Sony HRX-NX3D1U, adjustable parallax, & AE

[Tim Veal]

I've borrowed a HRX-NX3D1U from a friend to try out. You can do some adjustment of where the 0 parallax is, but the two lens do not look like they are moving. There is no measured indicator of your adjustment either besides a double image and a + or - sign. Does anyone know what the camera is doing? I want to try to match it for adding effects in 3D space in AE.

[Prech Marton]

As i know this cam has wider cmos sensors than 16:9, so it can crop
the image area, and you don't need to converge the lens axis.

This is very good, because there is no perpective distorsion.

[Tim Dashwood]

I don't think any of the tiny handheld cameras use physical lens toe-in or even optical shifting to achieve convergence. I think it is good-old H.I.T., just pushing pixels left or right. I think you are right about the oversampling of the sensor too.

[Tim Veal]

That makes sense. Looks like adding in elements in AE is going to be eye balling it for the 3D depth.

[Bruce Schultz]

I'm doing some processing of NX3D1 23.98fps clips today and so far this is what I can say about it -

MVC>AVI does not seem to work with these files in 24P mode. What I am getting is 1920 x 540 transcodes that are green frames without picture or sound.

I switched to processing in Sony Vegas 10E (the E being the version that supports NX3D1 24P files) and things got better quickly. I'm transcoding to MOV for Cineform Neo3D and the files are correctly sized at 1920x1080 Left and Right.

Vegas is a pain because it doesn't queue renders, but there is a kludgy work-around which is to open multiple versions of Vegas and render one file in each open version. This works best with multi core CPU's.

Once I get them into FCP/Firstlight I'll see how much picture is affected by convergence adjustment on parallel shots vs converged in camera shots.

More to come, I'm hoping to do a side by side resolution chart test of the Panasonic 3DA1 vs Sony NX3D1 later this week.

[Tim Veal]

My clips were also 23.98 but I couldn't get Vegas 10E to work. When in Firstlight the clips wouldn't let me set them L/R for some reason. But MVC to AVI Converter did and I was able to create my 3D muxed file in Firstlight. Did you use the MVC to AVI Converter from 3DTV? I'm going to AVI, so maybe that's the difference? It's also nice to be able to batch convert files with MVC to AVI Converter. I hope CineForm will add this to Firstlight or HDLink soon.

[Bruce Schultz]

I was able to get MVC>AVI to work for Sony TD10 60i footage, but not for 23.98 footage from the NX3D1. I got green frames that were 1920 x 540.

Sony Vegas works OK, it's just a slow render one file at a time. Here is how I did that;

I did find the Cineform HD MOV codec available in Vegas 10E but it was buried quite deep in menus. You can find it by choosing Render As, then save as type Quicktime then just below that the Custom button then Video Format settings in the Render As dialog. Clicking the Project tab on the bottom of the pop up form will allow you to export either the Left or Right eye data stream. When you first bring the MTS file into Vegas, the first thing to do is right click properties on the file in the bin and set the Stereographic 3D Mode to "pair with next stream" That sets the files up so Sony knows they are 3D.

I'm only using Sony Vegas 10E to process Sony NX3D1 24P footage into separate L/R eye data streams, then moving it over to Mac for Neo3D editing, which is why I need MOV. I found HDlink was unbelievably slow to transcode from AVI to MOV.

[Bruce Schultz]

UPDATE:

It turns out that the Content Management Utility supplied by Sony with the NX3D1 camera (and available online for free) actually has a utility that extracts Left & Right data streams from MVC footage, and does it as a batch utility. I've only tried this on Sony MVC footage, I don't know if it works on other manufacturers MVC codecs.

You just need to load in the MTS or MT2S files, control click them all and then click on Tools/Create Separate 2D Movies For Left & Right.

The auto file re-naming is pretty arcane, but it can be deciphered and files re-named to what you want as MTS or M2TS files which are clearly labeled by CMU as Left & Right then put into L & R folders for muxing.

Cineform Firstlight (for Windows) or Re-Master (for Mac) will then mux those L/R files into either AVI or MOV and away you go with After Effects, PPro CS5, FCP, or even Sony Vegas (but I've not tried that yet) with Neo 3D.

I could never get MVC>AVI to work with 23.98 footage using any of the Cineform output choices and the MOV uncompressed worked but was ungodly large. The Sony CMU program seems to do the data stream extraction as quickly as MVC>AVI and is much faster and easier than doing it in Vegas 10E where multiple settings have to be just right to do a clean L/R extraction.

[Tim Veal]

I downloaded the Content Management Utility, but you have to have the camera connected to install it. Since I just borrowed the camera it wont work for me. But I received an email from GoPro today. It said the next version of Neo / Neo3D will be coming in a few weeks and include support for MVC files. Hopefully that will provide a good direct way to convert the files.

[Bruce Schultz]

Yes I've had several long sessions with Cineform tech support about this. They are working on direct MVC support and that will be great - for Neo 3D users. Right now there is an audio sync issue in the conversion from M2TS to Cineform MOV that needs to be worked out, but it will be very convenient not to have to switch over to a PC from a MAC to do the MVC>M2TS initial file split, and to eliminate the interim step of converting the L/R separately to CFHD MOV's and then 3D muxing them in another step.

It's my impression that the MVC processing in Firstlight will be the same as the 3D Mux feature used for Panasonic 3DA1 pairs which works flawlessly in my experience.

BTW, that is pretty brain dead of Sony to make you install that software utility with a camera plugged in.