3D Tuolumne Grove

Finally!  Finally I have something done in 3D.  This has been a much longer process than I ever would have imagined.  I think if I would have known how long it was going to take and how many issues I would have to overcome, I would have never started filming in 3D.  But here it is!

First of all, I am using YouTube for all my videos because they have the best distribution method for 3D videos.  You can choose your 3D viewing method, anaglyph (with the red and cyan glasses), side by side, or interlaced if you have a 3D TV that handles those formats.  You can also choose your resolution.  Choose the highest you can and wait a while for the best 3D experience.

You will need some glasses, I suggest some cheap anaglyph glasses here.  If you have some other system, I’m sure you already have the glasses you need.

This video shows a walk through Tuolumne Grove during a snowstorm.  The ground, trees, and plants were covered in fresh snow and the hike was magical.  There’s not a lot of things more beautiful than fresh snow on trees.  I just love how the 3D shows you the little trees around the large trees.  It’s the little trees that I love the most.

I should be a little quicker with the next one.  I have a trip planed to Tuolumne Meadows and I’m going to do about 3 short shows on geology subjects.  Then a full fledged TM show with sunrises and sunsets and the whole thing.

Watch the video, and then if you care about all the trouble I went through you can come back here and read about it.  In case you are thinking of shooting 3D, you can read my nightmare and learn from my mistakes.

So I bought a Sony HDR-TD10.  Sony’s latest and greatest “Double-Full HD 3D video camera!”  Argh, all that meant was that there was no way to edit the video.  Camera and 3D filetype so new that nothing could deal with it.  I use Macs.  I don’t enjoy that other OS at all and tried to avoid it.  So I finally got my Son’s PC out and loaded the junky little Sony Picture Motion Browser program onto his computer and then I was able to at least look at the video.

Then, I looked and looked for a program that would convert the .MTS file that the camera creates to Left and Right eye videos that would be usable by an editing program.   Found it, it’s called MVC to AVI converter.  I’m leaving out a ton of looking for a Mac program that would do the same thing but still have not found one.  Weeks of looking.  Anything to keep from using Windows.  So I decided that using my Son’s computer all the time was not sustainable, plus I would rather use my Mac even it was running Windows.  So I loaded up Bootcamp and installed Windows on my Mac.  I’m leaving out buying a 2TB external hard drive to back up the MacBook and then the backup time.

So once I got Win on my Mac, I dealt with driver issues for about a week because the whole Windows world works on drivers.  Never got the drivers done so I bought the Win programs using MacOS and then dropped them into the Windows partition.  Of course Win can’t see the Mac partition so you can’t transfer files back.  So once I started converting files, I had to convert to uncompressed AVI files because Windows doesn’t do ProRes (are you kidding me?).  So a left and a right uncompressed HD AVI file quickly filled up the small Windows partition I made for it (waste of space if you ask me).  So I emptied off an old 120 GB drive and used it.  It was too small also, so I emptied a half TB drive, formated it to be used with Windows and then I was in business.  It still filled up, but I could go over to the Mac side and convert the uncompressed to ProRes which were usable and much smaller.

The file conversion and recompression to ProRes takes a few days for a whole shoot.  And I’m talking about my computer is sitting there working on files overnight and all day long.  Sometimes I’m over on the Windows side doing the conversion to left and right and sometimes over on the Mac side compressing to ProRes.  Nightmare.

Then I have to work with the left and rights and edit them.  So I bought Dashwood’s 3D Toolkit.  It works fine, but has an annoying message that pops up a thousand times a day warning of an interlacing mismatch.  I did what he told me to do and set it all to no interlacing but the video looks like crap that way.

Then comes the exporting. I’m sitting on an export right now that is claiming 29 hours more and its a couple hours into it.  Most of the time it goes quicker than the timer guesses.  Let’s hope it is done and the morning and I don’t find a major issue meaning I have to do it all again.  So yeah, I’m not sure it’s worth it, but I’m learning all the way.

Hopefully you like the show.  Please tell your friends and click on those annoying adds as I get a few cents with every click!  Send the video to your friends also and share share share.  This all comes to you for free, please share it and spread it around so I can make some gas money for the next trip.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Tony Farley

[I updated the post to reflect the correct name of the MTS converter I used]
[A new (2D) Beautiful Places episode from the same shoot is available on iTunes here:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=253709184

]