Bororo 3D
 

OK, we have been talking about it a bit, but now it is official. My Bororo 3D plug-in for Sony Vegas is out and available, in both 32 bits and 64 bits. So, no matter whether you use the 32-bit version of Sony Vegas or the 64-bit version, you can now use it to produce 3D videos.

It lets you place 2D objects in 3D space, which is most used for 3D text, though has many other uses.

It lets you composite a left and a right video stream into an anaglyph (any type of anaglyph you can think of), or into a field-sequential DVD, or several other types of interlacing, or into a left/right or right/left (as used by YouTube) or top/down or bottom/up format.

It also gives you several 3D transitions, with more to come in the future.

And it lets you fix videos shot with the Loreo Lens-In-A-Cap adapter, shift it left or right, depending on where your 35-mm adapter centers your frame, and cut out the fuzzy section in the middle that Loreo produces. No documentation for that one yet, but it is in the plug-in and was the main reason I wrote the plug-in in the first place.

And it's all free.

Adam, what would it take to support the DLP checkerboard output? TI has a lot of information on how to go about it and the 3dtv.at Stereoscopic player aupports it as well.

I only have a theoretical answer to that because I do not have the compatible hardware to actually test it. But presumably DLP TV, like this one, is supposed to expect the checkerboard format. That is why I added that option.

Just about all the front/rear DLP projectors on this list plus lot of existing Samsung DLP TV's support the checkerboard 3D pattern. It is natural and easy for that technology to do. Just a little bit of hardware will do it. The list is here: 3D Vision Requirements . Thank you.

Alas, all those require NVidia, while my Sony laptop came with ATI graphics. :(

Sorry, that is just one type of glasses. I linked it because they have a nice link there. There are several other brands that work with other brands of graphics adapters, some of them don't even require IR emitter (in case of rear projector DLP TVs). Here are couple of links:Mitsubishi TV - Home Theater TV, Unisen TV, LaserVue TV , Accessories . I am not a salesman, but these devices look really good, much better than anaglyphs, and come in many sizes and great prices, and the laser has colors that cannot be matched by anything else. I tried several types of wireless glasses.

Yes, they are very nice. They are also outside of my current price range.

I have spent my inheritance on my Sony PMW EX-3, so I will have to produce a well selling documentary before I can start spending again. :)

Version 1.2 is out and available for download. Documentation of the new features will follow later, but it offers new ways of combining left and right streams into a single 3D video. It also includes a "drapes" effect especially useful when combined with the Sony Vegas barn door transition, resulting in the opening or closing of a curtain, such as seen in this video.

Hello Adam!

I downloaded your plugin and start testing.
I just want to make a simple text object to place in depth of the scene,
and animate a little to make text come in front of the screen.
But if i start keyframing the "offset in pixels" parameter it doesnt
do this smooth, instead jumpy, only discrete value.
How can i achieve such effect? Maybe in future versions?

thx!

In a future version I plan to add another one where the offset will not be set in pixels but in a fraction of the width and that should be a lot smoother.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hello Adam Stanislav

I discovered your Bororo 3D plug in for Sony Vegas and wanted to thank you but couldn't find an email at your web page. So i registered here just to get my feedback on your plug-in.

Until now I had been editing my stereo3D stuff all manually and it's a pain. I had been looking for a stereo3D plugin capable of editing 3D easily in sony Vegas for quite a while, and your work is really really great.

I mainly use the 3D compositing tool to preview my content live, i didn't play too much with the FX for now but they seem to do the job. These tools really make editing much easier.
Thank you so much for making this plug-in and making it available for free.


I also have some suggestions for improvements :

I use a Zalman monitor (1680x1050 line interleaved output) the compositing filter works well in the preview window as long as the preview picture is not scaled.
This should be alright as long as you have a dedicated monitor for editing. Unfortunately my second monitor isn't always available (screen shared with an other computer) so i sometimes have to edit with a single monitor, in which case i have to downscale the preview window and the line interleave gets mixed up with the image scaling.

It's not a show-stopper, i can still edit in anaglyph and do the final checks when my second screen is available again. But it would be great if you could find a way to modify the plug-in to make the preview window still work when scaled with the line interleaved and checkerboard outputs.

The second suggestion i have is about stereo3D inputs. Depending on the image source i use (cameras, CG rendering, pc videogame recording, console videogame recording) the stereo3D input format changes, some of the content has two files, some has side by side input, other has line interleave input.
The current plugin only accepts separate left and right images on separate layers. It would be great if you could improve it to also support side by side, over/under and line interleaved inputs (both in full resolution and half resolution squashed).

Again there is a way to circumvent this, I can split the pictures into separate files quite easily, but it would be better if the re-encoding stage could be avoided.

Thank you Adam
I wish you good luck with future improvements on the Bororo3D plugin.

I am glad you find it useful. I am also glad you have registered here. :)

As for the preview window, I see no way of controlling it. Sony's documentation for Vegas plug-ins is very old and very cursory. In other words, if there is a way of controlling the preview window from a plug-in, I do not know what it is. How I go around it is by going full screen on my previews, so I can see the final result before rendering.

As for other types of input, I was just thinking about it yesterday and am planning to add several of them.

Multiple Layers?
 

Hi Adam, i want to thank you for the great plug-in you have created.
I´ve tried a simple composition with a object and a background and turned out great!

However, i´m having issues on going one step further...
You designed your plug-in in order to work with two layers for each environment/object/whatever,
to have the left and right eye angles separated... when i put an object with transparency above
the two layers that will create the 3D background, all goes well, but when i try to add more
layers above or below, the red/blue colors turn to other colors, as a result of having multiple
colored layers placed above or below others, in the same timecode...

So i would like to know if there is some way of "locking" left/right layers together for each
environment, to prevent color mix up? Many thanks in advance...

And i would also like to know if you are planning on doing a Premiere Pro version of the plug-in...

Thanks, and thanks once again for providing such a great, useful (and free) plug-in !!!

Hello, Daniel.

No, I have no plans to write Premiere Pro plug-ins. I was actually going to write a 3D editor from scratch last year. I was hoping to have it done by the end of last year, but my diabetes got the best out of me. So, I wrote a Vegas plug-in instead.

The problem is that Vegas (and just about any other editor I am familiar with) is simply not designed with 3D in mind, so it requires a lot of tweaking and juggling around the way it is designed to make 3D imagery. There are things I would like to do with it that I simply could not find a way of doing.

Essentially, the easiest (relatively speaking) way to work around the limitations is to do any compositing first, separately for the left and right views, render each view to a separate file using a non-lossy compression, then open the two files in Vegas and combine them into a 3D stream. I know this requires an extra step (and spare disk space, unfortunately) but, again, Vegas was not designed with 3D in mind.

Sony is talking about adding 3D support in the next version of Vegas. As far as I am concerned, I'll believe it when I see it.

I really wish I could just create a 3D video editor from scratch. It is not that difficult in principle. My main obstacle (beside my poor health) is the plethora of file formats, the most popular of which are not freely documented. For example, the documentation for the MXF format is on a CD from SMPTE and costs $500. That may be pocket change for Sony and Adobe but it is a lot of money for me. And that is just one popular professional file format.

Vegas 3D should be released at IBC next month.