Cineform Neo3D for Mac with Adobe Premiere Pro

[Adobe TV Presents] [Short and Suite] [On the Road With Jason and Karl] [Jason Levine] [Karl Soule] [Machine noises] [Short and Suite] [On the Road with Jason and Karl] Welcome to the exciting world of 3D. Today we're going to be talking about stereoscopic 3D workflows using an add-on for a production premium called CineForm Neo3D. Now, if you want a really, really, really in-depth video after you watch my kind of short and sweet introductory video here, my boss, a guy named Dave Helmly, has his own show on Adobe TV called "DAV's TechTable," and if you do a search on CineForm, I'm sure you're going to find this video. He's done an over 45-minute video that really goes in-depth in using CineForm for Windows. I'm actually going to take a moment and show you how CineForm for Mac works because while the 2 programs use the same codec, and you can use the files on either platform, the software interfaces are just a little bit different between the two, but it's a great solution if you're thinking about getting started working with 3D stereoscopic video. Now, when I'm talking about stereoscopic video, I'm talking about actually shooting with 2 cameras. I'm talking about shooting with a left eye camera and a right eye camera. The first step in all of this--and Dave goes really in-depth with this in his video-- is you have to set up the 2 cameras, and you have to get the 2 cameras pointed in the same general direction. There's a whole series of little tips and tricks and gotchas as far as how to set up and align the cameras correctly, but basically you want them on the same plane. You want them kind of looking in the same direction. Very, very important you have some sort of--like a synchronization marker between the 2 cameras. You want to make sure that you either have time code that's being jam synched from one camera to the next or from a third-party source like a genlock source, or you need to absolutely make sure you use a clapboard because that's crucial in aligning those 2 different images. Now, working with CineForm, one of the great things about it is 3D is kind of in this nebulous space right now where there's all different ways of transmitting a 3D signal. There's what's called over/under or left/right. There's traditional, good old-fashioned anaglyph, but even that comes in different colors. And then there's some other more esoteric ideas and sources there. The great thing about CineForm is that you're not burning in any of those techniques into your footage. You're actually kind of keeping it fluid. You can just edit a 2D image and then just flip 1 switch, and your entire timeline will become anaglyph or left/right or top/bottom, and that's one of the real benefits of it. To get started working with CineForm, we're actually going to start using a tool that is called "ReMaster." The basic idea of ReMaster is ReMaster is taking whatever your source footage is, and it has to be transcoded and converted to the CineForm codec. CineForm is an intermediate codec. It's really well respected. It's a 10-bit 4:2:2 very high quality codec. It's very well used in the industry, and the ReMaster tool comes included with Neo3D, and this is basically where we transcode our media. I'm starting by just going into one of the cards on an AVCHD camera. We shot some AVCHD footage, and I'm going to go ahead and open that inside of ReMaster, and you can see that this works natively with the MTS files. It also works with RED footage. It also works with just a wide range of different types of clips. You can drop them into ReMaster, and you can transcode your media. Now, a really good habit to get into if you're going to be working in a stereoscopic workflow is do each of the different eyes in separate passes. This is very important. When you're organizing your footage, no matter what types of 3D cameras, whether you're working with a single camera that's been custom built for 3D-- there's a few of them out there today from companies like Panasonic-- or if you're working with 2 cameras that are in a special housing or rig, traditionally when you start the process when you're going to start to edit, you start with a left eye file and a right eye file, and you have to take those 2 pieces of media, and you just always want to make sure your left eye footage and your right eye footage stay labeled properly because it's very easy to kind of mismatch the two, and then all of a sudden the whole process kind of falls apart. I'm starting with my left eye, and I've gone ahead and imported a clip into ReMaster. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Convert" here, and ReMaster asks me where I want this file to save out to, so I'm going to go ahead and say let's save this to the Left Eye CineForm folder here. And I'll go ahead and replace what I did before, and this is going to start the process of transcoding this particular clip. ReMaster does a really good job of giving me an idea of how long this is going to take. It gives me a frames per second indicator, so I can really judge what the transcoding process is going to take. On this tower system, it's doing about 7½ frames per second, so it's going to be 3 times the length of whatever my file is. I'm going to go ahead and hit stop on this for now. I figure you guys don't need to sit while we go through and transcode a bunch of footage. I think you've got the idea with ReMaster. The next step in the process is you're going to end up with-- after you work with ReMaster, you do this with the left eye, then you go through and you do it with all your right eye footage, and so you're going to end up with folders for left eye CineForm and right eye CineForm. We need to find a way of merging those clips together, and that's where the next tool in the CineForm arsenal comes into play. We're going to turn on--go to an application called FirstLight. Let me go ahead and import my first clip here. I'll go to my folder here, and I've got a folder here called Left Eye CineForm, and I'll go ahead and import my shot that we want to work with here, and you can see it over here in the media bin. Here's