3D Tornado Chasing
 

Hi all, I'm off on my most ambitious 3D project to date tomorrow. The aim is to shoot a 3D documenary about tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. The long range weather forecast looks good with a very active pattern across the Mid West over the next few weeks. You can follow my progress on my blog at Filming the ultimate storm - Wild-Weather.com or via twitter.com/stormguy

I'll also try to keep this thread updated with any news from the field.

Hey Alister, best wishes on the project. Storm chasing falls into that category of "things I would love to do but haven't and probably just won't ever get around to." I'm sure the 3D will be compelling in its own right, but FWIW human stereopsis ("stereo vision" due to binocular eyesight) is limited to about 100 meters or so. Depth perception beyond that distance is due to other cues like size, overlapping, and haze/shading so only the foreground will really benefit from 3D; the storm itself won't really look any different in stereo. Still will look forward to see your work at the end of the season, though!

He'll just have to make sure he's within 100 meters of the flying cows!

Knowing Alister, he will be. <big grin>

-gb-

Woo Hoo, I did it! We managed to intercept an incredible supercell storm that produced a strong tornado South East of Lamont, Oklahoma. I was able to film the storm and tornado in 3D right from it's birth and formation with both the HXR-MC1P dash cam pair and Sony XDCAM EX stereo pair. We were about a mile from the tornado and were being pelted with golf ball sized hail as we watched. As soon as I get home next week I will process the footage an upload some extracts. In Oklahoma city tonight, going to chase Texas tomorrow, then watch out as Friday looks to be another big day.

I know the tornado won't have any depth but the whole scene looks good with golf ball hail stones bouncing around in the fields and foreground people watching the tornado. The rig I am using allows the inetroccular to be extended out to over 20" for a bit of hyper stereo, I only used 8" Today. Down in Midland, TX tomorrow (Thursday) then expecting another chance of tornadoes on Friday in OK and TX.

Hey Allison, You mind making a WMV video file of this video compatible with the Nvidia GeForce 3D Video Viewer? (not anaglyph, but 120hz shutter glasses combined with a 120hz LCD monitor. But basically it's a toned down OEM version of Peter Wimmer's Stereoscopic Player.)

It's simple really, just encode both left and right streams side by side in a single stream to make a double 1440 anamorphic video file. Total resolution is 2880x1080 anamorphic

That would be really amazing, since it is practically being there...

Can't wait to see your footage, Alister. The hyper-stereo ought to be interesting.

If you get tired of tornadoes, c'mon down to Hurricane Alley along the TX coast later this summer (our area is still recovering from Ike last Sep). We'll throw one of those flying cows that Tim mentioned on the grill -- until we have to flee to CH's house like my family did for Ike.

As an additional note for the side-by-side video encoding, by default, the right eye stream is on the left part of the video and the left is on the right. And leave 5 seconds of blank video at the beginning for the player to skip over.

I've already played with a couple of canes. Do hope to try to shoot one in 3D this year.

Once I get home and the dust settles I will post the footage in various formats. I've pulled off a test clip and it looks good, you can see depth in the clouds overhead which is neat. Also got some pretty amazing hail footage. Expecting big storms tomorrow somewhere between the north end of the Texas Panhandle and Greensberg Kansas.

Wish I had the budget to stay out longer and get another camera operator on the crew, maybe next year.

Here is a rough and ready compilation of a few of my 3D storm and tornado clips. There are some alignment and sync issues to sort out, but it's just too hard to do on a laptop!

3D Tornado Test Footage on Vimeo

No more storms for the next 2 weeks due to a tropical low in the Gulf of Mexico and a ridge over the CONUS. So I'm off home.

biog problem with WMV
 

I am trying to encode a 2880 x 1080 side by side in windows media encoder 9 , but it seems the software just can handle a maximum width about 1920. I did a 1920 x 720 with 1.33 aspect and it worked great, but the 2880 x 1080 encoded in wme9 cannot play in any software. i downloaded a 2880 x 1080 side by side file from nvidia site and it works great. so, what are they doing to get this 2880 x 1080 working????

any advice much apreciated.

no need to merge video, it just makes problem by creating strange formats unnaccepted by most codec/players.
you do a simple two file video. If you really need a all-in-one, you can multiplex both files in one.
if you need to make it lighter and know the diffusion system you can either merge the files into a field sequential or line interleaved format, cutting down size (and resolution) in half.