Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Adobe TV Presents]
[Jason Levine]
[Karl Soule]
[Short and Suite] [On the Road with Jason and Karl]
Hi there. Today I want to talk a little bit about 3D stereoscopic workflows
using Adobe After Effects CS5.5.
We've made a number of improvements to stereoscopic workflows
using some tools inside of After Effects CS5.5 that can be used for both
live-action footage as well as creating stereoscopic graphics
and being able to output those to a local preview monitor
as well as outputting files in some of the standard file formats for storing
stereoscopic footage such as side by side, top/bottom or interlaced footage,
taking the two eyes, the left eye and the right eye and merging them together.
To get started here, we've kind of revamped and revised
an effect called the 3D Glasses effect.
This is something that's actually been inside of After Effects for a number of years,
but basically, the idea behind how this works--
if you have a left-eye file and a right-eye file, as long as they're time synchronized,
and of course, you can go through and use the tools in After Effects to trim these files down,
once they're time synched, you can throw the 3D Glasses effect on an adjustment layer,
and this will go through, and you can take the left eye and right eye
and it will mux the two clips together.
This is where the left eye and the right eye are actually merged together
in some sort of a viewing mode so that you can see them in a
stereoscopic viewing mode with glasses.
Right now, by default, the 3D Glasses effect uses
an anaglyph display mode that's red and blue.
It preserves the background colors,
but you can also change that to take out the background color,
so if you have a situation where you want to make sure the 3D effect
is optimized, if you set this to Balanced Red Green view,
it will actually change the overall color of the image so that the 3D effect
is the most prominent, and it does this by kind of muting all the background colors
so that the red and the green really, really stand out
and really make the anaglyph experience a better overall viewing experience.
This also works for red and blue.
It'll actually kind of give everything else sort of a magenta wash
so that, again, it really highlights the anaglyph viewing experience.
But as 3D stereoscopic has advanced, there have been new ways of
outputting these files to different types of monitors so that After Effects also
now has the ability to export this out as an Over Under view.
This is a common viewing situation where it basically squishes
the left eye and the right eye into the top and the bottom portions of the screen.
Now, this display, if you're working inside of After Effects,
and you have an external monitor hooked up to your computer,
a lot of external display sources such as plasma or LCD screens
will support over/under, side by side, or even interlaced viewing modes.
So, these different 3D viewing modes for interlaced, over/under,
and what's called stereo pair, or I prefer side by side,
you can actually have an external monitor connected to After Effects,
and you need to configure this by having your computer set up
so that you're not mirroring your 2 monitors.
You have an external monitor that has an extended desktop from your primary monitor.
And inside of After Effects, if you go to Preferences,
you can change the video preview to look at this external monitor.
In this case, I can look at what's called the Digital Cinema Desktop
from my MacBook Pro that I'm using today.
And I can use this and extend this out so that my secondary monitor
that I have connected to my laptop would be a full-screen preview window.
And again, if that particular monitor or display supports one of these
different 3D stereoscopic viewing modes, I can turn that on within the menus
in the monitor itself, and I'll actually be able to use glasses
and see that as an external output.
So, this effect in and of itself is pretty useful for taking left eye footage
and right eye footage and actually doing the muxing within After Effects
to get a stereoscopic view.
But one of the big questions a lot of people had was they want to use After Effects
as a graphics creation tool, and they want to be able to take advantage of the fact
that After Effects has the ability to push different layers in a 3D space.
So, you can actually have a Z depth between 2 different layers.
I've got a demonstration of that rigged up here inside of After Effects.
This particular composition, if we go through and look at some of the different layers here,
you'll see that we have Photoshop layers called "Big Cloud" and "Fluffy Stuff."
These are actually 2-dimensional pictures, but what we've done is actually pushed them
in Z space, and if I take something like my Orbit Camera tool
and start to rotate this around inside of After Effects,
what we can see is that you'll actually see these different layers
kind of stacked up one on top of the next here.
And so, by moving this around, you can kind of see all of the different layers.
And as I rotate my camera around, you can actually kind of see
some of the depth in this particular area here.
This is going to be used for a background for a Paladin logo
that's going to fly in over the screen.
So, we want to be able to take that Z space information
and convert that into something that will give me a stereoscopic output.
In the past, to do this, it was more of a manual process
where we had to take our single camera, create 2 additional cameras
with a left and a right offset, nest those into a different set of sequences,
and then eventually get to the point where we could use our 3D Glasses effect.
But it was a multistage process.
What we've done in After Effects CS5.5 is automate that entire process,
so if I've got my composition ready to go here, I've got my 3D camera within After Effects,
all I have to do is right-click on this, choose "Camera, Create Stereo 3D Rig,"
and in one step, this is going to create a whole series of nested comps.
So, I still have my original composition I've called "Stereo Rigged Demo,"
but now you'll see that it's created a left eye version of this composition.
It's created a right eye version of this composition.
And then it's created a third comp that actually has stereo 3D controls
and the 3D Glasses effect ready to go.
So, the stereo 3D controls--this gives me the ability to go through
and actually adjust the camera separation, so I'm actually adjusting
the inner ocular distance between the 2 cameras.
And I can also set convergence options as far as where my convergence point is,
what is kind of the baseline, what goes back in space,
what jumps out in front of the screen can be adjusted using these stereo 3D controls.
And again, I still also have my 3D Glasses control here,
so here I'm looking at, again, my Balanced Colored Red Blue view,
but if I have an external monitor hooked up that maybe supports an over/under display,
I can just simply change my viewing mode to over/under.
And one thing about the external preview.
If you are working with an external monitor, keep in mind
that the way After Effects is set up, you want that external preview to be full resolution,
and so typically in a lot of cases, that monitor might actually be dark
until you come up and you hit the RAM preview button
and actually start to RAM preview out your composition.
And then you'll start to see frames show up on your external monitor,
so just a point of how After Effects operates.
Obviously, any external monitor that you're looking at, you want to have the best quality
full resolution that you're looking at there, and so it usually is necessary
to actually RAM preview out at least a few frames to start to see
that image show up on your external monitor.
So, there you have it.
Two different functions that we've enhanced in After Effects CS5.5
dealing with stereoscopic workflows,
enhanced workflows using the 3D Glasses effect,
and the new camera rigging function that creates a stereo 3D rig
in one easy step if you're doing and creating animated graphics
using Z depth in After Effects very quickly can create those graphics
and convert them into a stereoscopic animation
ready to mix with your stereoscopic project.
Thanks again for watching. My name's Karl Soule.
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