my footage, information about my footage, and I can get a preview of what my footage looks like here. Now, a couple of things that you'll see when you're working inside of CineForm, CineForm is great for 3D, but actually the way it works with clips is pretty unique in that there's actually a lot more information, a lot more things you can play around with inside of CineForm, and that includes the ability to do some color grading and color correction directly inside of FirstLight. And the great thing about this, the way the CineForm codec works is these values here are actually just numbers that are used for decoding the footage, and what this means is instead of dropping a heavy color effect in a timeline and having to wait for that to render this is something--these controls take effect immediately, and you can go back at any point and play around with them. Just a real plug for CineForm because in addition to their great 3D workflows, there's also a lot you can do with color using the CineForm codec as well. There's even a whole series of--I've only got a few loaded here, but there's a whole series of different looks that are built in, things like BleachBypass, things like a whole bunch of different types of film stock that CineForm can emulate are built in as well, so if you're interested in playing around with color, CineForm is a great place to look for that as well. Let's go back to 3D for a second here. I've got my first eye here. I've got my left eye clip. We need to tell CineForm that this is the left eye, and so to do this, I just use a keyboard shortcut command, Command L. With the clip selected, Command L, and you'll see over here in the media bin it now shows that this is a 1920 x 1080 clip, and it's designated this is the left eye. All right, let's go ahead and bring in the right eye clip. I'll import this. I didn't show you this process, but this was taken through ReMaster, and I created a folder here called Right Eye CineForm, and I went ahead and converted this same clip, the right eye clip, to CineForm as well. We'll go ahead and open that up. You can see why this can get confusing. Both of these files actually have the same name. That's because they came off of identical memory cards in 2 separate cameras, so that's why it's really important to manage the left eye and the right eye files and keep them in separate folders so you can always tell which one is which. Here I'm going to take this clip and designate this as the right eye. I'll select it in the media bin, and the keyboard command for this is Command R, and so now I have a left eye and a right eye clip. Now, these particular clips were shot on simple AVCHD cameras, so they're not synchronized in any way at this point. From a time perspective, basically the person who shot these just hit record on one camera, then ran over and hit record on the other camera, and so we're going to use a clapboard to kind of synchronize these 2 clips in time, and this is something that if you watch Dave's video, he shows how to do this on the Windows side. On the Mac side it is just a little bit different, so just something to be aware of here depending on what platform you're on. What I'm going to do is I'm going to scrub through this clip and find roughly the point where the clapboard comes down, and I'm going to use the left and the right arrows on the keyboard to kind of step through this clip and find right at the point where the clapboard comes down, so right there. I've done that with the left eye. Now we want to do that with the right eye, so I'll go ahead and select the right eye clip. And again, I'll scrub through this here. And you can see the clapboard doesn't precisely line up in the frame, but I can still at least see the clap happen. And now if I switch back and forth between the 2 clips, you can see that they're both roughly synchronized. If you really want to test this out, you can select both clips by holding down the shift key, and then use the up and the down arrows to move back and forth between the left eye and the right eye, and if you come down here in the FirstLight interface, you'll actually see with both of these clips selected it's showing me the timecode information right now for the right eye. And then when I tap the up arrow, it switches to my left eye. I just want to make sure that those frames are time synced together. Once I've done this, I can choose to export both of these clips out-- now keep in mind, I have both clips selected here. I'm choosing File, Export, Stereo. And this will actually save out a third file, and this is the file that we're going to use in Premiere Pro, the file we're going to edit with, so your original source media becomes archive footage. These left and right eye CineForm files, in some cases you can toss these because you're really never going to have to use these again. We're just creating these files as sort of an intermediate so that we can get to and create this 3D file. I'm not going to go through and render this out here. I've already got it done, but basically once we've created this file, this third file, I throw this into a third folder which I call a 3D Mux CineForm folder, and those are the clips that I actually import and I edit with. Keep in mind if you're working with this if you've got a system that seems to be playing back one CineForm file just fine, keep in mind that that 3D file, you're effectively playing back 2 streams of CineForm at the same time, and this does require a little bit more hard drive capability, so if you're running into problems where that 3D file doesn't play back smoothly, you may want to consider increasing the type of ray that you're playing back this footage on. All right, let's jump over to Premiere Pro. I'm just going to start with a brand-new project here just to kind of walk you guys through this. We'll go ahead and create a new project. I'll just call this one S&S, Short and Suite. And when Premiere Pro opens up, of course, it always gives me this panel asking about what type of preset timeline do I want to use? Well, if you have the CineForm Neo software installed, you'll get these options here for