Tim Dashwood and Everything 3D with Blackmagic Design
By Jay Ankeney
One of the highlights of NAB 2010 was the new Post Pit Pavilion and it was standing room only when Tim Dashwood made his presentation on “Everything 3D” during the Monday session. Often considered one of the pathfinders in the technology of modern 3D, Dashwood’s passion is helping others understand how to get the most out of this new production medium as a communications tool.
Tim is co-owner of the Stereo3D Unlimited production company (www.stereo3dunlimited.com) in Toronto, Canada, with producer and stunt coordinator Paul Rapovski. He is also proprietor of Dashwood Cinema Solutions (www.dashwoodcinemasolutions.com) where you can find out about Tim’s popular “Stereo3D Toolbox” stereoscopic 3D plug-in for Final Cut Studio and After Effects software, as well as a library of tutorials on video production and post production.
“3D has been a fascination of mine for over a decade now,” Tim begins, “ever since I built my first hobbyist rig using two Sony Digital8 camcorders mounted on a breadboard, with two mirror-equipped periscopes adjusting the interaxial distance between the camera lenses. It was a valuable learning experience experiment.”
Since then, Tim has photographed a vast library of stock stereoscopic 3D footage, and has facilitated the live-action previsualization of major feature films such as Matthew Vaughn’s “Kick-Ass” and the upcoming “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” directed by Edgar Wright. He was also the cinematographer on 2009’s indie film “Bull” that was shown at the Montreal and Calgary film festivals.
In his studio, Tim has an 8-core Mac Pro workstation with 3 terabytes of RAID storage and 512 MB of VRAM on the graphics card to speed up the rendering processes of his Stereo3D Toolbox software plug-in. But to get both the left and right eye images of a stereoscopic shoot into his Mac Pro system, he needed to find input cards that could be reliably matched for balanced performance. To do this he turned to Blackmagic Design.
“I have learned that a pair of either Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink Studio or Intensity Pro SD/HD broadcast video cards lets us capture the stereoscopic video into our systems flawlessly,” Tim said. “For example, it is a major benefit to have two Intensity Pro cards in separate PCIe slots to bring in two parallel video streams simultaneously. This is crucial when we need to use our own software to adjust the convergence of those two video streams to customize where an image will be positioned in Z-space.”
Recently, Tim utilized this set-up on a high-profile fashion shoot in 3D for famed ready-to-wear designer Nada Shepherd that resulted in a 7-minute 3D film called “Future Fashion/Fashion Future”. It’s a short depicting two live action fashion models engaged in futuristic battles immersed in a video game world of CGI that can run in full 3D at any RealD-equipped digital cinema theater. You can also see it in red/cyan anaglyph at http://nada3d.com.
The project was shot with a pair of Iconix Video 2K cameras from Sim Video recording a full 1080p signal onto a Sony SRW-1 portable digital deck in dual-stream mode. That means the tape was running at 2X speed so it could lay down two discrete 1080/24p 4:2:2 channels.
Tim used the Blackmagic Design Decklink Studio card with his Stereo3D Toolbox application to display true 3D images on a 46” JVC GD-463D10 monitor. He ingested the field sequential interleaved HD/SDI signal from the SRW-1 deck through a single Blackmagic Design Decklink Studio card and then used his Stereo3D Toolbox software to correct disparities in the stereoscopic image and adjust its convergence. He then used the HDMI output of the Decklink Studio to feed a side-by-side stereo signal to the JVC monitor for on-set playback.
“It was important to be able to show our client a corrected 3D image during production,” Tim said, “so they knew what they were getting as it was being shot… just as they would in a normal 2D shoot. They could see live the way things were coming out of the screen just as they would in the final 3D version.”
Since the Sony SRW-1 interlaces the two streams when recording, the images seen on set were rough cut quality with reduced vertical resolution per eye, which was sufficient for the offline editing process. During the editing process, Tim used his software to demux the left/right images into discreet full 1080p streams. Once the cut was locked, he conformed the individual left and right clips into an online master by digitizing from the SRW-1 deck through a single Decklink Studio card into his Final Cut Pro edit system. He then created a TIFF sequence of each stream and sent it to Technicolor who created the final DCP (Digital Cinema Package) for projection in a RealD theater.
The Blackmagic Design equipment helped the project stay on budget. “The Decklink Studio card did everything we needed at a very reasonable price,” Tim said. “When you are buying multiple cards for stereo post production, that can become a significant factor.”
He also appreciates the fact that the Decklink Studio card has full-sized BNC connections on the back for HD/SDI I/O, and comes with a break-out cable bundle that can handle any analog signal.
“I’ve used Blackmagic Design products ever since the Decklink SP analog component YUV uncompressed video card,” Tim said. “I still have an old Mac G4 connected to a UVW-1800 deck for clients who need access to Betacam SP technology. You know what? It works as well today as it did on day one. I’ve always found that Blackmagic Design is easy to understand, works well, and gives a great return on investment.”
Tim also uses the HDMI outputs on the Intensity Pro cards to feed video to dual digital projectors in his 3D screening theater.
“The reliability of the Intensity Pro cards lets me fulfill my clients’ 3D needs with technology that exists today. Blackmagic Design equipment lets me do 3D right now, while waiting for 3D technology to become more standardized as it is adopted by an ever wider spectrum of users.”
“And with Blackmagic’s newly announced HD Extreme 3D card and HDLink Pro 3D technology announced at NAB, I will be able to combine my existing set up with these exciting new products to create an amazing 3D workflow,” concluded Tim.
