "why nobody did this"; I think you are discovering the answers for yourself :?

The proper solution? Somebody establish a standard that everybody adopts, like Marksanderson mentioned about H.264 Multi View Standard. It is not particularly hard to solve it technically with a tweaked decoding algorithm (e.g. encoder shifts the pixels in checkerboard into side-by-side pattern and compress normally; decoder decompresses normally and then shift side-by-side back to checkerboard); the problem is getting it to be a standard that had wide adoption.

Finally -- if I have a big 3D DLP HDTV, it will be a total waste not to connect a computer to it -- you will be wasting its awesome S3D gaming potential!
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by chrisdfw »

ssiu wrote: Finally -- if I have a big 3D DLP HDTV, it will be a total waste not to connect a computer to it -- you will be wasting its awesome S3D gaming potential!
True!

However, I am sure that 99% of those that own a 3d capable TV do not hook a computer up to it. If the manufacturers make it easy for people to play 3d movies on them then as the popularity of 3d in the home increases it will only help 3d gamers have more products available to us. :)
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by CraziFuzzy »

Pre-interleaved compressed video just isn't going to be an option. The only way this is going to work without a PC is going to be with a 3D-Blu-Ray player, which, as there is no 3D Blu-ray standard, is not going to happen anytime soon. Once there is a standard, i believe there WILL be some players made available, most likely that will support reading the standard and displaying it in any number of formats (interlaced, checkerboard, vertical striping, etc) to work with most/all displays available. It will take time though. It's a chicken and egg thing right now, the displays are here, but not in great numbers. The content is created, but not made available because there is no standard with which to distribute it. There is no standard because those that can really push the standard, because there is not enough market (besides, how much in a hurry do you think Sony is to add 3D to their blu-ray spec, when they do not offer an acceptable 3D display solution?).
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Re: How do you create 3d checkerboard movies for DLP/Plasma?

Post by dokworm »

Perhaps the REALD POD would do what you want on the fly?

http://www.reald.com/Content/PODS.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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