CineForm 2D and 3D, and so we can create a native 3D timeline here with the frame rate that's appropriate for our footage here, so I'll go ahead and select that. Now I'm going to go ahead and import my muxed file. We went through the FirstLight software. We created this final clip here that I have in a folder called CineForm 3D Mux. I'm going to go ahead and select that and open it up inside of my project. Right now it doesn't look very 3D. I can edit with it as normal. I can open it up in a source monitor, or I can take it and I can mark it in an out point. I can drop it down to my timeline. It works just like any other type of footage, but there's a little control up here at the top of the screen, and that's the 3D View Control. This lets me see exactly how I want to see the left eye and the right eye, so right now I'm looking at this in 2D mode where it's really only showing me a 2-dimensional image. But if I want to, I can specifically say I want to look at the left eye or the right eye. Let's go ahead and I'm going to break out my glasses here for a second. And I'm going to go ahead and switch into what we call anaglyph mode. Now, one thing you always have to do is kind of give the timeline just a little bit of a scrub here so that it refreshes, and Premiere knows what's going on with the CineForm software, and so now I'm starting to kind of sort of see some 3D, but everything is all sort of jumbled. It's not really looking very good at this point. We need to go through and we need to align the left eye and the right eye. Inside of Premiere Pro, I'm just going to right click on this clip and go to something called Source Settings, and this kicks me right back over to the CineForm FirstLight software, and this is where I can go through and use these 3D corrections here. I'll go ahead and enable the 3D corrections, and from here I can start to align the 2 clips, so probably the first few times you do this you're not going to get the cameras very well lined up, and so you're going to have to make some corrections to get the 3D to actually look good. What I'm going to use in this 3D Corrections panel is I'm actually going to use the footage of the person on the boat here, and I want to start by kind of aligning the left and right eyes so that that becomes sort of a centerpiece of focus in the 3D here. I'll go ahead and start with the horizontal adjustment here, and I'm going to kind of move this back and forth until I get both images of the person kind of lining up, and then I'm going to use the vertical alignment. I can tell from looking at this that the shoulders aren't quite lining up. There's a little bit of a vertical mismatch between the 2 cameras, and so I'm going to correct for that with this vertical adjustment like so. That's a good way of just kind of roughing it in. Something you'll notice when all of this is going on, since we're now moving the images around a little bit, we're getting a little bit of red on one side and blue on the other because the 2 images are now kind of sticking off the ends of the frame a little bit. A nice, easy way to just automatically correct for that, check this box here called Auto Zoom, and then that will automatically zoom the image, so as I'm moving this around, moving these different settings around like horizontal and vertical, it will actually automatically zoom the image in for me so that things will line up properly. Let's check this with our anaglyph glasses here, and now the 3D is really starting to kind of take shape. This is kind of popping into the foreground. You can see the buildings in the background are in the background, the sail is kind of sticking out. Everything is starting to line up here. It's not 100% perfect. There's a lot more controls for fixing these types of things with keystoning, depth tilt. Again, Dave goes more in-depth in his video than I'm going to do in this short overview video. But you definitely have a lot more control inside of CineForm to kind of compensate for other types of distortions that you might see with your camera or cameras. Let's switch back to Premiere, and now I can see the changes that I made in FirstLight immediately take effect over inside of Premiere Pro, and I can see my footage is kind of popping out here in the program monitor. It's doing what it should be doing, and so I can continue to work with this from here. Now, if you're working in CineForm and you have a nicer monitor, this will actually work with output monitors if you have a second head on your video card and you can send a DVI signal to an actual 3D-ready monitor. A lot of those monitors have the option of accepting a feed in what's called a top/bottom or an over/under split view, so if you want to do that, you can just change your viewing mode here. We'll change this to side by side, and again, just touch the timeline to kind of refresh it a bit, and now you'll see that this is sending left eye and right eye out as 2 separate feeds in the program monitor, and if that's going out to your passive display monitor that has 3D capability--and they're getting cheap nowadays. The holiday season saw a huge drop in price, so this year it's very easy to come by these stereoscopic monitors. That way you can actually see this on a stereoscopic monitor. You don't have to deal with the 1950s style anaglyph glasses. One last thing to be aware of is that while the Encore Blu-ray software doesn't currently support the Blu-ray 3D spec--that's still something that's relatively new. Adobe is still kind of looking into and researching the idea of supporting that, but something that you can do today is if you take your timeline, put it in this side by side viewing mode. You can burn this to a standard Blu-ray disk and simply go into your television and go through the menu on your television to enable 3D. Tell your 3D television that you're feeding it a side by side view, and lo and behold, you've got 3D on your television playing on your Blu-ray player. You can do that today. So, just a quick overview of CineForm for the Mac. Hope that was helpful. Thanks again. My name is Karl Soule. [Adobe TV Productions] [tv.adobe.com]